Sidney Hook, an Intellectual Street Fighter, Reconsidered

By DANNY POSTEL

It would take a mighty large bookcase to contain all of the works on pragmatism published over the last two decades. The brainchild of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and William James (1842-1910) and most fully articulated by John Dewey (1859-1952), pragmatism was America's first homegrown philosophical movement. Its influence has been cast throughout American intellectual life and beyond, winning adherents in Britain, Germany, and elsewhere.

But, until recently, pragmatism seemed