NERVE OF SIDNEY HOOK
253
leader under these conditions to expose the nature of the war and to
prepare the masses for the revolutionary crises that would surely follow.
But Hook, as I have said, considers the question of the causes of the
war irrelevant to both its nature and consequences; he converts this
question into one about "responsibility", which he answers frivolously
and vaguely by saying: " of course, in varying degrees, everybody", an
answer that we must take as a sample of his scientific approach to
politics. Yet in replying to a critic in the last
Partisan Review,
he
asserts that "the 'truth' of value judgments is to be determined by ...
scientific analyses of their causes and consequences in relation to the
specific problems of evaluation". He is certainly aware of these causes
and consequences and he knows enough to fear the outcome of even an
Allied victory, but he does not wish to face them directly or to think
them through, as some one who speaks so insistently about scientific
politics has the responsibility to do, and as was done by the inter·
nationalists during the last war. They emerge here and there in his
argument in a veiled form and give to his article about the policies of
the left its incongruous, eclectic character. Instead of considering openly
the consequences of Allied victory for the peoples in the defeated coun–
tries, for the colonial races, for the new relations of American and
British imperialism on the five continents, he speaks in the most general
terms of the continuation of the pre-war conflicts after the war, without
suggesting the new turbulent situation and the problems created by the
war itself. And he proposes for the guidance of American labor toward
the achievement of socialism a party more patriotic than the American
Legion to mobilize the masses for a more efficient conduct of the war,
and to fight for civil liberties and for safeguards against the abuse of
administrative powers.
While urging the workers to support the war actively, which means
support of the government, he warns them against Roosevelt's (and even
more, Wallace's) reactionary trend. He wants the war to
be
fought in
a "total" democratic fashion, although "total democracy" is possible
only in a peaceful socialist society. He wants the workers to take the
leadership of the w.ar out of the hands of the capitalists in order to
guaranteP. both the military victory and the peace, although this is in–
conceivable without a revolution, and he thinks that under present condi–
tions a revolution would be absurd and incompatible with resistance to
Hitler. What his proposal comes to in short is a new Popular Front
in which labor would have some representation in the management of
the war, but not "entire responsibility", as if partial responsibility would
save labor from the effects of such collaboration in the past, the "dis–
astrous" effects which Hook has traced in his article in
Partisan Review
in
1939 and predicted for similar schemes in the future.
Since he has discredited the Popular Front as a pattern of collabora–
tion, he has to look for precedents elsewhere, and he finds one
in
the
"Clemenceau thesis". It may be shocking to some readers that Hook
should compare with Clemenceau's program a manoeuver of a party that
he defines as an independent socialist labor party, in contrast to the
opportunist labor parties that we know. Clemenceau belonged politically
to the capitalist class, no less than Lloyd George, who attacked the in-
