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Hook stressed his loyalty to the essential aspects of the traditional free
university.
By this time, Hook had abandoned his self-identification with Marx–
ism, partly because it had become evident to him that the Marxist cor–
pus had been interpreted in ways that differed significantly from his
own preferred interpretation of Marxism as an empirical hypothesis
about scientific socialism. In contrast to this interpretation, Marxism
included a theory of Existentialist Marxism derived from a reading of
Marx's youthful
1848
manuscripts, as well as the construction of a
Nietzschean Marxism derived from the rejection of the primacy of eco–
nomic theory combined with the Romantic attractiveness of revolution–
ary transformation of social institutions. In a
1975
essay signaling this
abandonment, Hook recognized that Marx's texts and legacy had per–
mitted these diverse interpretations, as well as those of Lenin, Stalin,
and Mao-which had been used to legitimate totalitarian power.
In theory, it would have been possible for Hook to continue his advo–
cacy of socialism even as he shifted to a conservative position on current
cultural issues. Yet he appears to have changed his position.
At an interview for Hook's oral biography, Professor Diane Ravitch
began by asking him whether he had always been a socialist. He replied
that in his boyhood, the family had voted for William Howard Taft, and
he had shared the family's political loyalty. This surprised Professor
Ravitch, and Hook explained that his father had been a worker in the
garment industry and at that time there had been two seasons: "employ–
ment" and "slack." William Howard Taft was perceived as supporting
tariffs on imported textiles, thereby helping employment and reducing
"slack." Accordingly, the family supported his candidacy.
After this reminiscence, Hook pointed out that he had always prided
himself on his ability to apply logic and critical intelligence to political
and social issues. Yet he declared that embarrassing as the confession
might be in respect to this ability, he had concluded that he had been
guilty of a fallacy in the logic of practical reasoning. That fallacy was
embedded in his comparison of the realities of the capitalist system as
he had himself experienced them in the Williamsburg neighborhood of
his youth and in the Depression with the ideal portrait of socialism as
envisaged in Marxism and in other theoretical projections of the social–
ist economy. He had never corrected this bias by comparing the realities
of capitalism with the economic realities of socialism as they had
emerged in country after country where socialist governments had come
to power. Alternatively, he had not adopted a perspective in which the
ideal theory of socialism, with its vision of unfettered production for
