34
PARTISAN REVIEW
What they did not support explicitly in their propaganda they had
no way of supporting in any credible sense ; and their propaganda, in
fact, was directed against the war effort of the United States and of
those who supported it.
Hook's interests were, I believe, basically political, but he had
been trained , as I have noted, in philosophy.
It
should come as no
surprise, then, that some of his best
political
efforts were in philoso–
phy proper.
Here, a personal recollection may be clarifying. During the
thirties, those of us who were drawn, as so many were, to the idea of
revolutionary action - because of the Depression, because of Hitler,
because of the Soviet Union (about which we knew very little)-had
begun to think of adopting Marxism as a viewpoint in politics and as
a general philosophy. We were then faced by this question: What
about dialectical materialism? Was it still valid as a doctrine? Or was
it a bit of antiquated metaphysics? And what did it have to do with
Marx's basic views, with his notion of the class struggle as the motor
of progress , with his doctrine of surplus value, and of the revolu–
tionary role of the working class? Could not these ideas be discussed
without talking about dialectics? And wasn't there a contradiction
between dialectics and materialism, so that to speak of dialectical
materialism seemed like talking about idealistic materialism or ma–
terialistic idealism, a good thing to talk about if indeed there were
something of that sort, but wasn't it rather childish to think there was?
Hook did not reject dialectics at first, for he had a period of flir–
tation with the Communist Party while he was at work on
Towards
the Understanding of Karl Marx.
But by 1934 the Communists had at–
tacked his book, and one of Hook's responses was a remarkable arti–
cle against dialectics in nature which he published in 1937 in the
Marxist Quarterly.
In this piece he took apart the Communist view de–
rived from Engels, that there is a dialectic in nature as well as in his–
tory. Dialectic in history, Hook was ready to accept, but only if one
did not sharply distinguish it from scientific method.
It
may be asked : was there any real need to connect Marx's so–
cial theories and notions about the economy with an overall view in
philosophy? Max Eastman argued, as I remember, that there was not.
But now Marx had characterized his view of the world as a
composite of British economics, French social theory, and classical
German philosophy. What Hook did was to effect the substitution of
Dewey's instrumentalism (strongly influenced by German idealism)
for the dialectic of Hegel which had captivated Marx; in parallel ef-
