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Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist
"This is a provocative, elegantly crafted piece of our intellectual history. Phelps's rediscovery of Hook's radical philosophy is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the fate of the American left."--Michael Kazin, author of The Populist An American History "Like other famous rebels who eventually came home to patriotism and conservatism, Hook's life is one of breathtaking intellectual twists and turns. He occupied, at one time or another, almost every intellectual position available on the Leninist, Trotskyist, right-wing Socialist plus several nuances between them. . . . Christopher Phelps, in his persuasive new biography of young Sidney Hook, . . . strives . . . to uncover the young philosopher and activist at the height of his powers. What he discovers is not just a brilliant interpreter of Marx and the Russian Revolution, but a remarkable advocate and practitioner of the Americanization of Marxism."--Jim Gilbert, In These Times "Sidney Hook's critics and admirers have long held that his pragmatism was incompatible with his early Marxist politics. In this fine book, Christopher Phelps shows why they are wrong and, in the process, offers the first major study of Hook's intellectual development and political activism."--Casey Blake, Washington University (Department of History) or identify as author of Beloved The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford "The very best kind of intellectual biography sheds light not only on the life and ideas of its subject but on a whole tradition of though and a historical epoch. This deeply intelligent and elegantly written book does all those things admirably, and has the added--and rare--virtue of making its own original contribution to the clarification of some thorny issues in social theory, and Marxist theory in particular."--Ellen Meiksins Wood, author of Democracy against Renewing Historical Materialism
257 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 1997
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February 13, 2021
The Young Sidney Hook is a fantastic political biography of a man desperately in need of a philosophical exhumation.
I don't intend to damn Phelps with faint praise, what Phelps achieves here is impressive when taken on its own terms, but it's undeniable that Phelps leaves largely uninvestigated what I feel to be the most interesting elements and most pressing questions of Hook's philosophy. Despite, like myself, believing that pragmatism has much to tell radicals today, Phelps spends very little time exploring the ways in which Hook's pragmatism informed and enriched his Marxism. Having failed to do this, Phelps is left with little defense of Hook's pragmatism when the time comes to deal with those who accuse it of being responsible for Hook's later anti-communist bent.
For my part, I think the matter is simple. As Hook himself explains in his 1933 work Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx, it is from the theory of class-struggle that all other aspects of Marxist philosophy emerge. To my knowledge, Hook never, even as an anti-communist, denied the existence of the class-struggle, but, following the dictates of pragmatism, saw the Soviet Union as proof in practice the inability of the class-struggle to resolve in the emergence of a new, better society. Hook was consumed by the same climate of pessimism that swallowed Orwell.
A pragmatist Marxism, therefore, need show by reference to other examples in practice that the Soviet Union and other such societies were not the inevitable outcome of the class-struggle developing into a political, radical form. This is not an easy task, mind you, but blind faith in working-class subjectivity is hardly a rational alternative. An evasion of the matter is impossible for all but those who cling to radicalism as a religion, which, sadly, does seem to describe the vast majority of radicals these days (and, as Phelps shows, in Hook's day as well). The Soviet experience, and failure, must be reckoned with; not simply explained away, but its implications explored and developed.
This is a fact that Hook understood, but his response, unfortunately, was to conclude that the class-struggle, allowed to develop into revolutionary ends, doomed society to totalitarianism. While often discounted, I think there is much evidence that Hook was, truly, a democratic socialist until the end of his life, albeit of an increasingly strange and tortured type. He maintained that he respected Marx and that the failures of his political project had nothing to do any intellectual failures on his part. It was simply that the working-class was incapable of transforming society, it was a task too great, so held Hook, for anything so unstable as a social movement.
The theory I've laid out here is, in essence, Phelps' argument as well, but it's an argument that is undermined by Phelps' reliance on biography over philosophy. He describes this defense, roots it in the evidence that can be found in Hook's life, but when built upon such a brief examination of the underlying framework of thought that Hook was developing through in this time period, it ultimately rings hollow. Had the book spent a more substantial amount of time exploring the uniqueness of Hook's thought, Phelps' biographical account for Hook's equally unique development, I believe, would have been altogether far more compelling, not to mention productive. Ironically, Phelps writes that "[p]erhaps the shower of fireworks accompanying each article had done more to attract interest to the Hook-Eastman dispute than the merits of the philosophical exchange itself," while Phelps himself does little to clarify the meat of the ideas in this dispute!
It's not as though Phelps completely evades matters of philosophy, but rather that his discussions of these matters is superficial. He'll talk in terms of conclusions rather than the arguments by which such conclusions were arrived at, or he'll talk in generalities so broad as to strip even accurate descriptions of their meaning. He'll explain, for example, that the pragmatic understanding of science, as explicated by Hook's teacher John Dewey, interprets science to be "a universally understandable and popularly applicable method of inquiry," but does nothing to develop this further. Left as it stands, this conception of science is merely populist and is hardly worth making note of. Limitations such as this plague even the book's best moments.
For those, like myself and Phelps, who see in pragmatist Marxism a radical potentiality that is absent in the standard Marxist account of things, we are left with a challenge. No amount of explaining Hook's development away, even when explained away quite well, amounts to meeting the challenge that Hook himself failed to meet: how to remain a praxiological Marxist in the seeming failure of class-struggle. It's no wonder that, when confronted with this question, the vast majority of Marxists either abandoned revolution or denied the reality of Soviet totalitarianism. Even those who've retained their conviction in the revolutionary potential of class-struggle and who refuse to turn a blind eye to the truth of the USSR have managed this by downplaying the extent to which revolution is truly an event of social self-creation, a mass transformation of the sort that invites instability and, yes, potentially successful counterrevolutions.
Pragmatic Marxism, by contrast, can take none of these easy ways out.
Anyone interested in picking up Sidney Hook's Marxism today must too be willing to pick up the challenges that he was unable to himself meet. The Young Sidney Hook, for all its genuine merits as a political biography, does nothing to introduce the reader meaningfully to the nuances of Sidney Hook's philosophy and therefor to the difficulties these nuances introduce. It fails to start a conversation or to move the project of pragmatic Marxism forward. What it does do it does well, but what it does is not necessarily what anyone actually needs, unfortunately.
I don't intend to damn Phelps with faint praise, what Phelps achieves here is impressive when taken on its own terms, but it's undeniable that Phelps leaves largely uninvestigated what I feel to be the most interesting elements and most pressing questions of Hook's philosophy. Despite, like myself, believing that pragmatism has much to tell radicals today, Phelps spends very little time exploring the ways in which Hook's pragmatism informed and enriched his Marxism. Having failed to do this, Phelps is left with little defense of Hook's pragmatism when the time comes to deal with those who accuse it of being responsible for Hook's later anti-communist bent.
For my part, I think the matter is simple. As Hook himself explains in his 1933 work Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx, it is from the theory of class-struggle that all other aspects of Marxist philosophy emerge. To my knowledge, Hook never, even as an anti-communist, denied the existence of the class-struggle, but, following the dictates of pragmatism, saw the Soviet Union as proof in practice the inability of the class-struggle to resolve in the emergence of a new, better society. Hook was consumed by the same climate of pessimism that swallowed Orwell.
A pragmatist Marxism, therefore, need show by reference to other examples in practice that the Soviet Union and other such societies were not the inevitable outcome of the class-struggle developing into a political, radical form. This is not an easy task, mind you, but blind faith in working-class subjectivity is hardly a rational alternative. An evasion of the matter is impossible for all but those who cling to radicalism as a religion, which, sadly, does seem to describe the vast majority of radicals these days (and, as Phelps shows, in Hook's day as well). The Soviet experience, and failure, must be reckoned with; not simply explained away, but its implications explored and developed.
This is a fact that Hook understood, but his response, unfortunately, was to conclude that the class-struggle, allowed to develop into revolutionary ends, doomed society to totalitarianism. While often discounted, I think there is much evidence that Hook was, truly, a democratic socialist until the end of his life, albeit of an increasingly strange and tortured type. He maintained that he respected Marx and that the failures of his political project had nothing to do any intellectual failures on his part. It was simply that the working-class was incapable of transforming society, it was a task too great, so held Hook, for anything so unstable as a social movement.
The theory I've laid out here is, in essence, Phelps' argument as well, but it's an argument that is undermined by Phelps' reliance on biography over philosophy. He describes this defense, roots it in the evidence that can be found in Hook's life, but when built upon such a brief examination of the underlying framework of thought that Hook was developing through in this time period, it ultimately rings hollow. Had the book spent a more substantial amount of time exploring the uniqueness of Hook's thought, Phelps' biographical account for Hook's equally unique development, I believe, would have been altogether far more compelling, not to mention productive. Ironically, Phelps writes that "[p]erhaps the shower of fireworks accompanying each article had done more to attract interest to the Hook-Eastman dispute than the merits of the philosophical exchange itself," while Phelps himself does little to clarify the meat of the ideas in this dispute!
It's not as though Phelps completely evades matters of philosophy, but rather that his discussions of these matters is superficial. He'll talk in terms of conclusions rather than the arguments by which such conclusions were arrived at, or he'll talk in generalities so broad as to strip even accurate descriptions of their meaning. He'll explain, for example, that the pragmatic understanding of science, as explicated by Hook's teacher John Dewey, interprets science to be "a universally understandable and popularly applicable method of inquiry," but does nothing to develop this further. Left as it stands, this conception of science is merely populist and is hardly worth making note of. Limitations such as this plague even the book's best moments.
For those, like myself and Phelps, who see in pragmatist Marxism a radical potentiality that is absent in the standard Marxist account of things, we are left with a challenge. No amount of explaining Hook's development away, even when explained away quite well, amounts to meeting the challenge that Hook himself failed to meet: how to remain a praxiological Marxist in the seeming failure of class-struggle. It's no wonder that, when confronted with this question, the vast majority of Marxists either abandoned revolution or denied the reality of Soviet totalitarianism. Even those who've retained their conviction in the revolutionary potential of class-struggle and who refuse to turn a blind eye to the truth of the USSR have managed this by downplaying the extent to which revolution is truly an event of social self-creation, a mass transformation of the sort that invites instability and, yes, potentially successful counterrevolutions.
Pragmatic Marxism, by contrast, can take none of these easy ways out.
Anyone interested in picking up Sidney Hook's Marxism today must too be willing to pick up the challenges that he was unable to himself meet. The Young Sidney Hook, for all its genuine merits as a political biography, does nothing to introduce the reader meaningfully to the nuances of Sidney Hook's philosophy and therefor to the difficulties these nuances introduce. It fails to start a conversation or to move the project of pragmatic Marxism forward. What it does do it does well, but what it does is not necessarily what anyone actually needs, unfortunately.
Displaying 1 of 1 review