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Sidney Hook, an Engaging Philosopher
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12471 |
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BOOK WORLD
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7 / 1987 |
3,144 Words |
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Lee Edwards
Lee Edwards is senior editor for the Current Issues section
of THE WORLD & I. His latest book is The Power of Ideas: The
Heritage Foundation at Twenty-five. |
OUT OF STEP
An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century
Sidney Hook
New York: Harper & Row, 1987
606 pp., $29.25
Sidney Hook is the archetypal intellectual of the twentieth century - in love with reason, fiercely independent, devoutly atheistic, opposed to totalitarianism and committed to freedom, pragmatic about means as well as ends, and, above all, convinced that humans have the power to make "the world around us better or worse." He is not an ivory-tower intellectual but a philosopher activist who has, in his tumultuous eighty-four years, been involved in such controversies as the growth of communism during the Great Depression, the Moscow Trials of 1936 and 1937, U.S. entry into World War II, the origins of the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the student revolts of the 1960s.
In his autobiography, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century, Hook recounts his life as a young Jew in Brooklyn who escaped from poverty through education. Hook went on to become chairman of the Department of Philosophy at New York University, author of seminal works on Marx, Hegel, and John Dewey, and one of the most respected intellectuals in America. His book is rich in anecdotes about men and women of ideas and action - Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Whittaker Chambers, Bertolt Brecht, Freda Utley, James Burnham, and Albert Einstein, with all of whom he had various disagreements. Indeed, it may be said of Sidney Hook that he never met a man he didn't argue with; it was his way of arriving at truth. He protests that all he ever wanted was to immerse himself in
... (1990 of 19235 Characters)
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