Sidney hook biography

Although politically sympathetic to all of the social revolutionary programs of Marxism, and in complete agreement with Dewey's commitment to far-reaching social reforms, I had a much more traditional view of philosophy as an autonomous discipline concerned with perennial problems whose solution was the goal of philosophical inquiry and knowledge In that period he was indisputably the intellectual leader of the liberal community in the United States, and even his academic colleagues at Columbia and elsewhere who did not share his philosophical persuasion acknowledged his eminence as a kind of intellectual tribune of progressive causes.

Although he was impressed by Dewey's writing he had doubts about his teaching style: "A student wandering into a class given by John Dewey at Columbia University and not knowing who was delivering the lecture would have found him singularly unimpressive, but to those of us enrolled in his courses, he was already a national institution with an international reputation - indeed the only professional philosopher whose occasional pronouncements on public and political affairs made news As a teacher Dewey seemed to me to violate his own pedagogical principles.

He made no attempt to motivate or arouse the interest of his auditors, to relate problems to their own experiences, to use graphic, concrete illustrations in order to give point to abstract and abstruse positions. He rarely provoked a lively participation and response from students, in the absence of which it is difficult to determine whether genuine learning or even comprehension has taken place.

Dewey presupposed that he was talking to colleagues and paid his students the supreme intellectual compliment of treating them as his professional equals. Indeed, if the background and preparation of his students were anywhere near what he assumed, he would have been completely justified in his indifference to pedagogical methods. For on the graduate level students are or should be considered sidney hook biography colleagues, but when they are not, especially when they have not been required to master the introductory courses, a teacher has an obligation to communicate effectively.

Dewey never talked down to his classes, but it would have helped had he made it easier to listen. The drug scene was still many years in the future, and although many carried vicious pocket knives honed to razor-sharp thinness, the switchblade had not yet come into use. Half of the class seemed genuinely dull or backward, half were quick-witted but restless and undisciplined.

Although sidney hook biography were native-born, their use of English was extremely primitive The students feared their parents and the truant officer more than their teacher, and came up with all sorts of original ailments and domestic calamities to win freedom from classroom attendance. They were safe so long as the teacher did not report excessive absence.

Hook did not find it too difficult to control his students: "The times today are so different that no instructive comparison can be drawn between the school scene then and now. Physical punishment of the boys was permitted for severe infractions of discipline, but I never heard of physical assaults against teachers on school premises. The family structures were intact, and there was no punishment more fearful to the students than a threat to summon their parents to school.

Because the very dull and the very disruptive were removed from the ordinary classes, there was little interference with the educational process, and although I had no difficulty in keeping my opportunity class orderly, I believe I was able to teach them something, too. This was rendered easier by the fact that the class consisted of boys who, for the most part, had not reached full pubescence.

Moreover, a rumor resulting from some misunderstood remarks of mine, which I did not contradict began to circulate that I was an amateur pugilist, and this impressed them. Hook adopted the progressive methods of teaching that was promoted by John Dewey. To do this I had to disregard the syllabus for the grade. Capitalizing on the boys' passion for baseball, I taught them percentage, so that they could determine the standing of the clubs and the batting averages of the players, as well as American geography.

They learned a great deal about the colorful historical figures of the past and present I followed progressive methods, not out of principle but because they actually worked. I was unorthodox even in my untimely progressivism. There were some skills that could only be acquired by drill, and one couldn't always make a game of them. I was not above resorting to external rewards for persistence in drill exercises.

He also studied for his Ph. He was the soul of kindness and decency in all things to everyone, the only great man whose stature did not diminish as one came closer to him. In fact it was difficult to remain in his presence for long without feeling uncomfortable He was too kind, kind to a fault There was an air of abstraction about Dewey that made his sensitivity to others surprising.

Sidney hook biography: Sidney Hook was an American

It was as if he had an intuitive sense of a person's authentic, unspoken need. Anyone who thought he was a softie, however, would be brought up short. He had the canniness of a Vermont farmer and a dry wit that was always signaled by a chuckle and a grin that would light up his face. Hook was awarded a fellowship by the Guggenheim Foundation for research on post-Hegelian philosophy.

He sailed for Germany in June Hook was shocked by the level of anti-Semitism and nationalism in Weimar Germany : "The phenomenon of anti-Semitish was not what impressed me most. It was rather the pervasiveness and the intensity of the spirit of nationalism, not only among all political groups including the Communists, but among all elements of the population I came in contact with.

Only some segments of the Social Democrats were free of this nationalist spirit. It was, for many, more of an aggrieved and defensive nationalism than of a chauvinistic kind. The Germans, I was told again and again, had been deceived by Wilson's Fourteen Points with their call for no annexations and no reparations. Whether out of ignorance or naivete, many seemed to believe that it was not because of a shattering military defeat that Germany had sued for peace, but because of the promise of those Fourteen Points.

Every provision of Wilson's declaration had been violated by the Treaty of Versailles, which also contained-mention of this would always rouse an audience to fury-the humiliating clause that Germany bore sole guilt for the war. Among the many mistakes the civilian leaders of the Weimar Republic made, the most disastrous was signing the treaty.

They should have insisted that the German generals who had lost the war acknowledge it formally before the eyes of the world. Failing that, it would have been better if they had not put their names to it at all. While in Germany he became friends with Karl Korsch : "Politically, the most interesting of the individuals I got to know was Karl Korsch.

A leaflet advertising one of his public lectures, distributed at a tavern, provoked my curiosity. He was a man of dynamic enthusiasm and dedicated to the proposition that both Social Democratic and Communist orthodoxy had betrayed the essence of scientific Marxism. He himself had participated in the Communist uprising in Thuringia while he was teaching at the university there, had fled when it was defeated, and after a general amnesty coolly reappeared to take up his post.

The upshot of the resulting scandal was an arrangement with the local government, according to which he would be paid his salary on condition that he did not teach. His emphasis upon the element of activity in Marx's theory of knowledge and the indispensability of judgments of value and practice contra Rudolf Hilferding's and Karl Kautsky's views were directly in line with my own pragmatic interpretation of Marx and the synthesis I was then trying to establish between Dewey and Marx.

Korsch was at home in English, and after we exchanged reprints of some of our published writings, we became very friendly. Sidney Hook also met with Eduard Bernstein who talked about Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling : "Because of my Guggenheim project, I made several efforts to arrange a meeting with Eduard Bernstein, the famous revisionist of Marx, then living in retirement.

His figure and outlook, in the perspective of the fifty years after Marx's death, had grown enormously. I was put off several times, and when I finally met him, I realized why. He was suffering from advanced arteriosclerosis and was attended by a nurse. He seemed at first reluctant to talk about his reminiscences of Marx, but at the outset of our talk, to my chagrin, was eager to describe his first day at school, about which he had very vivid memories.

I kept reverting to various episodes of Marx's life and to some of Marx's literary remains, which Engels had entrusted to Bernstein. His manner was benign and friendly. Only twice did he lose his composure and burst out with a stormy lucidity. The first time was when I mentioned Edward Aveling with whom Eleanor Marx, Marx's youngest daughter, had been enamored, and who had been the cause of her suicide.

Bernstein rose from his chair with flushed face and agitated tone and voice and denounced him as an arch scoundrel. I did not, however, get a very coherent account of Aveling's infamy. In Hook visited the Soviet Union : "Although I became aware of definite shortcomings and lacks in Soviet life, I was completely oblivious at the time to the systematic repressions that were then going on against noncommunist elements and altogether ignorant of the liquidation of the so-called kulaks that had already begun that summer.

I was not even curious enough to probe and pry, possibly for fear of what I would discover. To be sure, most of the politically knowledgable persons I met were Communists of varying degrees of fanaticism. Although the deadly purges of the Communist ranks had not yet begun, I was aware that followers of Trotsky were having a hard time of it.

Adolf Joffe's letter of suicide - he was a leading partisan of Trotsky - protesting his treatment and that of others at the hands of the Party bureaucracy had moved me deeply, and Trotsky's expulsion from the Soviet Union while I was in Germany was still fresh in my mind. What accounted for my failure to discover the truth and even to search for it with the zeal with which I would have pursued reports of gross injustice committed elsewhere?

Several things. First, I had come to the Soviet Union with the faith of someone already committed to the Socialist ideal and convinced that the Soviet Union was genuinely dedicated to its realization. This conviction had been nurtured and strengthened by the Soviet Union's peace policy, its enlightened social legislation all along the line, and despite its doctrinal orthodoxy, which I never shared, its declared educational theory and practice.

John Dewey had visited the Soviet Union the previous year. Hook shared his views on the Soviet education system: "My teacher, John Dewey, who had visited Russia inhad declared its educational system to be the most enlightened in the world and closest to his own ideals. Actually, although I was as impressed as Dewey was by the pronouncements of Soviet educators, I was never taken in by the claims that Soviet educational practices lived up to them on a large scale.

On the basis of what I was told by the Russian families I got to know, I became convinced that Dewey in and George Counts, whom I met that summer inwere being shown specially selected classes and schools that were not representative at all. Nonetheless, Dewey's report of the state and, above all, the promise of Soviet culture as a consequence of a revolution The real reason was that, in attaching themselves to the organizations influenced by the Communist Party, they felt they were identifying with the Soviet Union - the country that was showing the world the face of the future: a planned society, in which, allegedly, there was no unemployment, no human want in consequence of the production of plenty, and in which, allegedly, the workers of arm and brain controlled their own destinies The Socialists, it was claimed, lacked the verve and fire required for the total expropriation of the bourgeoisie, for the destruction of its sidney hook biography apparatus, and for the transformation of existing educational, legal, and political institutions from top to bottom.

Hook explained in his autobiography: "I had endorsed the Communist Party electoral ticket Inthe depression was close to its nadir. The outlook seemed economically hopeless, and despair pervaded all social circles. Capitalism as a functioning economic system appeared bankrupt. The programs of both the Republican and Democratic parties called for balancing the budget but contained no proposals for major social reforms.

The illusion that the Soviet Union had solved the major economic problems flourished, even though it was buttressed by no hard evidence, only remarkable propaganda. To me it seemed overwhelmingly likely that Hitler would soon come to power and carry out the program of war he had frankly outlined in Mein Kampf. The only hope of frustrating his war plans against the Soviet Union was a revolution in Germany that would unite all the opposition forces headed by the working classes Our support of the electoral ticket was more symbolic than organizational, an expression of protest, hope and faith nurtured by naivete, ignorance and illusion.

At the time I was probably the best known academic personality who had publicly taken this position, although quite a number of other academic figures had declared themselves for Norman Thomas, the American Socialist Party candidate, whose position seemed very little different from that of the Socialist Party in Germany and as ineffectual in preventing the economic debacle there or here.

In MarchHook was asked to meet Earl Browder : "I want to talk with you about some things much more important to our movement We and what we represent are handicapped by our inability to counteract the capitalist press. It molds public opinion in powerful ways. We think that there is a way of getting our voice heard so that our position on the crucial issues of the day, without being identified as that of the Communist Party, will get a hearing beyond anything possible by means of our own press.

We would like you to find plausible occasions to visit the chief metropolitan centers of the country from Boston to San Francisco - it wouldn't be necessary in New York - and help build up circles of sympathizers, individuals not known to be politically active in any of our organizations but friendly to the Soviet Union and therefore to us. They should be primarily professionals and small businessmen and women.

When an important problem arises on matters of domestic or foreign policy, on a signal from you or transmitted through a trusted local intermediary whom they know, we would ask them to write letters to the press - national and local - stating in their own way and in their own modes of expression, a position that we believe would further the cause of peace and greater social justice.

Properly done, there would be enough variation in these communications to the editors to allay any suspicion of organized action. The cumulative effect of these letters to the press, bearing authentic names from authentic addresses, is sure to have a strong effect on editorial opinion. At the very least they would do something to counterbalance the class bias of the news reports on labor, on what is happening in Germany, and developments in the Soviet Union.

Browder then went on to argue: "I now come to something of vital importance. There is little doubt that Hitler will rearm Germany and, with the help of the Western capitalist powers, unleash war against the Soviet Union. The defense of the Soviet Union is the first and overriding duty of anyone who believes in the cause of socialism.

It is the chief bulwark against fascism. You have an opportunity to be of immense service, particularly because of your university connections. We would like you to find opportunity to travel to the major campuses of the country that are centers of scientific and industrial research. It should not be difficult to find and cultivate the acquaintance of at least one trustworthy individual sympathetic to the Soviet Union and its need for defense and survival against the threat of fascism.

After his reliability has been established, all he would be asked to do is to report on the work being done, the experiments and projects under consideration, any new inventions or devices particularly of a military and industrial character. Even partial and incomplete information might be of the utmost significance. Most valuable of all would be word about secret research of any character.

The reports of your informants would be channeled through you to us. You would not be asking any antifascist to do anything dishonorable, for he would be helping to defend the Soviet Union and the cause of the international working class. Hook reported later in his autobiography, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century : "Stripped of its euphemisms, this was a request that I set up a spy apparatus!

Before Browder was through outlining the details of this third proposal, I was in a state of panic. At first I thought it was a kind of test of my resoluteness and loyalty, to see how I would react. But why should I be tested? I had not applied for membership in the Communist Party. All the overtures had come from them to me. When Browder finished speaking, I was at first at a loss for words.

Sometimes it is an advantage to be able to say that one is not a member. Hook rejected the offer and cut off all contact with the party. Hook was disturbed by the events that were taking place in the Soviet Union. He no longer felt he could support the policies of Joseph Stalin. Hardman and Gerry Allard. Hook later argued: "The American Workers Party AWP was organized as an authentic American party rooted in the American revolutionary tradition, prepared to meet the problems created by the breakdown of the capitalist economy, with a plan for a cooperative commonwealth expressed in a native idiom intelligible to blue collar and white collar workers, miners, sharecroppers, and farmers without the nationalist and chauvinist overtones that had accompanied local movements of protest in the past.

It was a movement of intellectuals, most of whom had acquired an experience in the labor movement and an allegiance to the cause of labor long before the advent of the Depression. Sidney Hook, James Burnham and J. Hook later recalled: "At our very first meeting, it became clear to us that the Trotskyists could not conceive a situation in which the workers' democratic councils could overrule the Party or indeed one in which there would be plural working class parties.

The meeting dissolved in intense disagreement. The Show Trials of and shocked and angered Hook. I discovered the face of radical evil - as ugly and petrifying as anything the Fascists had revealed up to that time - in the visages of those who were convinced that they were men and women of good will. Although I had been severely critical of the sidney hook biography program of the Soviet Union under Stalin, I never suspected that he and the Soviet regime were prepared to violate every fundamental norm of human decency that had been woven into the texture of civilized life.

It taught me that any conception of socialism that rejected the centrality of moral values was only an ideological disguise for totalitarianism. The upshot of the Moscow Trials affected my epistemology, too. I had been prepared to recognize that understanding the past was in part a function of our need to cope with the present and future, that rewriting history was in a sense a method of making it.

But the realization that such a view easily led to the denial of objective historical truth, to the cynical sidney hook biography that not only is history written by the survivors but that historical truth is created by the survivors - which made untenable any distinction between historical fiction and truth-led me to rethink some aspects of my objective relativism.

Because nothing was absolutely true and no one could know the whole truth about anything, it did not follow that it was impossible to establish any historical truth beyond a reasonable doubt. Were this to be denied, the foundations of law and society would ultimately collapse. Indeed, any statement about anything may have to be modified or withdrawn in the light of additional evidence, but only on the assumption that the additional evidence has not been manufactured.

They had allegedly plotted and carried out the assassination of Kirov on December 1,and planned the assassination of Stalin and his leading associates - all under the direct instructions of Trotsky. This, despite their well-known Marxist convictions concerning the untenability of terrorism as an agency of social change. Further, they had conspired with Fascist powers, notably Hitler's Germany and Imperial Japan, to dismember the Soviet Union, in exchange for the material services rendered by the Gestapo.

In order to allay the suspicion flowing from the Roman insight that no man suddenly becomes base, the defendants were charged with having been agents of the British military at the very time they or their comrades were storming the bastions of the Winter Palace. In addition, although the indictment seemed almost anticlimactic after the foregoing, they were accused of sabotaging the five-year plans in agriculture and industry by putting nails and glass in butter, inducing erysipelas in pigs, wrecking trains, etc.

Hook went on to argue: "Despite the enormity of these offenses, all the defendants in the dock confessed to them with eagerness and at times went beyond the excoriations of the prosecutor in defaming themselves. This spectacular exercise in self-incrimination, unaccompanied by any expression of defiance or asseveration of basic principles, was unprecedented in the history of any previous Bolshevik political trial.

Equally mystifying was the absence of any significant material evidence. Although there were references to several letters of Trotsky, allegedly giving specific instructions to the defendants to carry out their nefarious deeds, none was introduced into evidence. The most substantial piece of evidence was the Honduran passport of an individual who claimed to be an intermediary between Trotsky and the other defendants, which was presumably procured through the good offices of the Gestapo, although it was common knowledge that such passports could be purchased by anyone from Honduran consuls in Europe for a modest sum.

Hook was disturbed by the way liberals reacted to the Moscow Show Trials compared to the way that they behaved in response to events in Nazi Germany. Hook, who had little sympathy for Trotskyists as a group, believing that they "were capable of doing precisely what I suspected the Stalinists of doing - if not on the same scale, at least in the same spirit.

It was indeed ironical to find the Trotskyists, victims of the philosophy of dictatorship they had preached for years, blossoming out as partisans of democracy and tolerance. It was shocking to find erstwhile liberals, still resolutely engaged in defending the right of asylum for victims of Nazi terror, either opposed or indifferent to the rights of asylum for victims of Stalin's terror.

Of course more than the right of asylum was involved. There was the question of truth about the Russian Revolution itself. FarrellBenjamin Stolberg and Suzanne La Follette to join a group that might establish a committee to look into the claims made during the Moscow Show Trials. Hook believed that the best place to hold the investigation was in Mexico City where Trotsky was living in exile and the ideal person to head the commission was his close friend, the philosopher, John Dewey.

What they needed was a group, and especially a chairman, who had an international reputation for fairness and whose integrity could be accepted by liberals, Soviet sympathizers, and intellectuals everywhere. Encouraged by the socialist philosopher Sidney Hook, their hopes soon fastened on Hook's dissertation adviser, the seventy-eight-year-old John Dewey, as the best possible choice for chair.

After all, Dewey had been celebrated in the Soviet Union when he went there in and had been asked by the Socialist Party to run on their ticket for governor of New York. But he was quoted every week or so in the moderate New York Times ; he was invited to the White House for dinner; he was the friend of powerful capitalists. Hook was aware that Dewey had been working on Logic: The Theory of Inquiry for the last ten years and was desperate to finish the book.

Sidney hook biography: Sidney Hook was an American philosopher

Hook later recalled in his autobiography Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century : "The first and most important step of the commission was to appoint a subcommission to travel to Mexico City to take Leon Trotsky's testimony. It was crucial for the success of the commission that John Dewey consent to go, because without him the press and public would have ignored the sessions.

It would be easy for the Kremlin to dismiss the work of the others and circulate the false charge that they were handpicked partisans of Trotsky. Only the presence of someone with Dewey's stature would insure world attention to the proceedings. But would Dewey go? And since he was now crowding seventy-nine, should he go? Dewey must go, and I must see to it.

Sidney hook biography: Sidney Hook was a leading

InHook formed the Committee for Cultural Freedom, a short-lived organization that set the stage for his postwar politics by opposing "totalitarianism" on the left and right. By the Cold WarHook had become a prominent anti-Communistalthough he continued to consider himself both a democratic socialist and a secular humanist throughout his life.

He was, therefore, an anti-Communist socialist. Inhe was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II. These bodies—of which the CCF was most central—were funded in part by the Central Intelligence Agency through a variety of fronts and sought to dissuade American leftists from continuing to advocate cooperation with the Soviet Union as some had previously.

Hook opposed all forms of determinism and argued, as had William Jamesthat humans play a creative role in constructing the social world and to transforming their natural environment. Neither humanity nor its universe is determined or finished. For Hook this conviction was crucial. He argued that when a society is at the crossroads of choosing the direction of further development, an individual can play a dramatic role and even become an independent power on whom the choice of the historical pathway depends.

Hook's book The Hero in History was a noticeable event in the studies devoted to the role of the herothe Great Man in history, and the influence of people of significant accomplishments. In his book, Hook provided a great number of examples of the influence of great people, and the examples are mostly associated with various crucial moments in history, such as revolutions and crises.

Some scholars have critically responded because, for example:. Hook introduced a theoretical division of historic personalities, especially leaders, into the "eventful man" and the "event-making man," depending on their influences on the historical process. Hook attached great importance to accidents and contingencies in history, [17] thus opposing, among others, H.

Fisher, who made attempts to present history as "waves" of emergencies. InHook published perhaps his best-known essay, titled "The Ethics of Controversy," [21] in which he set down ten ground rules for democratic discourse within a democracy:. These ground rules reflect Hook's rejection of any form of totalitarianism in favor of the democratic process, in which the idea of freedom of inquiry retained pride of place:.

One of [democratic society's] basic assumptions is that truth of fact and wisdom of policy can be more readily achieved through the lively interchange of ideas and opinions than by unchallengeable edicts on the part of a self-perpetuating elite - whether of theologians or philosophers or politicians or even scientific experts. Still, Hook came to the conclusion that it was legitimate for a democratic sidney hook biography to take steps to constrain the influence of anti-democratic or totalitarian groups or parties within a democratic society.

In the s, Hook was a frequent critic of the New Left. Articles [ edit ]. Articles for New Leader [ edit ]. Occasional papers [ edit ]. See also [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist. Cornell University Press. ISBN Retrieved 14 October New York Times. Gotham Center.

Sidney hook biography: Sidney Hook (December 20,

Ludwig von Mises Institute. Archived from the original on Retrieved American Humanist Association. Archived from the original on October 20, Retrieved October 18, Washington Times. December 8, New York: The Free Press. Heresy, Yes—Conspiracy, No. John Day Company. LCCN Heresy, Yes—Conspiracy, No! American Committee for Cultural Freedom.

Retrieved 3 September American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 19 April Shapiro, ed. Letters of Sidney Hook: democracy, communism, and the cold war. This faith in rationality emerged early in Hook's life. Even before he was a teenager he proclaimed himself to be an agnostic. It was simply irrational, he declared, to believe in the existence of a merciful and powerful God in the face of widespread human misery.

Only the pleadings of his parents that he not embarrass them in front of relatives and friends convinced Hook to participate in a Bar Mitzvah ceremony on his thirteenth birthday. He made his home in Stanford, California, but was buried in South Wardston, Vermont, following his death on July 12, Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.

January 8, Retrieved January 08, from Encyclopedia. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. Hook began to teach at New York University in He served as the head of the Department of Philosophy of nyu from toduring which time he founded the New York University Institute of Philosophy.

Hook's main concerns as a philosopher lay in the areas of social and political thought in which he defended, against opponents of the Right and Left, a socialist form of political democracy. His philosophy in this connection may be summarized by his comment that "Orthodoxy is not only fatal to honest thinking; it invited the abandonment of the revolutionary standpoint which was central to Marx's life and thought.

Best known for his staunch sidney hook biography of academic and political freedom and his stand against any form of totalitarianism, Hook was one of the organizers of the Committee for Cultural Freedom. In he was awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom. In the Phi Beta Kappa Society established the Sidney Hook Memorial Award, a monetary prize that recognizes national distinction by a single scholar in scholarship, undergraduate teaching, and leadership in the cause of liberal arts education.

The Metaphysics of Pragmatism was published in Kurtz ed. Sidney Hook gale. Learn more about citation styles Citation styles Encyclopedia. Hook, Sidney gale. More From encyclopedia. About this article Sidney Hook All Sources. Updated Aug 13 About encyclopedia. Sidman, Joyce —. Sidman, Joyce Sidlow, Edward I.