LIONEL ABEL
35
forts later on , Sartre substituted existential phenomenology , and
Althusser substituted structuralism (not, to be sure, Levi-Strauss's
structuralism), for Hegelianism in the restatements they made of
Marx's view. Evidently one had to substitute something for classical
German philosophy in any effort to make a reasonable whole of the
Marxist system. Why was this? Because a higher level of generaliza–
tion was needed to connect the views Marx had taken in history,
sociology , and economics. This higher level of generalization Marx
found in the dialectics of Hegel who had also said that philosophy is
the restatement of the
time
in ideas. Now the time of Marx was not
the time of the thirties, the forties, the fifties, or the sixties, so these
later decades had to be expressed differently from the way in which
Marx expressed his own period. Actually, Hook's substitution of
Dewey for Hegel in the Marxist system may well have been the most
intelligent effort yet made to make of Marxism a systematic whole,
and instrumentalism did express the time of the thirties in ideas.
One might say in criticism, though, of Hook's effort, that the time he
expressed was of rather short duration, as was also the time Sartre
stated existentially. And it was a very tiny time indeed that went into
the synthesis of Althusser.
Having argued for Hook's judgment in politics, I find that now I
shall have to argue against Hook himself, for in his memoir, "Break–
ing with the Communists,"
(Commentary,
February 1984), he claims
that on one very important matter he had been in fact politically "ob–
tuse." Apparently he had expected the Communists to prevent Hitler
from coming to power, or failing that to overthrow the Nazi govern–
ment (with the help of the Soviet Union) . Now were these expecta–
tions - shared by many at the time - due to "political obtuseness" ? I
think not. I suggest that Sidney Hook knows that nobody is going to
think him really obtuse, and on the other hand he does not like to
dwell on the depth of his early commitment to Communism.
3
He is
3. He does admit this to some extent in his
Commentary
piece, for he notes that his
book
Towards the Understanding
oj
Karl Marx".
. .
had played an important role in
drawing Oxford and Cambridge students into the Communist movement." This
makes nonsense of Richard Rorty's contention in Paul Kurtz's
Festschrift
for Hook,
Sidney
Hook, Philosopher of Democracy and Humanism,
that"... Dewey and Hook fought
jointly . .. against the temptations that Marxism held out to American intellectuals
in
the thirties." Certainly one of such temptations was conversion to the Communist
faith, and as we have seen Hook admits to having converted Oxford and Cambridge
students to Communism.
