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PARTISAN REVIEW
The current acceptance of the historical reality of a Cold War waged
between the Soviet bloc and the West between
1947
and
1989
has gone
far toward erasing the historical memory of the actual usage of that term
in the late
1940S
and
1950s.
The contemporaneous use of the phrase
"Cold War warrior" was a pejorative term for a person who sought to
foment an unnecessary war with a nonexistent enemy because of his
paranoiac belief that socialist countries, as supporters of an alternative,
noncapitalist society, represented a hostile threat to the West. Thus, Sid–
ney Hook's anticommunism was portrayed as an ideological vision
whose moral absolutism overrode the arguments for prudent policies in
pursuit of peace with the Soviet bloc in an age of nuclear arms. A por–
trait that moved further than the criticism of anticommunism as a
species of ideological zealotry was its dramatic representation, as in
Arthur Miller's play
The Crucible,
as a form of moral Puritanism which
sought to repress the communist movement, paralleling the paranoiac
Puritanical suppression of the practice of witchcraft in an earlier age.
Hook, who had observed the triumph of totalitarian forces in Ger–
many, recognized that democratic societies could, in principle, and, in
appropriate circumstances, must restrict the activities of antidemocratic
political groups. He formulated this view in
Heresy Yes, Conspiracy No.
To the extent that Communist Party activities in democratic countries
represented the expression or even the advocacy of heretical ideas and
competing points of view, their rights ought not to be abridged on pain
of violation of democratic principles. Yet, to the extent that these activ–
ities represented a conspiratorial organization against the procedures
and methods of democracy, it would be legitimate for a democracy to
pass legislation that would restrain the freedom of action of the con–
spiracy. Hook's distinction does not, of course, govern the application
of this theoretical principle to particular cases and their adjudication in
specific circumstances.
The dispute over the nature of the Soviet Union in both its domestic
and foreign policy emerged from the place it had occupied in the
1930S
on the fringes of American political culture to become a central feature
of the intellectual, media, and policy issues of the
19 50S.
Thus,
Partisan
Review,
the journal of the anticommunist writers, including such gifted
novelists as Silone, Orwell, Koestler, and Malraux, was recognized as
the most significant intellectual journal of the period.
In
these years, Hook was a member of
Partisan Review's
editorial
board, along with James Burnham, his colleague in the Philosophy
Department at New York University. Another board member was
Lionel Trilling of Columbia University, whose novel
The Middle of the
