Out of step: an unquiet life in the twentieth century

National Review, August 14, 1987 by M.E. Bradford

Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century

by Sidney Hook(Harper & Row, 628 pp., $29.95)

ACCORDING TO the customary definitionof the role of the philosopher, the life of thought is supposed to be a distanced and serene overview of what is to be known concerning the nature of things--and of the act of knowing, the way the systematic mind proceeds. But with Sidney Hook this familiar vocational archetype is completely inapplicable. Not that Professor Hook has neglected the disinterested priorities of his discipline. Since he first, in 1927, joined the Department of Philosophy at New York University, he has properly attended to his primary vocation--has taught and written of developments in modern philosophy from the special vantage of his own version of pragmatism. Even in his new book, at the age of 84, Hook continues to maintain that "looking back from the perspective of the veteran of the many wars and feuds of the academy, one cannot fail to be impressed with how unimportant they all seem in the light of genuine scholarly achievement.' Yet though he speaks of it as "a diversion from may primary interest,' it is the rest of his intellectual life that makes this philosopher exceptional.

Hook's adventures in the publicarena have been of the kind we would expect in the life of a thinker who has always regarded his reflection as not descriptive or analytic but instrumental: a means of "redetermining within limits not only ourselves but our society and to some extent even our natural environment.' Out of Step is primarily an autobiography of this topical, contentious, dramatic side of Sidney Hook's life. And, because of Hook's importance in the events that he reconstructs, it is a mirror of his place and time: a fascinating contribution to our understanding of why, since the watershed years of 1928-1939, our national character has steadily eroded toward a nadir that all of us can now foresee.

Sidney Hook's account of how hebecame a radical and, for a few years, a Communist fellow-traveler is particularly instructive--notably to American intellectuals from the South and West who, in most cases, cannot imagine living through such an evolution. Hook writes memorably of growing up in a working-class Jewish family in Brooklyn, of public school, CCNY, rough Irish boys, brawling, trouble-making in class, and the formation of a free and inquiring mind.

The brightest of Hook's friendswere, like himself, originally attracted to ideas of a planned society and welfare state, not by notions of efficiency or increased productivity, but by an "apparent rationality' and "heroic element,' by the "sense of human fraternity' embodied in the rhetoric of every kind of socialism: in other words, "on ethical ground.' In retrospect, Hook grants readily that the New York Left, of which he was a guiding spirit as early as 1930, was over-sanguine in its confidence that there would be no harm in concentrations of state power assembled to pursue ostensibly worthwhile goals. He concedes further that these intellectuals failed to recognize the importance of incentives to the successful operation of any modern society, and that they were indifferent to the link between "strict construction' of the Constitution and a government of laws. Finally, they were, from the beginning, oblivious to the fact that New York was not America--still a common form of myopia in Professor Hook's world.

Sidney Hook began to put distancebetween himself and much of the American Left even as he acquired authority within that community--an authority derived from integrity and a lifelong commitment to human freedom. For the same reason that he is truly a public man, Hook was never really a proper ideologue and therefore was never swallowed up in any of the massive collective enthusiasms of his era. As he put it himself, he could admire "Voltaire, but not Robespierre' --could, even when they were of his party, disparage doctrinaires who perceived "in the ambiguities of political maneuver' only "needless hypocrisy'; who could not accept that "the policy of the lesser evil' is "the center of any realistic conception of the political life.' But despite the great gulf that, over several decades, has opened up between social democrats and the totalitarian Left, it is in his accounts of earlier times when Marx was the central thinker for everyone on his side of the spectrum --when all of the factions attempted to act in concert--that Hook's narratives are of greatest interest.

Though he may tell us more thanwe are ready to digest, more of conferences and petitions, manifestos and factional schisms, Hook's recollection is invaluable as a chronicle of what it felt like to move within that turbulent current, a wave of fond hope that an influential minority of Americans once believed was certain to bring about the revolution promised in the secular theology of their chosen prophets. In particular, Hook gives us an anatomy of the shallow leftism of the late-arriving literati: those who had never thought seriously about politics or economics before the Crash--who, in the shock of the Depression, lost their inherited faith in freedom, "their moorings in the society they had grown up in,' and thus came sentimentally to admire the regime of Lenin and Stalin as "the planned society where the dislocation to which they reacted could not recur.'