## 1. Sidney Hook's Adoption of Pragmatism: from the Justification of Naturalistic Metaphysics to the Commitment to Scientific Method



Hook studied philosophy as an undergraduate at the City College of New
York in the early 1920s, where he was influenced by Morris Raphael
Cohen. He then attended Columbia University, where he earned a PhD
under the supervision of John Dewey. As the background for the
development of Hook's thought, the philosophical and
intellectual discussion of this period was dominated by the reigning
power of Deweyan pragmatism even as it also showed the emerging signs
of the coming influence of Marxism. One illustration of the
significance of Dewey for Hook's intellectual development can be
found in the fact that the completion of Dewey's attempt to
produce a naturalist metaphysics, *Experience and Nature*, took
place in the mid-twenties and Sidney Hook's doctoral
dissertation, *The Metaphysics of Pragmatism*, was defended in
1927.



Hook's study of the metaphysics of pragmatism placed his work
within a series of successive reconsiderations by pragmatic
philosophers of the relationship between the nature of metaphysical
inquiry and a commitment to scientific method. The founding fathers of
pragmatism in the United States, Charles Peirce and William James, had
each presented pragmatism as a criticism of metaphysics.



In his two essays that founded pragmatism as a philosophical movement,
Peirce argued that the experimental methods of the natural sciences
provided the proper the model for philosophical inquiry. He understood
the scientific method to be opposed to the methods used in traditional
metaphysics which were identified by him with Cartesian rationalism
and rationalist intuitionism. Further, Peirce's account of the
nature of "belief" could be interpreted as leading to a
complete rejection of all metaphysical hypotheses on the ground that,
as they are not verifiable by the methods of scientific inquiry,
metaphysical beliefs were properly considered "meaningless
gibberish."



In a different idiom, James had criticized both the metaphysical
Materialism and the metaphysical Idealism that he took to be dominant
in the latter part of the nineteenth century. James had argued that
both of these seemingly contrary philosophical hypotheses shared the
philosophical flaw inherent in the metaphysical approach that he
identified as a form of "looking backward." James
identified traditional metaphysics with the method of searching for
the necessary presuppositions of empirical phenomena. This form of
"looking backward" from the realm of contingent experience
to a philosophical set of entities that necessarily existed, whether
Materialistic or Idealistic, was contrasted by James with the
pragmatic approach which looked to future experience. Accordingly, for
James, metaphysical claims were to be interpreted as hypotheses whose
adoption or acceptance by an agent was justified only if it would lead
to verifiable or confirmable consequences in future human experience.
This involved James in a redefinition of the nature of metaphysics,
since it transformed metaphysical claims into predictions regarding
the consequences for the human condition of adopting them. Thus the
pragmatism of both Peirce and James could be understood as calling for
the elimination of traditional metaphysics and replacing it with a
"scientific"metaphysics, metaphysics within the bounds of
scientific methodology



Dewey had sought to build upon the insights of Peirce and James in
arguing for a naturalistic metaphysics. He stressed that scientific
inquiry was an activity of human beings whose minds and intellectual
habits had emerged in natural evolutionary processes and that
scientific inquiry was carried out in a natural environment so that
its results were applied in the transformation of the conditions of
nature. Along these lines, it seemed for Dewey that philosophers of
logic or science should be concerned not only with normative rules of
logical and scientific inquiry but also with the features of the
natural environment in which logical and scientific inquiry had taken
place. Accordingly, logical and epistemological inquiry involved the
broader investigation of the biological, psychological and
sociological conditions of human knowledge. For pragmatism,
naturalistic metaphysics as an extension of such investigations
involved an account and analysis of the most general and pervasive
features of human experience in its natural environment.



In Dewey's naturalistic metaphysics, then, a contextual and
empirical account of the origin and function of human knowledge is
combined with a recognition of man's biological quest for
adaptation to and control of his environment. This emphasis upon human
adaptation and control characterized the recognition within pragmatic
philosophy of its debt to Darwinism in the development of its theory
of mind's place in nature and of the nature of human
knowledge.



Hook followed Dewey in stressing the connection between a naturalistic
metaphysics and the identification of human knowledge as an instrument
in transforming the real nature of Nature. Significantly, this feature
of naturalistic metaphysics heightened the pragmatic emphasis upon the
capacity of human agency to function as an activist transformer of the
natural environment. To a significant degree, what was natural,
whether in the sphere of the universe or the sphere of human affairs,
could be considered in the idiom of pragmatism not so much as a
"given," but as a possibility for a "taken."
The theme of human transformation of the natural environment carried
Hook from the initial interest in the metaphysics of pragmatism to the
possibilities of pragmatism as a philosophy which could apply
scientific method for social change.



Hook's analysis of the metaphysics of pragmatism focused on the
issue of whether the practice of scientific method presupposed a set
of beliefs about the world or any set of ontological commitments.
According to Hook, the primacy of scientific method did not require
any prior set of foundational metaphysical beliefs but was justified
instead by its consequences. Decades later, after the great emphasis
ascribed to the nature of Being in existentialist metaphysics, Hook
returned to an analysis of this issue in his essay "The Quest
for 'Being.'" He reaffirmed his earlier view that
the practice of scientific method did not presuppose a set of
ontological commitments or metaphysical theses about the world. Hook
recognized that an empirical analysis of experience and of the way
scientific knowledge originated and functioned in the human
environment could justify statements that represented the "great
commonplaces" of experience and of the world. These statements
could even be identified as "empirical metaphysics" in the
sense that they asserted general traits about experience. From
Hook's perspective, however, these "great
commonplaces" did not constitute a set of metaphysical doctrines
about the nature of reality which could be demonstrated
philosophically or verified scientifically (Hook, *The Quest for
Being*, 1961, Part 3, "The Quest for
'Being'").



Hook's account of the naturalist metaphysics of pragmatism was
driven by the longstanding focus among pragmatists on the interaction
between human beings and their surroundings, and the potential of such
interactions to result in a transformation of both. Thus Hook's
account did not lead him into the thicket of the debates concerning
the elimination of metaphysics that were raging in the late 1920s and
throughout 1930s. It is worth noting that many of these debates are
implicit in the Peircean "pragmatic maxim", which proposes
a verificationist criterion for the meaningfulness of a statement. As
Peirce himself saw, and as the Logical Positivists would quickly come
to see, it is difficult to make sense of "verification"
without making reference to certain metaphysical concepts, including
those of counterfactual circumstances and unrealizable potential. In
difficulties such as these would lay the collapse of many of the more
stringent forms of anti-metaphysics. However, Hook did not pursue the
hard line criticisms of metaphysics that were implicit in pragmatism;
rather, his intellectual interest shifted to the significance of the
pragmatic commitment to scientific method in other areas of
philosophy. Hook's subsequent philosophical activity was based
upon his belief that the pragmatic commitment to scientific method had
transformative implications, primarily in three areas of philosophy:
the theory of knowledge, ethical theory, and social and political
philosophy.



In theory of knowledge, Hook defended the scientific method as the
paradigmatic way in which human beings could achieve reliable
knowledge. In ethical inquiry, Hook argued that the application of the
scientific method was crucial for the justification of normative
ethical statements and for their confirmation as objectively true
statements.



Given his Deweyan commitment to socially-engaged philosophy, it is no
wonder that in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s and 1950s,
Hook's philosophical attention began turning increasingly
towards social and political philosophy. Here, too, Hook sought to
apply the scientific method. Hook's writings on educational
reform, socialist theory, political protest, academic freedom, civil
liberties, segregation, and ideology often engaged with social
concerns at a level of concreteness that had eluded Dewey. Though his
views on these social issues blend what appear to us today as
politically opposed categories, Hook claimed that his views reflected
a consistent and univocal philosophical commitment to the epistemic
and moral experimentalism that lay at the core of pragmatism. Hook
recognized there was ample evidence that different political positions
derived from divergent structures of perception which interpreted the
empirical data in contradictory ways as well as from fixed attitudes
which had been set through a person's life experience. To a
degree, he appreciated the significance of the dissimilarities in the
application of scientific method between the confirmation of an
experimental hypothesis in natural science by a community of inquiry
and the empirical grounds that could be appealed to as providing a
justification of a particular social or political policy in the
context of decision-making in historical circumstances. Hook
continued, both in his explicit thought about the nature of moral or
political disagreement and in his implicit practice in discussion, to
hold the pragmatic faith that critical intelligence - a
generalized form of scientific method - could rationally resolve
any conflict of opinion.


## 2. Hook's Defense of the Pragmatic Theory of Knowledge



At the center of Hook's support for pragmatism was the
justification of the pragmatic theory of knowledge. This justification
characteristically took the form of setting the pragmatic theory
against two opposing conceptions of truth which were identified as the
"correspondence" theory of truth, which was advocated by
philosophical Realists, and the "coherence" theory of
truth, which was advanced by philosophical Idealists. For Hook, the
superiority of pragmatism was most evident in the recognition that it
was the only theory of knowledge which explained why the attainment of
knowledge was important for human activity in its interaction with the
environment. In the pragmatic theory of knowledge, the discovery and
confirmation of true hypotheses about the nature of the world was
understood as the realization of an instrument that enabled human
beings to predict and control aspects of their environment.



In contrast, whatever the merit of the correspondence theory of truth,
it could not ground a theory of knowledge that could explain why why
the attainment of truth should make a difference in human affairs. In
such theories, as truth is a matter of statements
"mirroring" or "copying" reality, knowledge is
not connected with the human ability to experimentally alter the
environment. Here Hook remained faithful to the early pragmatism of
Peirce and James, which featured a standard criticism of the
correspondence theory as presupposing human beings as "passive
spectators" whose role in knowledge is that of mirroring the
objects and events of the environment in which the knower finds
himself. The pragmatist indictment was that the correspondence theory
of truth relegated the knower to the role of "passive
spectator" in a completed universe, an image that is at odds
with the success of experimental scientific inquiry. Picking up on
themes in Dewey's work on experimental method, Hook argued that
knowledge is best conceived as an instrument for human prediction and
control of the environment. This remained a significant pragmatist
insight to be recognized even in the context of later and more
sophisticated interpretations of the correspondence theory, like
Alfred Tarski's "semantic theory of truth." Despite
the pragmatic criticism of the correspondence theory, Dewey, Hook and
other pragmatists like C.I. Lewis recognized the legitimacy of the
goal of this theory in its aspiration to realize a connection between
human language about the world and the facts of the world, or between
linguistic assertions and what actually "is the case" in
the world.



To appreciate the full force of the pragmatist theory of knowledge, it
must be positioned in opposition not only to Realist views rooted in
the correspondence theory of truth, but also to Idealist views that
are based in the coherence theory of truth. Idealists, from the
pre-pragmatic generation of Bradley and Royce to the later writings of
Brand Blanshard, had identified truth with consistency or coherence.
Pragmatists could accept that the truth of logical or mathematical
systems could be defined in terms of their consistency since such
systems could be understood as abstract formal structures of language
without requiring confirmation or applicability to empirical
experience. A coherence theory, however, could not provide a criterion
for truth. In a contingent universe, where empirical events were not
derived from a set of consistent axioms but were parts of the flux of
experience of nature, no criterion of consistency or coherence could
provide the basis for an account of truth. From the pragmatic
perspective, the coherence theory presupposed and required a
metaphysical conception of the world as forming parts of the absolute
mind so that inconsistent and incoherent events were excluded. The
rejection of an Idealist theory of absolute mind in metaphysics by
Peirce, James and Dewey brought with it their rejection of a coherence
theory of truth in epistemology. Thus for pragmatism, truths about the
world were not arrived at by the criterion of coherence but by a
method through which verifiable empirical hypotheses were confirmed in
experimental practice.



Against both competitors, pragmatists claim the advantage of being
able to neatly tether knowledge to successful inquiry. With successful
inquiry understood as the controlled and deliberate transformation of
one's surroundings, Dewey and Hook were able to draw an explicit
tie between their pragmatist theory of knowledge and at least one
instance of highly impactful science, namely Darwinian biology. That
is, they saw it as an attractive feature of their conception of
knowledge that it was friendly to a conception of the human mind as an
evolved instrument for improved prediction and control of the
environment.



Both Hook and Dewey sought to place the application of the scientific
method and the pragmatic theory of knowledge in the maelstrom of human
social, cultural and political issues. Even in these difficult
domains, they believed that the Peircian model of scientific method
could be realized. Just as Peirce had suggested that a history of
experimental method would demonstrate a movement from fallible
hypotheses to their progressive replacement by other fallible
hypotheses with greater degrees of confirmation approaching the
asymptotic limit ascribed to truth, Dewey and Hook argued that the
pragmatic theory of knowledge or truth should pursue this scientific
method with respect to what Dewey had termed the "problems of
men."



While the contrast between the convergence in the natural sciences
within the community of inquiry and the divergence and disagreement
over political and social issues within a political community is
historically evident, there is a theoretical basis for the pragmatic
thesis of a unitary method. Scientific method requires that inquirers
are committed to the rational and open-minded investigation and
analysis of experimental consequences. The celebrated illustration
that Galileo cites is that he is unable to persuade his critics of the
truth of scientific results if they refuse to look through the
telescope. Similarly, the existence of persons whose antecedent
attitudinal framework or whose bias within their structuring of their
perceptions limits their ability to observe the empirical evidence
that is relevant for resolving an issue does not negate the
objectivity of the factual evidence or the legitimacy of the
acceptance of the hypotheses that represent the optimal interpretation
of the data. Along these lines, the optimal policy option or decision
for resolving a problematic situation is also open, to a degree, to
objective confirmation or refutation. Thus Hook identified his
foundational belief to be a pragmatic theory of knowledge derived from
Dewey as the basis for his extended forays into public debate over a
host of political and social questions.



The broadness of this justification of pragmatic theory of knowledge
was one aspect of Hook's effort, later abandoned, to ally
pragmatism with Marxism. One parallel which provided a basis for
Hook's effort was the pragmatists' identification of truth
as instrumental in transforming the human condition. Thus for Hook,
the pragmatic theory of knowledge was paralleled by the well-known
passage in Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach."
Marx's gnomic statement that "Philosophers have hitherto
only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change
it" could be interpreted as indicating the distinction between
an account of knowledge in which the knower or spectator sought to
duplicate or interpret in language the phenomena of the real world, as
opposed to the ways in which an experimentalist knower would develop
hypotheses which would result in the transformation of the environment
according to predictable hypotheses. From this perspective, the
vindication of the Marxist hypothesis by the consequences of its
transformational activity paralleled the general pragmatic thesis of
the vindication of an hypothesis by its success in modifying the
natural and human environment.



The truth of the hypothesis could not be recognized except as
confirmed by the changes that its application to experience generated
for future experience. By stressing this parallel between Marx and
Deweyan instrumentalism, Marxism was not interpreted by Hook as a
dogmatic thesis about historical inevitability but as an experimental
hypothesis to be confirmed by its future consequences. In developing
this parallel, Hook also asserted that his interpretation of Marx
differed from the materialist variant of an Hegelian dialectic of
history, which he ascribed to "orthodox idolaters" of
Marxism (Hook, *The Meaning of Marx*, 1934, "The Meaning
of Marx"). The analogy to Deweyan pragmatism also enabled Hook
to differentiate his interpretation of Marxism from what he referred
to as the misinterpretation by Stalin and the Soviet authorities
which, according to Hook, had transmuted Marxism into a species of
secular religion.



For Hook, the connection between Marxism and pragmatism ran deeper
than the connection between knowledge as an instrument of change in
pragmatism and knowledge as an instrument for revolutionary
transformation in Marxism. On Hook's interpretation,
Marx's theory could be identified as an application of
scientific method to social and economic history. The Marxist theory
would then be justified in the same way that any scientific hypothesis
would be justified, that is, through confirmation by empirical
evidence. Thus, the Marxist interpretation of the "contradiction
of capitalism" could be interpreted as a verifiable empirical
hypothesis about the ways in which the class relations of production,
that is, the ways the manufactured and agricultural enterprises of a
country were owned and managed, fettered or blocked the social forces
of production, that is, the ability of these enterprises to produce a
much greater volume of products that could more fully satisfy the
needs of persons in a society. The revolutionary slogan calling for
the liberation of the social forces of production directed against the
class relations of capitalist society could be interpreted as a
verifiable empirical hypothesis that socializing the means of
production would bring about a far greater volume of products and
their distribution to a much greater range of persons in the society.
Along these lines, Marxism represented the application of scientific
method to the current empirical realities of society. Hook did not
balk at referring to Marxism as developing a "science of
history." Similarly, he referred to the Marxist theory and
practice of revolution as analogous to the Deweyan model of the
application of scientific method to the resolution of a problematic
situation.



On this interpretation of Marxism, the philosophical presupposition of
Marx and Engels which were identified as dialectical materialism were
incompatible with the delineation of Marxism as a scientific and
experimental hypothesis. Thus, while, or even because Hook asserted
his belief in a version of Marxism as compatible with pragmatism as an
experimental hypothesis, the various theses of Marxist dialectical
materialism were subjected to an intensely probing and extremely
skeptical criticism in his writings. Consequently, Hook found himself
to be identified as a supporter of Marxism through an unorthodox
interpretation of that theory, while at the same time he was
castigated as an opponent of Marxism by the recognized authoritative
figures of the Marxist movement because of his severe criticism of the
metaphysical claims within the Marx-Engels canon regarding dialectical
materialism. Hook's interpretation of Marxism as a scientific
hypothesis would appear to be compatible with the Marxist
movement's preferred characterization of its theory as
"scientific socialism" in opposition to "utopian
socialism." Yet, scientific socialism was asserted by its
followers to be a species of ultimate philosophical truth rather than,
as Hook's pragmatic interpretation required, a set of fallible
and corrigible hypotheses about the historical situation, including
contemporaneous economic processes and their eventual outcomes. It was
evident to believers in Marxism as a kind of secular faith or religion
that its interpretation as a species of experimental science left the
way open for its refutation and revision or rejection in light of the
analysis of future consequences. For Marxists, and to a significant
degree for Hook, in the early 1930s Marxism was a commitment of faith
and a normative guide to revolutionary action. Yet as an experimental
theory according to Peircian pragmatic principles, it would admit of
"disconfirmation" or refutation in the light of future
historical evidence. From this perspective, in the context of the
1920s, the empirical nature of the institutions of the socialist
society in the Soviet Union and their development in the near future
could be identified as representing factors that would confirm or
refute the Marxist hypothesis.



Hook's philosophical position was characterized by his
affirmation of Marxism and activist commitment to its implementation
in the United States, even as he concluded that the evidence of the
failure of socialist institutions and Marxist practices in the Soviet
Union had increasing weight. Even as Hook became deeply involved in
the socialist and communist political movements during the late 1920s
and early 1930s, the analysis of the negative evidence derivable from
developments within Soviet society was reshaping his positive attitude
toward Marxism. Consequently, Hook's involvement with Marxism
oscillated between his continuous exploration of Marxist theory
including its historical origins and his increasing criticism of
Soviet institutions and Communist Party practice. The critical
approach to Soviet society and pro-Soviet movements gradually
displaced the previous vindication of Marxist theory.



One continuing aspect of Hook's involvement in Marxism was the
completion in 1935 of his most significant scholarly contribution to
the development of Marxist thought: *From Hegel to Marx*. This
research had been undertaken during his residence in Europe, primarily
in Germany and briefly in Moscow, after the completion of his doctoral
dissertation at Columbia. In Moscow, Hook had carried out research at
the Marx-Engels Institute in 1929, which was then headed by a scholar
of the history of Marxism, David Riazanov. A tension between two
opposing attitudes was paradigmatic of Hook's involvement in
Marxism during that period. On the one hand, Hook was immersing
himself in what were considered canonic texts of Leninism; on the
other hand, Hook was to discover himself reacting with abhorrence to
the purge of Riazanov from the Institute, in part, presumably, on
account of his objectivity in his approach to the sacred texts of the
new State.



*From Hegel to Marx* provided an analysis of the origins of
Marxist theory through an account of Marx's intellectual
confrontation with each of the Young Hegelians who had sought to
interpret the relevance of Hegel for developments in European society.
Hook tried to show how Marx's successive rethinking of the
writings of David Strauss, Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge, Max Stirner,
Moses Hess and Ludwig Feuerbach led to the emergence of his own
"scientific theory of history." Hook's study did
justice to the subtleties of the polemics that flourished among the
Young Hegelians on diverse issues including the nature of emancipation
in bourgeois society or the function of religion in relationship to
class consciousness in European society. Further, by selecting these
thinkers as the originating background for Marx rather than focusing
upon Marx's earlier philosophical manuscripts, Hook was able to
provide evidence for the interpretation of Marx that indicated links
with a pragmatic theory of knowledge and a nascent experimental social
science. Accordingly, Hook could suggest that just as the pragmatists
like Dewey had moved beyond the Hegelian tradition toward a
naturalistic account of mind and of human self-consciousness, so
Marxism had moved beyond the idealistic framework of Hegelian thought
toward a materialistic and potentially scientific account of
historical change as the process of dialectic.



Hook's final attempt to provide an interpretation of Marxism
which was consistent with pragmatism was developed in his 1933 book
*Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx*. In this work, arguably
for the last time, Hook defended the closeness of the analogy between
the Marxist theory of knowledge as connected to revolutionary activism
and the pragmatic theory of knowledge as requiring confirmation of
hypotheses by their experimental consequences. In this work, also
arguably for the last time, Hook sustained the interpretation of Marx
as a critical and experimental science of history which was to be
tested by the future historical relationship between the social forces
of production or technology and the class relations of production in a
capitalist society.



Since, as previously noted, Hook's interest in Marxism was not
an abstract theoretical one, but involved his personal commitment and
activity in the arena of contemporaneous politics, it was virtually
inevitable that the focus of his concern would shift toward the major
events that emerged as the dominant historical realities of the 1930s.
Hook's political thought was pioneering in the critical
intensity that he brought to bear upon two major movements of the
1930s: Stalinism and Nazism.



Hook went against the grain of the growing radical movements in the
United States which had become more pro-Soviet as the economic
depression lengthened and the New Deal was perceived on the left as
having failed to solve the problems of the depression. Hook became a
severe critic of the movement of policy in the Soviet Union, including
the formulation of the charge that the Soviet rehabilitation camps
were actually a form of slave labor, that the purges of writers and
artists represented brutal repression, and that the trials of leading
members of the Communist Party and the Politburo were show trials
which involved framing the accused in order to strengthen
Stalin's position in his struggle for complete power.
Hook's criticism of communism in the Soviet Union went through
several phases and the earliest phase was not anti-socialist, perhaps
not even anti-communist, but could be identified as anti-Stalinist. It
also represented a degree of identification with the thought and
political approach of what was termed during that time Trotskyism.



Hook was distinguished from many in the radical movement in the 1930s
in his recognition of the novel threat of Nazism to European and
Western society. For most Marxist theorists, the emergence of Nazism
could not be considered a major historical threat since the laws of
historical inevitability were believed to prove that socialism must
follow the capitalist crisis. The success of Nazism in Germany must
then be explained away as a passing phenomenon in the decadent
"last phase of capitalism." Even as a post-doctoral
student in Germany in the late 1920s, Hook had expressed criticism of
the approach to the elections in Germany of the Communist Party in
their confidence that any Nazi triumph would be brief and would
necessarily be followed by the transfer of power toward socialism and
the Communist Party. Hook's opposition to Nazism included a
partial recognition of the extreme price that even a brief
transitional period of Nazi rule could exact in Europe. It was this
opposition to Nazism that led Hook to subsequently break decisively
with the Trotskyite position in the early 1940s.



It is significant that Hook's vindication of Marxism by
reference to its scientific character paves the way for the refutation
of Marxism when its predicted consequences are not verified in
practice. Hook's practical political involvement throughout the
1930s with the record of Soviet dictatorship as well as with the
regressive oppression by the National Socialist regime in Germany
provided strong evidence that his own predictions about the future of
capitalism and socialism that had been derived from Marxist theory
were not being verified by the historical events. Even more generally,
the idea that there could be a "science of history" which
would allow human prediction and control of historical outcomes was
refuted for any open-minded observer of the facts whose vision was not
blinkered or blinded by faith in a theoretical construction.



Hook's enduring commitment to Deweyan pragmatism contributed to
his ultimate rejection of Marxism. The understanding of verification
in pragmatic theory as requiring experimental confirmation of
hypotheses by an appeal to derived, predictable consequences
illuminated crucial dissimilarities between pragmatism and a Marxist
theory of verification through revolutionary activism in societal
transformation. Further, the interpretation of the scope and limits of
scientific method in the attainment of knowledge led to a
clarification of the extreme difficulties, insuperable in
methodological terms, between the establishment of a natural science
and the realization of a "science of history." Thus
Hook's continuing commitment to the exploration of Deweyan
pragmatism led him to the abandonment of his support for Marxism. To a
degree, Hook's focus on foundational moral issues shifted by the
late 1930s from the investigation of the compatibility of Deweyan
pragmatism with Marxism toward the defense of Deweyan ethical
naturalism against the tide of opposition from moral absolutism and
from moral emotivism.



Before turning to Hook's defense of ethical naturalism in moral
theory, the practical issues that dominated contemporaneous political
discussion merit review. There are three elements that were connected
to contemporaneous political controversy.



The first issue was the question of the nature of Stalin's rule
in the Soviet Union, which was highlighted by the trials of leading
figures of the Russian Revolution, including, most prominently, Leon
Trotsky. A second major issue was the interpretation of the character
of the Nazi regime which was given primary significance by the
question of American support for Britain at the risk of war with Nazi
Germany. The policy options raised by the discussion of these two
practical issues brought to the fore, for Hook, the more general issue
of the relative weight to be ascribed to political factors as opposed
to economic factors, that is, the value of the existence of
institutions of democracy or dictatorship compared with the value of
the institutions of capitalism or socialism.



On the first issue, Hook acted directly by requesting John Dewey to
serve as the judge of a proposed impartial tribunal which would
examine the justice of the charges that had been brought by the Soviet
government under Joseph Stalin against Leon Trotsky. To a degree, such
a tribunal could be justified as an extension and application of the
pragmatic method. The tribunal would seek to resolve conflicting
opinions by an appeal to evidence and by undertaking a form of free
inquiry. Dewey accepted Hook's argument that Trotsky may have
been the victim of injustice by a socialist society. Presumably, such
an injustice merited some attempt at rectification, particularly since
the Soviet Union had assumed a role of a morally progressive society
in its relation to Western societies and Dewey himself had lauded
Soviet education experiments as progressive on his visit to that
country in 1928. Accordingly, Dewey agreed to become the judge of a
quasi-formal trial of Leon Trotsky to be held in the country of
Trotsky's exile, Mexico, on the charges that the Soviet Union
had brought against him. This form of trial does not have a juridical
function so that the goal of the trial may be considered as carrying
out an educational rather than judicial function. The moral authority
of John Dewey enhanced the credibility of the proceedings. The trial
involved a rigorous examination of the evidence against Trotsky.
Trotsky himself was cross-examined as a witness at the trial. The
result was a verdict rendered by Dewey which was essentially
recognized as a declaration that Trotsky was not guilty of the charges
brought against him by the Soviet authorities.



One byproduct of this trial was Dewey's published analysis of
the set of Trotsky's beliefs about Marxism, freedom, scientific
method and democracy. Dewey had concluded that Trotsky did not
understand the nature of democracy and its required toleration for the
rights of the minority in the process of government. Dewey argued that
Trotsky's approach revealed a mind that was "locked in
absolutes" and failed to recognize the variable and contingent
nature of historical processes. Trotsky's belief that Marxism
had provided a theory of scientific socialism which was a blueprint
for the development of the historical future was not consistent with
the pragmatic understanding of the scientific method. Although Hook
had taken the initiative in generating Dewey's involvement in
the vindication of Trotsky, he shared Dewey's negative
conclusions about the compatibility of Trotsky's beliefs with
pragmatism, freedom and democracy.



In the debate over the second issue, that is, opposition to Nazism
including the risk of American entry into the Second World War, Hook
further distanced himself from the Marxist or the Trotskyist approach.
The leading intellectual journal of political discussion of the left
during this period was *Partisan Review*. This magazine, which
had been founded as a communist literary journal devoted to the
unlikely union of Marxism with aesthetic modernism, had been taken
over by the Trotskyist movement in the mid-1930s. Sidney Hook served
on its editorial board along with his colleague in the New York
University Philosophy Department, James Burnham, and the Columbia
University Professor of English and literary critic, Lionel Trilling.
The editors of *Partisan Review* published a controversial
editorial against American support for Britain and the anti-Nazi cause
on the ground that such support could lead the United States into the
war against Nazi Germany. The *Partisan Review* editorial
followed the Trotskyist theoretical position that had been formulated
during the period shortly before the Second World War. The Trotskyist
view was that the United States was a corporate capitalist society
whose militarization would be facilitated by its entry into the war.
Consequently, a war between the United States and Nazi Germany would
represent a war between two forms of corporate capitalist militarism.
This kind of war was identified as one during which the forces of
socialism, which were considered as the forces of democracy, would
probably experience repression and from which, in any event, they
could expect no benefit.



Hook's rejection of this argument indicates the distance he had
moved from Marxism and Trotskyism. The empirical facts regarding
National Socialism could not be identified as a phase within the
decadent death throes of international capitalism. Rather, the
empirical facts of Nazi aggression and Nazi aims required a practical
assessment and appropriate response freed from the blinders of Marxist
historical determinism. The policy options had to be examined from the
perspective of political and moral realism with an evaluation of their
potential consequences.



In assessing his support for the capitalist democratic societies like
the United Kingdom and the United States against the socialist Soviet
Union governed by a single Communist Party or the national socialism
of Germany governed by a single National Socialist German
Workers' Party, Hook explicitly affirmed that the defense and
preservation of the institutions of political democracy that permitted
freedom for individuals and groups were a much more important priority
than the transfer of the ownership of the means of production from
individuals and corporations to a socialist state. This conclusion
went directly counter to the Marxist view that the political
organization of a society was secondary to the primary economic
structure of the society, that is, in one Marxist phrasing, that a
state is nothing but the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. This
conclusion, which emerged during the debate over support for the
United States against Nazi Germany, was subsequently to become a
strong basis for Hook's support for American policy against the
Soviet Union during the period that is referred to as the Cold
War.



One additional aspect of Hook's consideration of the
relationship between pragmatism and Marxism was his attempt to set up
an "experimental" test for the vindication or refutation
of Marxism as an historical theory. Hook's analysis of the role
of the heroic person at different periods in history that was carried
out in his 1943 study *The Hero in History* can be interpreted
as developing such a "crucial experiment." In the final
chapter of this study, the role of Lenin as the hero of the Russian
Revolution is examined. It is evident on Hook's account that the
Russian Revolution cannot be adequately understood as an historical
transformation that was carried out under inevitable dialectical laws.
The empirical historical narrative of the period does not cohere with
a theoretical construction according to which the social forces of
production of pre-Soviet Russia were being fettered by the class
relations of production of a capitalist society resulting in an
inevitable revolutionary transformation.



For Hook, the realization of Leninist rule in Russia required that
Lenin be interpreted as an "event-making" hero. This
thesis is incompatible with Marxism. According to Marxism, the actions
of those who are identified as heroes in history must be interpreted
as "determined," or strongly "conditioned," by
the economic substructure. In *The Hero in History*,
Hook's criticism of the Marxist theory of history hinges upon an
account of the historical achievements of the hero, Lenin, who brought
about a Marxist state in Russia. Thus, ironically, the work that
marked Hook's final break with Marxism was an un-Marxist
interpretation of the achievement of Lenin in his founding of the
Marxist socialist state. (Hook, *The Hero in History*, 1943,
Chapter X).


## 3. Hook's Defense of Ethical Naturalism



Hook's activist involvement in many of the major moral issues
that emerged in the political debates of the 1930s was connected to a
major theoretical issue of ethical theory: the possibility of the
determination and the justification of objective, normative
statements. In ethical theory, Hook aimed to provide a clear and
consistent formulation of Deweyan ethical naturalism. In his *John
Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait* of 1939, Hook began his
discussion by quoting in full Dewey's view about the centrality
of ethics for philosophy. Dewey wrote, "the central problem of
philosophy is the relation that exists between the beliefs about the
nature of things due to natural science to beliefs about values
- using that word to designate whatever is taken to have
rightful authority in the direction of conduct." Dewey
continued: "the problem of restoring integration and
co-operation between man's beliefs about the world in which he
lives and his beliefs about the values and purposes that should direct
his conduct is the deepest problem of modern life" (Hook,
*John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait*, 1939, 128).



In his discussion of Dewey's ethical naturalism in the
"portrait," Hook proceeded to bring together different
strands of Dewey's ethical theory that had been developed
throughout his philosophical career, from his early textbook on ethics
in 1908 through *Human Nature and Conduct* to *The Quest for
Certainty* and concluding with *The Theory of Valuation* of
1937. Hook stresses that a common feature of Dewey's diverse
presentations of his ethical theory is the location and derivation of
morality within the scope of nature, particularly the understanding of
human nature. Accordingly, for Dewey, there is an intimate connection,
rather than a bifurcation, between value and fact, the
"ought" and the "is," or the prescriptive and
the descriptive. A major argument of Dewey's for this
connection, which is the hallmark of his ethical naturalism, was
developed in the chapter on the "Construction of Good" in
*The Quest for Certainty*. Hook shares the Deweyan naturalist
view that is developed in that chapter that the term
"Good" can be understood by reference to the
"desirable". Emphasizing this naturalistic analysis, Hook,
like Dewey, recognized the prescriptive component in desirability.
"The desirable" refers to what *ought* to be
desired, not only to what *could* be desired or what
*is* desired. Hook insisted that the prescriptive component is
not separated from the descriptive facts of desire. The connection
between the desirable and the desired was not deemed to be a fallacy
which overlooked the gulf between the "ought" and the
"is," but a justified recognition of the way in which the
moral norms for human behavior were developed by recognizing the
empirical needs, interests and desires of human beings. Dewey
identified phrases like "the desirable" with similar
terms, such as "likeable" and "enjoyable." In
each case, the dispositional term could not be reduced to a singular
episodic term. To claim that an object, event or experience was
likeable, desirable or enjoyable was not so much to claim that it had
been liked, desired or enjoyed by a subject, but involved a species of
predictive hypothesis, namely, that it could or would be enjoyed by
other persons who possessed the relevant potential capacities. The
denial that statements about "the Good" were subjective
and the recognition that they involved a predictive hypothesis led to
the more general thesis that statements about the good, or normative
statements, were to be interpreted as statements regarding what would
be desired by persons who understood the nature of their desires and
knew the consequences of their desires. Accordingly, ethical norms
were not subjective or relative but represented cognitive empirical
predictions that could be verified or confirmed. They were hypotheses
about what would be liked or enjoyed or desired by persons who had
investigated critically the nature of their desires, analyzed
rationally the optimal means required to satisfy those desires and
were sensitive to the consequences of their desires. The derivation of
a fundamental moral term like "Good" from the empirical
and experiential elements of human desires determined the naturalist
character of Deweyan ethics. While human desires could be perverse,
such as malicious desires that would wreak havoc with the lives of
other people, Hook's belief was that such perverse desires could
not withstand the tests required for normative acceptance. Without
being able to appeal to an absolute intuitive exclusion of such
malicious desires or of perverse policies that were motivated by these
desires, Deweyan naturalism argued that such desires would not meet
the criteria for acceptance as norms. Such desires could be understood
as incoherent, self-contradictory or self-destructive, and they would
inevitably conflict with other desires as well as lead to
counter-productive consequences which would mandate their
unacceptability. Thus, ethical norms were neither subjective
expressions of likes, preferences or desires nor intuitive absolutes
that were moral imperatives without any connection to human desires or
interests, but were empirical hypotheses regarding optimal norms for
realizing desirable ends. Accordingly, empirical statements were
cognitive and could be shown in principle to be either true or
false.



In his chapter on Dewey's ethical theory in *Intellectual
Portrait*, Hook also stressed Dewey's belief that since
normative ethical statements were cognitive empirical hypotheses,
scientific method could be used to mediate between conflicting
hypotheses (Hook, *John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait*, 1939,
Chapter VII, "Standards, Ends, and Means"). Thus Hook
assumed that there was a method of verification for normative
hypotheses by an appeal to their consequences. Hook's
illustrations of this use of scientific method in ethics, however, are
characteristically developed for cases of competing social, economic
or educational policies. Even in these contexts, the question can be
raised whether there is a blurring of the differences between the ways
in which verification functions in scientific experiments and the ways
verification can function in decisions evaluating social policy.
Further, even if it were conceded that it is possible to achieve a
kind of "verification" or "disconfirmation" of
policy decisions on such issues as the desirability of minimum wage
legislation or the prohibition of narcotics in American society,
Hook's critics were concerned about the distance between the
notion of "mediation of conflicting opinions by an appeal to
consequence" in such contexts of decision among policy options
and the contexts of the emerging disputes over practices of racial
genocide or the use of concentration camps as instruments of
ideological rehabilitation. Consequently, Dewey's ethical
empiricism was subject to continuous challenge during the 1930s and
40s on the charge that it presupposed an optimistic interpretation of
human nature which could not be sustained in light of the new
realities of totalitarianism and genocide.



The focus of Hook's concern in ethical theory over several
decades was the continuing defense of Deweyan ethical naturalism.
During the decade of the 1940s, a number of ethical and political
works were written that represented reactions to the historical evils
that had emerged into public consciousness after the Second World War.
These works involved reconsiderations of the causes for the phenomena
of human evil and of historical regression that were identified with
the institutions of "the concentration camp universe" and
of mass murder. These works generally involved a rejection of ethical
naturalism and the recurrent claim that the Deweyan approach reflected
an excessively optimistic and unrealistic interpretation of human
nature.



Thus at one pole, anti-naturalist ethical theories were derived from
interpretations of current historical phenomena. Some of the
anti-naturalist doctrines in ethics developed theses that were
analogous to the religious doctrine of "original sin."
This tendency was evidenced by the popularity achieved by the writings
of theological critics of Deweyan ethical naturalism such as Reinhold
Niebuhr in the 1950s. The dual theme of these works involved both a
descriptive interpretation of the perversity, malice and
imperfectability of human nature, as well as an ontological or
meta-ethical thesis about the need for a non-natural, that is,
religious or rational-intuitionist basis and source for moral
imperatives in human society and history.



Hook's defense of ethical naturalism against the anti-naturalist
writings that were related to contemporaneous historical events also
involved him in the rejection of Existentialist ethical theory. The
empiricism and objectivity that were hallmarks of Dewey's
ethical theory were antithetical to the Heideggerian or Sartrean
interpretation of normative ethical assertions as arbitrary
commitments which represent the choices of persons who bear the burden
of freedom and self-consciousness. Hook defended the pragmatic view
that normative ethical judgments are evaluated and their truth or
adequacy can be confirmed by an appeal to their consequences against
the Existentialist thesis that the only criteria available for
evaluation of a person's moral commitments is one of their
authenticity to the agent's being *engagee* in the
situation or accepting of the burden of responsibility for his
personal commitments. The darkened canvass of moral phenomenology that
emerged during the decade of the 1940s, with its scenes of total war,
seemingly absurd resistance, and irrational genocide, did not alter
Hook's identification with the moral naturalism that had been
developed as part of the moral canon of the earlier decades of the
twentieth century.



At the opposite pole of philosophical methodology, the focus of
inquiry was not upon contemporaneous historical phenomena but upon the
analysis of language, particularly the constructed languages of logic
and mathematics and upon the paradigm of knowledge as delineated in
empirical discourse and the languages of the empirical sciences. At
this pole also, ethical naturalism was rejected in favor of an account
of ethical statements as expressions of emotive attitude. From this
perspective, ethical theory was not to be derived from interpretations
of history and human nature but from an analysis of logical language
and the nature of the languages of the empirical sciences. Dewey and
Hook believed that this interpretation of ethical language as
expressions of emotive attitude was not justified by an analysis of
the ways in which ethical propositions originated in human society or
were supported in the context of ethical practice. The ground for the
emotivist position, in their view, was the logical positivist thesis
that there could be only two kinds of cognitive statements. One kind
of statement was cognitively analytic, that is, a class of the
statements that were true or false by virtue of the rules of language.
The second kind of statement was cognitively empirical, that is, a
class of statements that are asserted to be true or false by virtue of
sense experience. Statements that were neither analytically true (or
false) nor empirically verifiable were thus non-cognitive, that is,
neither true nor false. Expressions of emotive attitude like
"Hoorah for Stanford!" are exemplified as non-cognitive
expressions of emotive attitude. There may be special circumstances in
which moral statements admit of analytical truth or falsity, just as
there are significant cases where moral statements are empirically
verifiable and can be claimed to be probably true or probably false.
Yet, in the logical positivist account, since most moral statements do
not appear to be true or false by virtue of the rules of language or
to be verifiable in the way in which statements are verifiable in the
experimental sciences, they must be understood as expressions of
emotive attitude. Against emotivism, Dewey and Hook argued that the
pragmatic elucidation of moral statements considered them in the
contexts of their use in framing moral policy and argument, while the
logical positivist analysis of ethical statements did not derive from
the consideration of the actual contexts in which ethical statements
as judgments of practice functioned and received their
justification.



With reference to the debate in ethical theory between logical
positivism and pragmatism, there is a relevant and seemingly
paradoxical event that forms an interesting part of the historical
record. Despite the significant differences that were evident between
the views of logical positivism and pragmatism in ethical theory, the
editors of the *Encyclopedia for Unified Science*, a
multivolume work which had been projected to represent the
authoritative formulation of the position of logical positivism in
several fields of philosophy, had decided to ask John Dewey to author
the essay on ethical theory. The invitation for Dewey to contribute to
the Encyclopedia was given by Otto Neurath in a meeting at
Dewey's home in New York City in 1937. Along with Neurath and
Dewey, Sidney Hook, who had emerged as previously noted as a major
expositor of Dewey's ethical theory and Ernest Nagel, who had
played a major role in advancing the dialogue between American
pragmatism and European analytical philosophy, were present at the
discussion. After Dewey had expressed an initial reluctance which
stemmed from his perception of the distance between his own views and
those of Neurath in epistemology, Dewey consented to write the volume
which was published in the Encyclopedia as *Theory of
Valuation.*



In that work, Dewey reiterated his strong disagreement with the view
that ethical statements could be relegated to a class of non-cognitive
expressions of emotive attitude. Dewey developed a distinction between
moral statements in their function as "prizings" in
contrast with their function as "appraisals." Without
making explicit reference to A.J. Ayer or any other logical
positivist, Dewey suggested that the logical positivist doctrine that
had categorized ethical statements as expressions of emotive attitude
could be understood as an identification of the "prizing"
function of moral statements. For Dewey, normative moral statements
could be interpreted more adequately as "appraisals," that
is, as statements which went beyond the expression of personal
attitudes of prizing in order to assert cognitive claims about the
values of entities or experiences that could be tested by other
persons. Although "prizings" could be analogized to
emotive attitudes, appraisals were understood as empirical statements
whose claims about the value of an object could be confirmed as true
or false based upon intersubjective experience and upon their future
empirical consequences.



The continuing debate on the issue of the linguistic status of
normative statements generated an effort to clarify the nature of
ethical disagreement as a means for the resolution of that debate. In
C.L. Stevenson's *Ethics in Language*, the analysis of
the nature of ethical disagreement was considered as providing a
method of mediation between pragmatist and logical positivist views in
ethical theory. In his graduate seminars on ethical theory, Hook made
use of Stevenson's *Ethics in Language* as the point of
departure for his defense of pragmatic ethics against the criticisms
that derived from the analysis of moral language. Stevenson had
located Dewey's interpretation of ethical norms within the broad
framework of patterns of moral discourse. For Stevenson, dispute over
Deweyan norms or appraisals would represent a pattern that he
identified as "disagreement-in-belief." For this kind of
disagreement Stevenson shared Dewey's view that scientific
method provided a competent mode of adjudication. Normative
disagreement of this kind could be considered as a parallel to
empirical disagreement on experimental scientific questions where true
decisions between conflicting hypotheses could be arrived at by an
appeal to the evidence of their future consequences.



Stevenson sought to demonstrate, however, that moral disagreement was
more adequately represented by the linguistic pattern which he
identified as disagreement in attitude. For this kind of disagreement,
Stevenson shared the non-cognitivist conclusion of the logical
positivists, according to which there would be no rational or
scientific method for mediating among conflicting opinions by an
appeal to their future consequences. Ethical disagreement of this type
could be brought to an end only by a change in attitude. Along the
lines of Stevenson's approach, philosophers who rejected the
ethical naturalism of Dewey and Hook have examined the ways in which
disagreement in attitude can be related to different structures of
perception, plural or diverse interpretive discourses, and conversion
to alternative paradigms.



In examining the anti-naturalism in ethical theory that was derived
from the analysis of language, Hook followed Dewey in stressing the
distinction between prizings and appraisals. Thus, in Hook's
view, moral statements, like empirical scientific statements, were to
be considered as hypotheses whose truth or falsity would depend upon
their confirmation by future experience. Consequently, this
naturalistic and empirical interpretation of ethical statements
involved Hook in continuing debates with the proponents of competing
interpretations of ethical statements, such as C.L. Stevenson.
Stevenson had proposed two reasons in justification of his view that
moral disagreement was most fundamentally disagreement in attitude
and, therefore, differentiated from scientific or empirical
disagreement. One reason, according to Stevenson, was that persons
could agree about all the facts that were relevant to a moral dispute
and yet hold different attitudes on the issue so that they supported
different policies. The second reason cited by Stevenson was that a
disagreement was considered to be resolved when the persons involved
in the dispute converged on an agreement in attitude even if they
maintained differing views about the facts. On the other hand, the
moral dispute was not resolved if persons who had agreed on the facts
continued to disagree in their attitudes about the question at
issue.



Hook provided naturalistic rebuttals to these two arguments advanced
by Stevenson on the attitudinal interpretation of ethical statements.
Hook argued that in the case in which seeming agreement on all the
facts was conjoined with a continuing disagreement in attitude, it was
not legitimate to exclude the possibility of an undisclosed factual
disagreement. Future investigation might uncover disagreement about
relevant facts that could have an impact in changing attitudes.
Hook's claim is that the premise of Stevenson's argument,
namely, that *all* the facts relevant to attitudes in a moral
dispute have been discovered, is not demonstrable. That is, there is
no form of completeness theorem which would explicate the notion of
*all* the facts. Thus, the pragmatic thesis that normative
statements are empirical appraisals that are open to confirmation by
future consequences is not refuted by Stevenson's identification
of disagreement in attitude, since the discovery of future facts may
bring about a change in attitude.



Further, agreement in attitude by parties to a dispute does not
necessarily imply, as Stevenson suggests, that the moral dispute has
been resolved. It is notorious that a resort to force by one
protagonist in a moral dispute can change the balance of power so that
the other party to the dispute must adopt a different attitude toward
the issue for prudential reasons. Yet the conclusion of such an
episode would be that the use of force had brought about a settlement
of the dispute but not necessarily that it had resolved the ethical
disagreement. A change in attitude by a person who has been a party to
a dispute which results in the resolution of the conflict does not
necessarily mean that the moral issue which precipitated that conflict
has been satisfactorily resolved. The end of a dispute through the
convergence of attitudes differs in those cases where the change of
attitude reflects the acceptance of the realities of power or is the
product of conditioning, as in hypnotic submission, from those cases
where the change of attitude has derived from convergence on the facts
at issue in the dispute.



In this connection, it could be argued, apparently contra Stevenson,
that attitudes of extreme prejudice are virtually always defended by
an appeal to reasons or facts as supporting the prejudicial attitude.
A person who has an ethnic or racial prejudice does not simply express
his prejudicial attitude but tends to rationalize it by asserting
justifying reasons in support of the attitude. It may be true that the
demonstration that these reasons are in point of fact false does not
customarily lead to the abandonment or withdrawal of the prejudicial
attitude. Nonetheless, the phenomenon of rationalization suggests that
over the long run, the sustaining of even prejudicial attitudes
requires support by reasons. The demonstration that the supporting
reasons are factually false tends to bring with it some degree of
revision in attitude.



The issues in the debate between the Stevenson variant of
non-naturalist emotivism and pragmatic naturalism were not resolved,
but the locus of the debate over ethical naturalism shifted. This
shift occurred because of a new turn in the reigning methodology of
philosophy. The logical positivist focus on the language of science,
like the more generalized Deweyan focus on scientific method, was
replaced by the focus on understanding the rules governing the use of
conceptual terms in ordinary language. In the context of ethical
naturalism, the analysis of the moral vocabulary involved the
explication or definition of "Good" as a term of
commendation for reasons. Thus the emotive aspects of the moral
vocabulary could be interpreted by identifying the commendatory
goading or prescriptive functions of moral terms. At the same time,
the empirical or pragmatic aspects of the moral vocabulary could be
interpreted by identifying the way in which reasons were advanced in
support of commendations or prescriptions. On the whole, Hook did not
seek to develop a bridge between Deweyan naturalism and the works of
ordinary language philosophy. He recognized that the works of Austin
and Ryle involved theses about the nature of mind and the nature of
experience which were compatible with and supportive of Dewey's
naturalism. Hook did not pursue, however, the defense of ethical
naturalism in the vocabulary and methodology that had been advanced by
philosophers of ethics like Stuart Hampshire and Philippa Foot.
Rather, Hook's pragmatism led him away from the ongoing debate
in ethical theory toward the application of Deweyan naturalism and
empiricism on contemporary issues in education, politics and
society.


## 4. The Pragmatic Philosopher as Public Intellectual



Sidney Hook's emergence as a major American philosopher and his
accompanying prominence as an influential intellectual in the American
cultural and political scene took place during the decades of the
1930s and 40s. During that period he was recognized as a forceful
defender of pragmatic theses in theory of knowledge and ethical
theory. Yet the greatest part of Hook's *oeuvre* is
comprised of writings on the issues that were brought into focus
within American social and political thought in the post-War period.
As a political philosopher, Hook had been involved from the outset of
his career in the fundamental issues of democracy, liberty and
equality. In the post-War period, however, Hook was embroiled in
political controversy over the balance between individual liberty and
national security occasioned by the exigencies of the Cold War.
Hook's support for a balance which recognized the need for
limitations of liberty for the sake of national security led him to a
critique of the dominant liberal position which argued against new
executive or legislative efforts to enhance national security that
could requires any limitation of individual liberty. On Hook's
view, the traditional liberal position of the Millian variety
represented a form of what he termed "ritualistic
liberalism."



Hook's belief in democracy involved a commitment to civil
liberties and racial desegregation. Again, after the 1960s, he was
involved in political controversy over the legitimacy of
discrimination on grounds of race as an instrument for educational
desegregation and racial integration.



The range of issues on which Hook wrote included the redirection and
reshaping of his perennial interest in philosophy of education and in
the relationship between the economic structure of a society and its
political institutions. In the post-War period, Hook revisited his
earlier position in philosophy of education as well as his support for
socialism. His later work in philosophy of education involved him in a
response to the emergence in the 1960s of an educational approach that
advocated *relevance* as the most important criterion for the
educational curriculum, as well as a response to the debate between an
emphasis on the Western tradition and the thesis of multiculturalism
in education. Along similar lines, his reexamination of the issues
raised by socialist theory was engendered by the need to respond to
the evidence that had emerged, particularly by the 1980s, regarding
the failure of socialist economics in diverse countries where it had
been practiced. The positions that Hook advanced in these areas were
generally perceived as representing a shift from his
self-identification as an anti-communist democratic socialist to his
arrival at a prominent place in the diverse ranks of supporters of
American conservative thought. Yet Hook had remained constant to his
pragmatism which sought to resolve ideological issues on the basis of
a continuing and ongoing inquiry, evaluation of evidence, and
appraisal of values.



Hook followed Dewey in considering the philosophy of education to be a
central focus of concern for any social and political philosophy. Hook
argued that American educational institutions, in their bureaucratic
structure and organization, were too authoritarian and were not
sufficiently responsive to the needs of the individual student. As for
the content of the curriculum and the methods of teaching, Hook argued
that they were too rigidly bound by the traditional disciplines and
was insufficiently concerned with the classroom as a community of
inquiry or a forum for the development of critical and independent
thinking. Under Dewey's banner, a legion of advocates and
supporters of progressive education had carried out a thoroughgoing
reform of American educational institutions. These reforms included
the development of alternative schools that defined themselves as
"child-centered" and the development of curricula that
abolished traditional requirements in favor of the rights of students
to have a greater role in the determination of the course of their own
of studies. Like Dewey, Hook came to the conclusion that the
developments within progressive education that had been fostered in
Dewey's name had gone too far in their rejection of the need for
authority and the importance of liberal education as an education in
fundamental knowledge, including the knowledge of traditional subject
matter. As a result, Hook tried to formulate a measured criticism that
would balance the strengths of the American educational system and
tradition while at the same time seeking to reform aspects of that
system and that tradition. In his *Education for Modern Man* of
1946, Hook sought to develop a direction for American education that
would conform to the ideals of pragmatic liberalism. For Hook, this
required that the classroom should become a community of inquiry in
which students would develop their potentiality for critical inquiry
as a method which is analogous to scientific method. One of the
strongest claims in *Education for Modern Man* was the primacy
of method for education. To a degree, Hook's belief in the
primacy of scientific method presupposed the pragmatist account of a
generalized methodology for all the sciences. Criticism of the
pragmatic thesis of a single generalized scientific method as opposed
to the recognition of the difference in the methods used in the
writing of history, the study of literature and research on social
problems as distinct from the methods of the natural sciences had an
impact on Hook's philosophy of education. Hook's
subsequent recognition of the ways in which the teaching of science
involved the learning of substantive subject matter and experimental
techniques rather than a generalized method for the criticism and
testing of hypotheses marked a nuanced shift in his educational
philosophy.



Although *Education for Modern Man* recognized the place of the
major intellectual disciplines in the sciences and the humanities in
the curriculum of the public school and the college, the stress was
not laid upon the learning of the substantive subject matter as much
as upon the development of the student's ability for independent
thinking and the fostering of his capacity for exercising critical
intelligence. Similarly, although the authority of the teacher and
administrator was recognized, the stress was placed upon the
democratic character of the classroom as a community of free inquiry.
In Hook's interpretation of education, a condition for the
identification of an educational institution as a democratic
institution was the requirement that it sustain freedom of
inquiry.



In Hook's general theory of democracy, the idea of freedom of
inquiry also retained pride of place. Thus constraint on freedom of
inquiry by a democratic majority in an electoral democracy would
represent not only a violation of freedom but a violation of the
democratic process. Continuous with the value of freedom of inquiry,
the idea of cultural freedom was identified as a condition for
democratic society. Accordingly, Hook was to formulate his criticism
of Soviet society during the period of the cold war by reference to
the violations of cultural freedom within the Soviet Empire.



At the same time, Hook's interpretation of a free and democratic
society was consistent with the recognition that such a society could
set limits to freedom of expression. Conceptually, this recognition of
the limits of freedom related to pragmatic pluralism. Its
philosophical justification rested on the belief that no single value
was absolute and that every value was justified only as a result of a
process of mediation, compromise, or balance with other values. Hook
appreciated the pluralistic character of liberty as recognized in the
later terminology of John Austin, according to which the
"correlative opposites" of the term "liberty"
are not only such terms as "slavery,"
"repression" and "coercion," but also such
terms as "security," "order,"
"self-restraint" and "law." The significance
of this recognition of the duality of opposites of the concept of
liberty is that it points to different contexts in the application of
liberty. When "liberty" is opposed to
"slavery" or "tyranny," the realization of
liberty involves the abolition of slavery or tyranny. When
"liberty" is opposed to "security" or
"order," the realization of liberty involves a balance of
values between liberty and security or order.



Hook's formulation of the issue of the limits of freedom in a
democracy could be traced back to his sensitivity to his observation
of the rise of Nazism in Germany during his residency in that country
in the late 1920s. The anti-Nazi neo-Kantian philosopher, Leonard
Nelson, had pointed out at that time that totalitarian movements,
particularly the National Workers Socialist movement, confronted
democracy with a potentially fatal dilemma: if the democratic system
were to outlaw or prohibit the National Workers Socialist Party from
participation in political elections, it would be taking a significant
step toward the destruction of democracy by excluding a party which
had a mass following. If the democratic system were to fail to outlaw
or prohibit the National Workers Socialist Party from participation in
national electoral politics, however, it would be taking a potentially
even more significant step toward the destruction of democracy. A
single electoral victory of the National Workers Socialist Party, no
matter by how small a margin, would result in the abolition of other
political freedoms or in the termination of subsequent elections, as
in the standard refrain of democracies that have committed suicide:
"one person, one vote - one election." Thus,
Nelson's dilemma recognized a possibly fatal flaw in democracy
once a significant pro-totalitarian or anti-democratic party had
achieved a degree of popular support.



Hook's understanding of the dilemma led him to the belief that
it was legitimate for a democratic system to take steps to constrain
the influence of anti-democratic or totalitarian groups or parties
within a democratic society. In the United States, the question of the
right of the American Fascist Party or the American Communist Party to
participate in electoral politics did not rise to the level of
political controversy, probably because of the lack of popular support
for these parties. The issue was drawn, however, over the legitimacy
of excluding members or advocates of such parties from positions which
involved access to national security decisions as well as their
exclusion from positions of major influence in the cultural sphere.
Hook sought to resolve this dilemma in a controversial book titled
*Heresy, Yes - Conspiracy, No*. The line that Hook sought
to draw was the granting of full cultural and political freedom to any
heretical anti-democratic views. At the same time, if holders of such
views were organized as a disciplined cadre which could represent a
threat to national security or as a doctrinally controlled movement
which could exercise coercive influence in a free marketplace of
ideas, then the activities of such groups could be limited. Critics
charged that in developing the thesis of *Heresy, Yes -
Conspiracy, No*, Hook was in effect permitting the exclusion of
Communist Party members or "fellow travelers" from holding
jobs in universities or from holding positions of power or influence
in cultural activities like films and theater. In Hook's
defense, the record would show that Hook was involved in the
formulation of a thesis within the theory of democracy about the
legitimacy of the line to be drawn in defense of democracy, rather
than the application of this thesis to individual cases. Thus, Hook
did not seek to resolve the question of what kind of evidence would
constitute participation in a conspiracy as between such diverse
considerations as the fact of membership in a political party, the
criterion of "advocacy" for policies that were considered
as "subversive," indoctrination along lines laid down and
enforced by a leadership cadre, or participation in an espionage
ring.



*Heresy, Yes - Conspiracy, No* represented, from
Hook's perspective, a contribution to the defense of democracy
and cultural freedom in an environment in which both democracy and
cultural freedom were under attack from the Soviet Union. As
previously mentioned, Hook was a leading member of the editorial board
of *Partisan Review*. During the 1950s, this journal was the
premier anti-communist publication in the United States. The leading
intellectual figures who represented opposition to the policies of
Joseph Stalin and the leaders of the Soviet Union in their internal
policies and to the international policies of the Soviet Union wrote
on the nature of Soviet society and policy for this journal. These
figures included such leading writers from Western Europe as George
Orwell, Andre Malreaux, and Ignazio Silone as well as the
American black novelist Richard Wright and such intellectual
luminaries from Eastern Europe as Czeslaw Milosz, Arthur Koestler and
Manes Sperber. As the leading journal within the anti-communist
spectrum, *Partisan Review* was confronted by the moral issue
of McCarthyism. The activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the late
1940s and early 1950s represented a problem for anti-communism in two
dimensions. On the one hand, from the public relations perspective,
McCarthy's inaccuracies and exaggerations provided a sword to
the critics of anti-communism. One quip of the period that represented
this aspect was the thesis of liberal opponents of McCarthy that they
were "anti-anti-communists." More significantly, on
substantive moral grounds, as Hook recognized, it was not tenable for
an intellectual movement that charged Stalinism with framing its
enemies in purges, trials and rehabilitation camps to be complicit
with a movement which would falsely accuse persons of being communist
agents or members of the Communist Party. The result was the decision
by a majority of the editorial board of *Partisan Review*,
including Sidney Hook, to condemn McCarthyism and to lend its support
to the opponents of Senator McCarthy. In terms of the contemporaneous
moral context, it is relevant to note that Professor James Burnham,
who was a colleague of Sidney Hook at the Department of Philosophy at
New York University, disagreed with this position and resigned from
the editorial board of *Partisan Review*. Burnham's
argument was that it was a fallacy of moral equivalence to compare the
enormity of immoral evil carried out by communism in its attack on
democratic institutions with the moral flaws that had taken place
during Senator McCarthy's strategy and tactics of seeking to
uncover Soviet agents who were guilty of espionage in the U.S. State
Department or Government.



The theoretical background of *Heresy, Yes - Conspiracy,
No* was not limited to the analysis of the specific means that a
democratic society could use to protect itself from internal
totalitarian movements without impinging upon legitimate civil
liberties, but involved the general conception of the absolute status
of the right of liberty and the legitimacy of constraints upon
freedom. In a subsequent work titled *The Paradoxes of
Freedom*, Hook confronted the Jeffersonian theme of a right to
liberty as an absolute and inalienable right. As a pragmatist, Hook
argued that moral rights, like legal rights, could not be absolute,
whether grounded in God or Nature. Rather, Hook sought to show how the
language of rights presupposed obligations of other persons to protect
a right and that these obligations to protect the rights of the
individual person were derived from shared human interests in social
life. It followed that although rights for Hook could not be reduced
to utilities, preferences or expressions of emotive attitude, all
rights, including the right to liberty, were defeasible by other
values or interests. Thus, a right to liberty could be overridden by
the need for a society to protect itself. This is evident when a
person's right to liberty is denied and he is imprisoned after
committing a crime. The logic of the defeasibility of absolute rights,
however, would also imply that the right of a citizen to hold a
national security clearance or a job with a nation's
intelligence agency could be limited by reference to the value of
national security. Hook's practical position was buttressed by
his theoretical account of the pragmatic nature of the concept of
liberty. The pragmatic account of liberty, however, was not a
rationalization for Hook's political advocacy. The
interpretation of natural rights as admitting of limitations upon
rights by reference to other values is a constant aspect of the
approach that pragmatism offered to the traditions of absolutism and
imprescriptability on natural or human rights.



Hook's theoretical interest in the issue of cultural freedom was
overshadowed by his involvement in the forum of public policy.
Hook's rejection of Marxism led him to support the value of
political freedom as an essential condition for a democratic society,
whether in capitalist or socialist economic frameworks. The
implication of this theoretical analysis, for Hook, was his support of
the American commitment to political and cultural freedom as opposed
to what he saw as a Soviet or communist commitment against political
freedom in furthering the growth of a totalitarian state. For that
reason, therefore, Hook could be counted as a "Cold
Warrior" in support of the West during the Cold War. It should
be noted that in the political terminology of the period, the
identification of Hook as a Cold Warrior by persons who favored the
use of that term did not mean a supporter of the Western democratic
alliance or what was termed "the free world" against
totalitarianism. Rather, "Cold Warrior" was used
pejoratively to indicate a person who sought to influence American
policy so that it would pursue a containment or adversarial strategy
toward the Soviet Union as a corollary to an ideological and paranoiac
interpretation of the Soviet Union as an aggressive and expansionist
empire. Thus, critics of Cold Warriors and the Cold War saw the Soviet
Union as an alternative, socialist system with which a realistic,
moderate and non-ideological Western policy should pursue
"constructive engagements" toward compromise, cooperation
and mutual respect.



In his support for the idea of cultural freedom, Hook was a founder of
the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. This Committee organized
a number of symposia on issues related to cultural freedom among a
wide intellectual community, including such figures as W.H. Auden and
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Much more significant in political terms was
the extension of this kind of activity to international forums,
particularly in Western Europe. Among Western European intellectuals
in the early 1950s, the issue of their choice among the options of
European neutralism, ideological support for the Soviet Union or
support for the United States was at the center of political debate.
The Congress of Cultural Freedom conference that Hook helped organize
in Paris at that time represented a rallying base for criticism of the
Soviet Union and for support of a philosophy of liberal democracy that
was compatible with the American foreign policy interest. One of the
more remarkable results of the activities of the Congress of Cultural
Freedom was the founding of a number of cultural journals modeled on
*Partisan Review*. These journals included *Encounter*
in England, *Les Preuves* in France and *Der Monat* in
Germany, as well as similar periodicals in India and Australia. The
high cultural standards adopted by these journals led to their
becoming vanguard publications in their own national cultures, so that
their advocacy of the anti-communist message was transcended by their
literary achievement. The continued exposure of the abuses of human
rights and democratic values in the Soviet Union and its satellites
remained a constant theme even as they were in the forefront of
literary and artistic culture and provided independent and open forums
for the discussion of major questions of economic development and
social policy.



Consequently, it was a source of embarrassment when the revelation
broke that the CIA had helped finance the activities of the Congress
of Cultural Freedom and of these publications. Inferentially, Hook
believed that the funding source did not corrupt the integrity of
these publications or taint their legitimacy as forums of critical
inquiry. From the other direction, there was surprise that the CIA was
prepared to fund publications that had been openly critical of many
aspects of American foreign policy and domestic affairs.
Interestingly, the acronym in the bureaucratic files of the CIA that
referred to the funding of this project was "NCL," that
is, the non-communist left. Hook believed that it represented a degree
of prudential wisdom by the United States government to be willing to
support a non-capitalist, anti-communist cultural enterprise that was
not necessarily faithful to the line projected in American foreign
policy, since it had developed a significant body of criticism against
both the theory and the practice of totalitarian communism.



Throughout this period, Hook's political views could be
identified as "democratic socialist."



One significant evidence of the transition of Hook's thought on
economic issues is available in his early encounter with the writings
of Friedrich von Hayek, the economist of the Austrian school which had
developed the thesis that democratic socialism was incoherent from
both economic and political perspectives. Hook wrote a review of
Hayek's *Road to Serfdom* which confirms the shift from
his earlier view on Marxism and socialism. Far from asserting his
earlier thesis that the achievement of political democracy require
socialism or, at any rate, a greater degree of economic democracy in
the form of lessened concentration of economic power in the capitalist
class, Hook advanced the criticism that Hayek's thesis
paralleled in a significant sense the fallacious Marxist thesis of
economic determinism.



Hayek had argued, according to Hook, that socialist societies
represented a state concentration of economic power which had a
potential for totalitarianism that would be actualized over the
long-run. For Hayek, the reverse also held, namely that free-market
societies required the rule of law and constraints upon the exercise
of monopolistic or arbitrary power so that free market economies would
lead to the establishment of democratic institutions, again, over the
long-run.



Hook's counter-thesis was the independence of political
structures and economic systems. According to Hook, authoritarian or
tyrannical regimes have been established in countries in which both
capitalist as well as socialist economic institutions have prevailed.
Similarly, for Hook, there would be no bar to the realization of
democracy in either a society that had free markets or in a society in
which government owned or controlled the economic means of
production.



In the decades since *The Road to Serfdom* was published, there
has been significant evidence regarding the close relationship between
the concentration of economic power and political power, particularly
in many of the developing countries. At the same time, it could be
argued that neither Hayek's thesis nor Hook's
counter-thesis has been definitively proven. The democratic and
socialist states of Western Europe could represent a refutation of
Hayek's thesis. The Hayek rebuttal, however, could point to the
degree in which free markets operate in European societies alongside
the governmental sector. The new phenomenon of one-party political
dictatorships that embrace and encourage free-market economics in the
People's Republic of China or Vietnam would also suggest a
refutation of Hayek's close connection between free societies
and free market economics. The Hayek rebuttal would be that the
necessity for the rule of law as well as for greater freedom of
movement of persons and goods in these developing economies have
already limited to a degree the exercise of totalitarian power and
arbitrary rule. Consequently, the thesis remains that the potential
for change in the direction of liberal and democratic society is built
into the continuing function of free markets even in these
long-standing one-party dictatorial states.



Subsequently, Hook's own views on economics underwent
significant change. To a degree, this reflected his move from New York
University, where he had been a professor of philosophy for four
decades, to the Hoover Institution in California. At the Hoover
Institution, Hook was closely involved with a number of the leading
theoreticians of the economics of free-market societies. Although
there was a shift in Hook's approach to economic theory, the
general change in his views on issues of political philosophy are not
attributable to theoretical economics but to other social, political
and cultural factors in the United States.



The legitimacy of the attribution of Hook as a conservative in his
later views in political philosophy derives from his writings and
activities across the entire gamut of social policy questions. To
Hook's long-standing opposition to the Left on foreign policy
issues that had stemmed from his major commitment to anti-communism,
there was added his stance against major positions of the left wing of
the American political spectrum on domestic issues, particularly after
the self-identified revolutionary activities of the New Left in the
late 1960s.



As a response to campus turmoil of the late 1960s, Hook founded an
organization called University Centers for Rational Alternatives.
Through this organization, Hook aimed to advance his critical
rejection of radical efforts to transform the American university and
educational system. The newsletter of that organization, titled
*Measure*, represented Hook's belief in a balance between
the traditional practices of the American university and the need for
reform based on critical method and rational criticism.



The range of Hook's political writings was extended broadly in
his contributions to *Measure*. The issues that had dominated
Hook's criticism of totalitarianism, as well as his criticism of
aspects of American liberalism through the 1950s had revolved around
the pole of communism versus anti-communism. The emergence of the New
Left in 1968 moved Hook's application of what he believed was
his pragmatic commitment to free inquiry from its previous emphasis on
the reform of institutional practice toward the emphasis, expressed in
*Measure*, on the balance between continuity and change.
Consequently, in the spectrum of political philosophical thought Hook
had moved from the liberal wing, in which the priority had been
identified as the need to critically evaluate the flaws and faults of
American institutional practices in order to reform or transform them,
to the conservative wing, in which the priority was identified as the
need to protect and sustain the strengths and values that were
inherent in American institutional practices. Hook's writings
and positions became linked to American political conservatism on a
range of issues from educational curriculum through affirmative action
to constitutional questions of the limits of executive privilege and
judicial authority.



The issues that were discussed most frequently by Hook in
*Measure* related to American education, which, as previously
noted, had been an enduring focus of his interests from the outset of
his career. Hook's changed approach to education was developed
in his essay, *Philosophy of the Curriculum*, in 1976. In that
essay, Hook sought to formulate the indispensable subject matter for a
curriculum in higher education. While Hook maintained his previous
thesis that the development of critical thinking was crucial to any
valuable educational experience, his formulation of the curricular
subject matter reveals the degree to which the critical method is
intertwined with the learning of appropriate subject matter, whether
in the humanities or the sciences. Further, Hook defended liberal
education as requiring the reading and study of the Western canon even
if such a requirement goes against perceived student needs and the
expression of student preferences, or violates some proposed criterion
of social relevance. Thus, without reneging on his earlier criticism
in *Education for Modern Man* of any educational philosophy
that assumed a fixed human nature, Hook recognized the legitimate role
of a liberal education as the initiation of every human being into the
cultural traditions of his society. Such initiation into a tradition
was compatible with the development of a critical method and approach.
The idea that the classroom was a community of free inquiry remained a
central feature of Hook's philosophy of education. At the same
time, the identification of the classroom as a community of free
inquiry was no longer directed against academic traditionalism in its
curricular implications such as the tradition of reading the greatest
works of the humanities or the classic texts of political and social
thought. Rather, it was directed against the classroom as a community
of faith or a forum for political advocacy. Thus, the growing
curricular practice of "cultural studies" of
"designated groups of victims" represented the
transformation of the classroom into a community of shared substantive
values with a political agenda rather than a community of inquiry with
a shared critical method. To the degree to which multiculturalism did
not represent the study of the languages and texts of other cultures
but represented a species of political commitment to designated
deprived cultural groups, it would entail, for Hook, an unjustified
metamorphosis of the university from a community of free inquiry into
a community of political faith and advocacy.



Educational issues were intertwined with broader issues of American
society. The issue of affirmative action for college admissions, for
example, related to the social issue of the nature of American
democratic pluralism. Hook supported a conception of American
democracy as a society that had been built upon individual rights and
equality before the law, where greater equality was to be realized by
virtue of the fact that the United States was a society of multiple
opportunities with differing patterns for upward mobility. In
contrast, Hook perceived affirmative action, with its corollary of
quotas assigned to designated groups as a conception of American
democracy as a system of group rights, where greater equality was to
be realized by distributive measures. For Hook, rights were ascribed
to the individual and not to individuals as members of majority or
minority groups. Consequently, discrimination on grounds of race was
illegitimate, whether it was designed as an expression of majority
prejudice against a minority or as a benign instrument of
rectificatory justice. Accordingly, for Hook, programs of affirmative
action could be justified if they functioned to help a deprived
individual student overcome deficiencies in his educational background
or to eliminate any bars to opportunity that had been erected by
discriminatory laws or practices. Programs of affirmative action,
however, that resulted in quotas for minority group participation
involved discrimination against the rights of other individuals. Since
each individual was entitled to equality before the law and equality
of rights, no individual was entitled, on grounds of membership in an
historically deprived group or racial or ethnic minority, to
advantages that violate equality of rights and justify discrimination
against other individuals on racial or ethnic ground. While the social
ideal of overcoming economic inequality was legitimate, the means for
its realization could not involve replacing individual rights with
group rights or justifying discrimination against individuals who were
considered equal before the law. Hook took note of the great progress
toward equality that had taken place in American society from the turn
of the century through the 1980s. Hook expressed confidence in the
capacities of a democratic society to overcome inequalities in
economic distribution and in social participation of ethnic minorities
without transforming the legal structure of the American system that
had prevailed through those decades. As a lifelong supporter of John
Dewey, Hook believed that democratic society, if it embodied the
critical method, would be capable of progressive improvement.



In light of this Deweyan optimism, it is significant that Hook took as
the subject of his Presidential Address for the American Philosophical
Association the question of whether pragmatism had an appropriately
"tragic sense of life." Hook sought to counter the charge
that the meliorism and optimism of pragmatism represented a failure to
understand the tragic situation that is an inevitable part of the
human condition. Hook had argued that Deweyan pragmatism did not
represent an excessively optimistic faith in human perfectibility, on
the model of Condorce, and distanced itself from a logically
dialectical faith in the inevitable historical progress along the
lines of Hegel or Marx. Hook and the pragmatic philosophy recognized
that there have been innumerable sites of human failure,
self-destructive action and tragic defeat in history. Hook recognized
the empirical phenomena of historical evil while believing that a
philosophical or theological emphasis upon these phenomena as
representing the essence of mankind or determining with historical
inevitability the end of civilization could be identified as a
"failure of nerve" which went beyond the required
acceptance of the facts about the human condition. Rather,
Hook's thesis in his presidential lecture was that it was
necessary to appreciate those enduring features of the human condition
that rendered utopian thought untenable and incoherent even as they
made possible progress through scientific method and an increase in
human freedom that could occur at any particular time and place.



Accordingly, Hook's conclusion recognized the recurrence of
tragedy throughout human history and throughout the careers of
individuals. Hook argued that this recognition of a tragic sense was
compatible with the humanistic naturalism that Deweyan pragmatism had
fostered. The tragic sense of this pragmatic naturalism did not
require the acceptance of the inevitability of the triumph of fateful
"Necessity" on the model of Greek tragedy or within the
framework of an Ionian metaphysical perspective in which human
achievement is unavoidably dwarfed and overwhelmed by the immense
magnitudes of natural phenomena. Similarly, the tragic sense of
pragmatic naturalism did not require the acceptance of the
inevitability of human self-destruction because of the flawed
constitution of human nature, as in the religious metaphors of
original sin or the Freudian metaphor of the "death
instinct." So pragmatic naturalism could sustain the recognition
of a tragic sense while retaining the Deweyan optimistic realism that
human nature, interacting with the environing processes of Nature,
could survive and develop a free society of free human beings, with
the use of human reason and the methods of the sciences.


## 5. Hook's Place in the History of Pragmatism



According to a narrative that is common in contemporary accounts of
20th Century philosophy in America, pragmatism fell into decline
shortly following World War II. Professional philosophy, it is said,
had become dominated by the pretensions to formalism and precision
that is the mark of the "analytic philosophy" that had
emigrated from the UK. Turning to technical topics in the philosophy
of language, philosophy of mind, and epistemology, American
philosophers abandoned the vision of philosophy as a publicly engaged
practice of social critique that had been championed by Dewey, opting
instead for view of philosophy as a highly specialized and anemically
academic discipline. Pragmatism, this account has it, was
"eclipsed" and "marginalized" by analytic
philosophy. The popular account continues that in the 1980s,
pragmatism was revived in the form of the "neo-pragmatism"
proposed by Richard Rorty, Cornel West, Hilary Putnam, and Stanley
Cavell, among others. However, when this account is presented by
advocates of the tradition of "classical" pragmatism, the
emphasis is placed on the allegation that neo-pragmatism is no true
pragmatism at all, but a counterfeit of the movement begun by Perice,
James, and Dewey. According to those allied with the classical
pragmatists, pragmatism remains in eclipse. Hence there has emerged a
significant "back to Dewey" movement within contemporary
American philosophy, a movement that overtly sets itself in opposition
to mainstream analytic philosophy and seeks to reestablish
pragmatism's predominance.



What is puzzling in all of this is that those invested in the idiom of
classical pragmatism nearly always write Sidney Hook out of
pragmatism's history. Once Hook is acknowledged, one sees the
Deweyan vision of philosophy thriving throughout the period of alleged
marginalization. That is, one finds in Hook not only a high-profile
publicly engaged philosopher employing the methods of experimental
inquiry to present social problems, but also an influential academic
philosopher engaged with the professional debates of his day, and
often making necessary concessions and adjustments to the pragmatist
commitments in light of new objections and evidence. Although
Hook's results do not always reflect "chapter and
verse" Deweyanism, they do retain what is far more important,
namely, the unflagging commitment to the application of experimental
intelligence to the social and political problems of the day.



Several new studies of the history and mid-century development of
pragmatism have appeared recently, including the landmark work of
Cheryl Misak, which does much to dislodge the dominant "eclipse
narrative" and recast pragmatism as continuous with the
mainstream trends within the so-called "analytic"
philosophy of C. I. Lewis, Nelson Goodman, W. V. O. Quine, and Donald
Davidson. Nonetheless, apart from a suggestive but still only
preliminary discussion by Cornel West in his study of American
pragmatism, Sidney Hook's place in the pragmatist story remains
largely unexplored.