36
PARTISAN REVIEW
here indulging- many writers of memoirs do this - in self-exculpa–
tion by way of self-accusation, which Ezra Pound describes thus:
To confess wrong without losing rightness .
I shall try to defend Hook against more powerful attacks on
him than his own; about that I can only state an opinion: his faith in
the Communists, it seems to me, as in many an instance of misjudg–
ment by others, was simply due to faith, not to lack of intelligence.
The main criticism of Hook's political thinking has been directed
at the positions he took after World War
II,
during which, as we saw,
he supported the United States and its allies. But in the aftermath of
the fighting came the Cold War (most certainly declared by Stalin,
as everyone in the Communist Party knew when Earl Browder was
expelled).
It
was then that Hook first took the view that Commu–
nism, which as a political doctrine he had argued for, had become,
by actions of the Stalinists in Europe, little more than a conspiracy to
overthrow democratic governments; it was no longer the progressive
political faith he had once taken it to be. Hook had, in fact, voted for
Foster and Ford in the 1932 Presidential election .
This latter judgment by Sidney Hook of the Communist move–
ment as a power-grabbing conspiracy left out of intellectual acccount
the ideas of Karl Marx which Hook himself had propagated in works
like
Towards the Understanding ofKarl Marx
and
From Hegel to Marx.
To
be sure, Hook was responding to changes in the Communist move–
ment and to the new power-position of the Soviets in Europe . All the
same , his judgment of the Communists in his 1953 book
Heresy, Yes,
Conspiracy! No!
ignored substantial aspects of the Communists' intel–
lectual tradition, thus leaving something to be desired
philosophically.
But now if the view Hook took of the Communists during the
cold war is to be criticized, then is the view of those who attacked
him for it to be approved? I do not think so . Against Hook's view was
the intellectual heritage of the Communist movement, which makes
it hard to treat that movement (as is sometimes urged) as we would a
Nazi or fascist movement. For there is no comparable heritage of
ideas behind any of the right-wing movements which may be called
fascist, as we have seen them in Europe, Asia, or South America.
Thus Hook's decision at a certain point to regard the Communists as
aiming essentially at espionage, and at the isolation of the United
States from its NATO allies, seems, at least at first sight,
philosophi–
cally
unacceptable, notwithstanding the
political
reasons for it. On the
