Sidney Hook

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In 1926, Hook became a professor of philosophy at New York University and was head of the Department of Philosophy from 1948 to 1969. He retired from the University in 1972.

In 1931, Hook began teaching at the New School for Social Research through 1936, after which he taught night school there until the 1960s. By 1933, Hook and New School colleague Horace M. Kallen were serving also on the ACLU's academic freedom committee.

At the beginning of his career, Hook was a prominent expert on Karl Marx's philosophy and was himself a Marxist. He attended the lectures of Karl Korsch in Berlin in 1928 and conducted research at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow in the summer of 1929. At first, he wrote enthusiastically about the Soviet Union, and, in 1932, supported the Communist Party's candidate, William Z. Foster, when he ran for President of the United States. However, Hook broke completely with the Comintern in 1933, holding its policies responsible for the triumph of Nazism in Germany. He accused Joseph Stalin of putting "the needs of the Russian state" over the needs of the international revolution.

However, Hook remained active in some of the causes of the Marxist left during the Great Depression. In 1933, with James Burnham, Hook was one of the organizers of the American Workers Party, led by the Dutch-born pacifist minister A.J. Muste. Hook also debated the meaning of Marxism with radical Max Eastman in a series of public exchanges. Eastman, like Hook, had studied under John Dewey at Columbia University. In the late 1930s, Hook assisted Leon Trotsky in his efforts to clear his name in a special Commission of Inquiry headed by Dewey, which investigated charges made against Trotsky during the Moscow Trials.

The Great Purge encouraged Hook's increasing ambivalence toward Marxism. In 1939, Hook formed the Committee for Cultural Freedom, a short-lived organization that set the stage for his postwar politics by opposing "totalitarianism" on the left and right. By the Cold War, Hook had become a prominent anti-Communist, although he continued to consider himself both a democratic socialist and a secular humanist throughout his life. He was, therefore, an anti-Communist socialist. In 1973, he was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Hook helped found Americans for Intellectual Freedom, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), and the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. These bodies—of which the CCF was most central—were funded in part by the Central Intelligence Agency through a variety of fronts and sought to dissuade American leftists from continuing to advocate cooperation with the Soviet Union as some had previously. Hook later wrote in his memoirs that he, "like almost everyone else," had heard that "the CIA was making some contribution to the financing of the Congress."

On February 6, 1953, Hook discussed "The Threat to Academic Freedom" with Victor Riesel and others in the evening on WEVD radio (a Socialist radio station whose call letters referred to SPA founder Eugene V. Debs). In May 1953, the John Day Company published Heresy, Yes–Conspiracy, No, a 283-page book expanded from a 1952 pamphlet (Heresy, Yes–Conspiracy, No!), itself expanded from a 1950 New York Times article called "Heresy, Yes–But Conspiracy, No."

In the 1960s, Hook was a frequent critic of the New Left. He was opposed to a unilateral withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Vietnam War and defended California Governor Ronald Reagan's removal of Angela Davis from her professorship at UCLA because of her leadership role in the Communist Party USA.

Hook was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965 and ended his career in the 1970s and 1980s as a fellow of the conservative Hoover Institution in Stanford, California.

The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Hook for the 1984 Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Hook's lecture was entitled "Education in Defense of a Free Society."

Hook was a lifelong agnostic.

He married Carrie Katz in 1924, with whom he had one son. The couple separated in 1933. Katz had studied at the Rand School in the early 1920s. There, she studied under Scott Nearing and came to write a chapter in his book The Law of Social Revolution entitled "The Russian Revolution of 1917" (1926). Friends from the Rand School included Nerma Berman Oggins, wife of Cy Oggins. She was a Communist Party member who was a "Fosterite" (i.e., she supported William Z. Foster amidst Party factionalism in the last 1920s). She went on to work at the Labor Defense Council. In 1935, Hook married Ann Zinken, with whom he had two children.

Hook died age 86 on July 12, 1989, in Stanford, California.

Source

• 1984: In Praise of Reason Award from the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). awarded by CSICOP Chairman Paul Kurtz
• 1985: Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Ronald Reagan (May 23, 1985)