COMMENT
The Ideological Blacklist
It
would seem that Sidney Hook, the eminent
political philosopher and activist, has been the victim of an ideological
blacklist. I have not seen every book in recent years dealing with some
aspects of Marxism. But none of those I've looked at contain a single ref–
erence to Hook - not even a negative one. He is not in any index; he has
just disappeared, been killed off. Yet the fact is that he wrote the first
definitive work on Marx in this country.
Sidney Hook had his share of failings, and I had my disagreements
with him. He occasionally descended to unfair arguments, sometimes
personal ones, against those who should have been closest to him. And he
indulged too often in polemics that could have been left to lesser figures.
But for Hook to be ignored, or boycotted, is a gross cultural injustice, a
flagrant disservice to the history of ideas.
In the thirties and forties, Hook was one of the major interpreters of
Marx and Hegel; and he had an enormous influence on an entire genera–
tion of writers and intellectuals, not only in clarifYing Marxist theory but
in indicating where its fallacies and shortcomings lay. And he did this with
great wit and concision. I remember, for example, his demolition of a
popular Stalinist notion about the change of quantity into quality as a
basic element of dialectical materialism. Hook said simply that four does
not change into red, and a number does not change into a color. He was
also a gifted teacher - as I learned from having been in some of his
courses at New York University as a graduate student and part-time
instructor. So far as I know, he was bested only once by a student. He
was talking about the philosophic idea of becoming and of innate
qualities, and he said only an acorn could become an oak tree, when
Delmore Schwartz, in his class at the time, raised his hand and sputtered
that only a pig could become a ham sandwich.
In addition, Hook was an accomplished philosopher, though he did
not make any original contributions that I know of. He was a disciple of
John Dewey and a leading expounder of his ideas. He was an associate of
Bertrand Russell. But his name is absent from all the books of philosophy
I have come across.
However, besides being unjust, there is something puzzling about this
boycott. After all, all those writing about Marx or about philosophic
subjects could not have been members of a monolithic party with orders
to ignore Hook. How could so many diverse people have dismissed him?
Could it be that the old Stalinist branding of Hook as a pariah has spread
almost unconsciously through the entire field of Marxist writings and
general philosophic studies? Could the fact that he was an influential anti-
