LIONEL ABEL
37
other hand, those who charged Hook with McCarthyism, intoler–
ance, and support for right-wing American imperialist policies , and
who simply pointed to the intellectual background of the Communist
movement , left out of their own account these facts: after the defeat
of Hitler, the Communists were no longer trying to win the minds of
men by ideological struggle; the Cold War had been declared by
Stalin and imposed by fiat on the American as on the West European
parties; espionage, which had been a secondary aspect of the Com–
munist movement , had become one of its major aims. But if Hook's
critics were most certainly wrong
politically,
were they at least right
philosophically
against the philosopher?
To defend Hook on this point I shall rely on the thinking of
Martin Heidegger, a philosopher for whom Hook has never expressed
any special admiration . Heidegger maintains in one of his essays,
"The Essence of Truth" in
Holzwege,
that in the search for truth, the
philosopher has the right, not often, not always, but at critical points
in his thinking, to
consent to error.
I suggest that what Heidegger meant
by this phrase Hook's changed attitude towards Communism has
made clear, for Hook here was willing to overlook what may have
seemed like undeniable facts in order to drive home an important
political conclusion. Now a philosopher's consent to err can turn out
to be, as]ames]oyce said about the mistakes of men of talent , "por–
tals to discovery," and such indeed is the case with Hook's omission
of the intellectual background to Communism in his judgment of the
Communists. We have learned recently from the Russian expert,
the late Leonard Schapiro, that nothing Lenin wrote before the Bol–
sheviks took power had any relation to what the Bolsheviks did after
power was taken, and the Russian dissenter and philosopher Alex–
ander Zinoviev has gone even further, asserting that there is no
rela–
tionship whatever between present day Communist society and the ideas ofMarx
and his followers.
It may well be that the so-called "intellectual back–
ground of Communism" has proved a hindrance to our making a
proper judgment of the Soviets, and of those who follow its line .
In a remarkable new book,
How Democracies Perish,
the French
political philosopher and journalist]ean-
Fran~ois
Revel describes the
struggle between the Soviets and the West as a match game between
two teams, one of which - the Soviets - hopes for victory but will ac–
cept a tie, the other-the West-hopes for a tie and will accept de–
feat. And Revel brilliantly explores the path followed by American
Presidents from Franklin Delano Roosevelt on in unnecessary con–
cessions to the Soviets, all leading to the present American position
