Rising Gorge

By Stefan Kanfer

PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC POLICY by Sidney Hook

Southern Illinois University

288 pages; $17.50

In his seminars at New York University, Professor Sidney Hook often asked students to define Bertrand Russell's beliefs. But no one could trap the gadfly who advocated the nuclear destruction of the U.S.S.R., the condemnation of U.S. imperialism, the adoption of idealism, rationalism or realism. Concluded the professor: "Next time anyone asks you, 'What is Bertrand Russell's philosophy?,' the correct answer is, 'What year, please?' "

When future seminars address themselves to Sidney Hook's work, the correct response will require only one word change: Any year, please. As these 21 feisty essays demonstrate, over the past four decades the teacher-philosopher has seen no reason to alter his course. He did not need Alexander Solzhenitsyn to inform him of the Gulag; back in the '30s Hook condemned the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, nations whose politics employed "vicious ersatz theologies." The Supreme Court's pendulum decisions on criminal justice have found Hook unchanged; he has long advocated the rights of the victim: "When we read that a man whose speeding car had been stopped by a motorcycle policeman, who without a search warrant forced him to open his trunk that contained ... corpses ... walks out of court scot-free because the evidence is ruled inadmissible--we can only conclude that the law is an ass."

Save for an early immersion in Marxism, Hook, 77, has found his place outside of movements or situation ethics. For this perversity he has been attacked by Communists, religious dogmatists, reactionaries and the '60s New Left, who charged conspiracy when Richard Nixon ordered reprints of a Hook article decrying campus violence. "You cannot bar other people from agreeing with you," concluded the author, and went on attacking blighted authority wherever he found it--including the White House.

In fact, hypocrisy and its concomitant, special pleading, have always been Hook's true betes noires: "The impassioned groups that shout in our courtrooms today 'All power to the people' are unaware that they are calling for mob rule of which many of their forebears were victims." Of reverse discrimination, Hook demands: "Would it be reasonable to contend that women should have been compensated for past discrimination against their maternal forebears by being given an extra vote or two ... ?" Nor is he indulgent to political philosophers--"those of us who are concerned with current issues ... we need only refer to Santayana's apologias for Mussolini and Stalin, Heidegger's support of Hitler, Sartre's refusal to condemn the concentration-camp economy of the Soviet Union."

These exemplars have not caused the author to mute his own polemic. He was, after all, a student and friend of Philosopher John Dewey, and the disciple adheres to the master's dictum: human freedoms can be extended only by the arts of intelligence. In Philosophy and Public Policy, that intelligence oscillates between civility and perversity. "The Hero in History" summarizes his brilliant division of the "event-making" men who redirect history (Lenin, Peter the Great) and "eventful" men (Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman) who are overtaken by circumstance. Yet his call for a corrective to the country's present antiheroic mood is simply an "intelligent political participation on the part of citizens"--a phrase indistinguishable from November editorials in small-town newspapers. His attack on Lillian Hellman, whom he calls "The Scoundrel in the Looking Glass," exhumes old records to catch the autobiographer in a variety of duplicities and concealments. Hook concludes that "the manner in which [she] refers to ... anti-Communist liberals shows that what she cannot forgive them for is not so much their alleged failure to criticize [Joseph] McCarthy but ... their criticism of the crimes of Stalin and his successors during the forty years in which she apologized for them." When Novelist Mary McCarthy made equally hostile remarks about Hellman on the Dick Cavett Show, a lawsuit followed. Hellman is unlikely to take Hook to court; his evidence is clear, weighty and damning. But even here, he insists on a scorched-earth policy. The fumbling, revisionist introduction to Hellman's Scoundrel Time, by Garry Wills, "has unconsciously reconstructed the Kremlin's propaganda line. The only omission is the failure to charge the U.S. with the guilt of conducting germ war are in North Korea." Disingenuousness requires analysis, not overkill.

Still, Hook is at his keenest at war with ideas or with historians. Arnold Toynbee's pious but inexact theories, T.S. Eliot's elitist culture of the future, Alger Hiss's claim of innocence -- these are the stuff of enduring debate, and even when his case is exaggerated, Hook never fails to stimulate or enlighten. He is less successful when he praises. John Dewey's writings are described in dust-jacket prose: "chock-full of fruitful insights" and at times he can sound like Kahlil Gibran: "Democracy is like love in this: It cannot be brought to life in others by command." It is fortunate for author and reader that benignity is a minor component of this collection. The central theses of Philosophy and Public Policy prove that throughout a career of combat, Sidney Hook's hackles and gorge have always risen to the occasion. Those who shrink from confrontation should stay clear of such reactive power. Only thinkers need apply. For them, as Alfred North Whitehead observed, "a clash of doctrines is not a disaster. It is an opportunity."

--Stefan Kanfer

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