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implications became the defining factor of his position within American
cultural and political life. Thus, Hook's original effort at uniting Prag–
matic philosophy with Marxism led him to combine, for several
decades, a belief in democratic socialism with a dedication to the cause
of anticommunism.
In the 1960s, however, in response to the New Left's attack upon
many American historical institutions, including the university, Hook
reexamined the priorities of his personal and Pragmatic moral views
regarding the values of American society. This reexamination led him to
an activist defense of pluralism and balance among competing inherited
social values, including a defense of the traditional university. Accord–
ingly, in the fourth major step of his intellectual career, Hook became
identified with aspects of the American neoconservative movement, par–
ticularly in the "culture wars" that were generated by the "revolution–
ary" 1960s and their aftermath.
Hook's continual commitment to Pragmatism was also expressed in
the more general, and personal, idiom of Enlightenment naturalism, a
motif which represents a fifth major step of his intellectual career. As a
naturalist, Hook did not believe that there could be any divine guaran–
tee either for human triumph and redemption in history or for spiritual
transcendence and liberation from the forces of nature. As a partisan of
the Enlightenment, he believed that human intelligence might succeed in
progressing toward the perfectibility of the human condition and the
scientific transformation of natural processes, since the ultimate defeat
of mankind was also not religiously ordained or inevitable.
The course of Sidney Hook's intellectual career can be charted by a
survey of these five major steps. Some of these steps remained constant
commitments throughout while others shifted, changed, and developed
during a life which was continually engaged in theoretical social inquiry
as well as in public forums for the exchange of ideas.
The advent of the Pragmatic movement in American philosophy,
which gained Hook's lifetime loyalty, was heralded in a remarkable let–
ter from William James, the author of
Pragmatism,
to his younger
brother, the novelist Henry James, dated May 4, 1907. In the opening
of that letter, William James praises with characteristic ambivalence
Henry James's study of the United States,
The American Scene,
as
"supremely great ... in its peculiar way."
It
is relevant in the context of
Hook's birth in 1902 to an immigrant family in New York to note
Henry James's comments in
The American Scene
on his visit to the
Lower East Side of New York at about that time.
