DAVID SIDORSKY
33S
Encounter
in the United Kingdom,
Der Monat
in Berlin, and
Les
Preuves
in France. Although each of these journals had its own distinc–
tive style and approach, each had, as its dominant moral theme the
opposition between democracy and totalitarianism. In a sense,
Partisan
Review
was the model for each of them in its successful combination of
aspects of cultural modernism, artistic avant-garde criticism, and the
recognition of the significance of anticommunism for the politics of the
period .
Despite this international expansion of Hook's influence in the anti–
communist movement, he remained constant to both Pragmatism and
socialism. Hook reasserted the justification of Pragmatism, which
Dewey had formulated against metaphysical anti-empirical views in
The
Quest for Certainty,
with a parallel criticism of Heideggerian Existen–
tialism in
The Quest for Being.
Hook's support for socialism did not imply any view about the rela–
tionship of free market economics and political democracy. In a front
page essay on von Hayek's
Road to Serfdom
for
The New York Times
Book Review,
he criticized von Hayek's thesis that free-market plural–
ism leads to democracy and that socialism's concentration of economic
and political power leads to the denial of freedom. For Hook, who had
rejected Marxist economic determinism, there was no necessary con–
nection between the economic and the political order. Consequently, he
believed in the possibility of democratic socialist governments, just as he
recognized the reality of dictatorial socialist regimes. He also believed
that there could be democratic capitalist governments, contrary to the
standard Marxist view, and that capitalist societies might not be demo–
cratic, but authoritarian or even dictatorial.
Hook's subsequent turn toward neoconservatism did not originate
from a new belief in the importance of free-market economies for polit–
ical freedom. Nor did it derive from any fundamental change in his sec–
ular and naturalist opposition to religious views. Thus, Hook did not
become, in contemporaneous political terms, either an economic or a
religious conservative. Yet he did represent and strongly express the
voice of cultural conservatism.
The rise of the New Left in the I960s, with its attack on academic
freedom and academic integrity in major universities, provided the
impetus for the fourth major step in Hook's intellectual career- in
which his views were to be linked with the neoconservative movement
in American political thought. Hook remained "out of step." For as uni–
versities shifted to compromise with and absorb the onslaught of the
New Left with a series of changes in their standards and curricula,
