40
PARTISAN REVIEW
"the greatest mass movement since Christianity .»The phrase he used
to place the Communist movement in history is most interesting and
instructive , for it also places the Communist movement in a particular
history, the history of religion. Is it not religion, in fact, that causes
men to take ideas seriously enough to act on them, especially when
such action involves self-sacrifice? And the greatest mass movement
since Christianity was indeed the expression of a secular religion, as
in the nineteenth century, the nationalism which called on men to
die for the fatherland was a secular religion. From which notions we
arrive at a surprising judgment of Hook's effort to justify the Marxist
system (even dialectics when restricted to history and society) in terms
of Dewey's philosophy of science. Was not Hook functioning here as
a reconciler of religion and science, the religion of course being a sec–
ular one, the scientific doctrine that of his time? At this date Hook's
efforts in
Towards the Understanding
of
Karl Marx
and
From Hegel to Marx,
taken with his essay in the
Marxist Quarterly
against Engel's view of
the dialectic, are like nothing so much as the efforts of philosophers
and theologians over the last centuries to reconcile Christianity and
science, as in the thirteenth century St. Thomas tried to reconcile
Aristotelian reason and Christian faith. It is to be noted, too, that
the recent efforts of the German theorist of the Frankfurt school,
jiirgen Habermas, to connect some selected elements of Marxism
with aspects of American pragmatism, notably the ideas of Pierce and
Dewey, have nothing whatever to do with Hook's thinking during
the thirties, for the thought of Habermas has no relation to the move–
ment of masses of men .
It
indicates only that pragmatism is still an
important reflection on science and has to be taken into account in
any overall view of society. But Habermas is an intellectual talking
to intellectuals, and his main injunction to them is that intellectuals
should talk. I agree that they should, and of course they really do not
have to be told.
Perhaps now I can justify the judgment that Hook's version of
Marxism was far and away the most intelligent, being an attempt to
reconcile it as a religion with science, and science properly under–
stood, given the time . Sartre's effort to make a synthesis of Marxism
and existentialism, though full of brilliant insights, was in a way a
trivial affair by comparison; it amounted to trying to unify a religion
of the individual with the collectivist Communist doctrine, and of
course one of the two components had to give way; in the sixties Sar–
tre rejected his religion of the individual, and with it his own most
original ideas. As for Althusser, his effort is altogether insignificant,
