DAVID SIDORSKY
Charting the Intellectual Career of Sidney Hook:
Five Major Steps
T
HE CENTENNIAL OF SIDNEY HOOK'S BIRTH provides a unique
vantage point for surveying the main intellectual movements of
the twentieth century. These movements can be observed from
the perspective afforded by each of the five major steps of Hook's intel–
lectual career. He was, to a degree probably unparalleled by any other
philosopher of his generation, actively involved in the cultural and polit–
ical conflicts of his time.
Pragmatism, which is generally considered to be the first indigenously
American philosophical movement, was born just after the turn of the
century. Sidney Hook became a partisan of this philosophy, whose
themes provided the substance for the first major step of his intellectual
career during his graduate studies at Columbia University with John
Dewey in the early
1920S.
In the five decades in which Pragmatism was
the dominant philosophy of the United States, Sidney Hook emerged as
a primary figure in the justification and defense of Pragmatic views. He
earned the title, among both Pragmatism's proponents and critics, of
"Dewey's bulldog."
Yet Hook sustained a continuing interest in Marxism, which formed
the second major step in his intellectual career. He sought to unite his
interpretation of Marxism with Deweyan Pragmatism in the late
1920S
and early
1930S.
This interpretation developed the affinities between the
Pragmatic methodology, with its commitment to scientific method as an
instrument of human knowledge, and Marxist theory, understood as a
scientifically based program for historical transformation.
Hook's Marxism brought him to a deep involvement in the political
and cultural movements of the Left. These movements were riven by
opposition and support for the Soviet Union and for the official line of
the Communist Party. In the third major step of Hook's intellectual
career, his analysis of the conflicting grounds of this rift and its moral
David Sidorsky is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University.
