Sidney Hook 1902 – 1989

Sidney Hook was an American philosopher, long-time professor at New York University, and one of the most prominent American public intellectuals of the twentieth century. A pupil of John Dewey, he produced his Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx in 1933, the first serious American philosophical study of Marx, and remained throughout his career a defender of an experimental, democratic, and anti-Stalinist socialism that gradually moved him toward Cold War liberalism. His The Hero in History, Heresy, Yes, Conspiracy, No, and the late memoir Out of Step shaped American debates on political agency, civil liberties, and the role of the philosopher in public life.

Sidney Hook was born in Brooklyn in December 1902 to Austrian Jewish immigrants. He took his bachelor's at the City College of New York in 1923 under Morris Cohen and his doctorate at Columbia in 1927 under John Dewey, with a dissertation on the metaphysics of Karl Marx. He joined the philosophy department at New York University in 1927 and was its chair from 1948 to 1969; in retirement he was a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

His books include The Metaphysics of Pragmatism (1927), Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (1933), From Hegel to Marx (1936), John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait (1939), The Hero in History (1943), Education for Modern Man (1946), Heresy, Yes — Conspiracy, No (1953), The Quest for Being (1961), Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life (1974), and the memoir Out of Step (1987).

Hook was the foremost American philosophical Marxist of the 1930s, the leading interpreter of Dewey's pragmatic naturalism for two further decades, and after his break with the Communist Party an unrelenting Cold War liberal and a co-founder of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He defended secular humanism, democratic socialism in his early years and democratic anti-communism later, and civil liberties even for those whose ideas he detested. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985 and died at Stanford, California, in July 1989.