From the issue dated July 12, 2002
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Left Hook, Right Hook: the Rules of EngagementBy CHRISTOPHER PHELPSIt is August, a brilliant, sunny California morning. I am seated at a table reading correspondence from the Marxist years of the pragmatist philosopher Sidney Hook. My surroundings, incongruous given the folders of revolutionary socialist meditations spread before me, are the quarters of the Hoover Institution archives at Stanford University. Named after the Republican president, the institution is a top conservative think tank. Hook held a fellowship there for the last 15 years of his life. Its archives hold 185 boxes of his papers, immaculately organized. Born to immigrants in Brooklyn, Hook was a scrappy radical from an early age. A high-school Socialist, he adopted Communist sympathies in the 1920s and early 1930s before courageously opposing authoritarianism in the Communist movement at a time when most radicals looked upon the Soviet Union uncritically. For five or six years, he preserved his revolutionary Marxism as an anti-Stalinist radical, writing his two best books, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (1933) and From Hegel to Marx (1936). Just before World War II, Hook began to expound an increasingly hardened anti-Communist liberalism, and by the time of the cold war, he was famous for his unending stream of writings against Communism. Immersed in Hook's letters, I experience a historian's daydream. Trotsky is alive in Mexico. The Spanish Civil War is raging, the Moscow purges are wiping out the Old Bolsheviks, and sit-down strikes are sweeping the United States. I am brought back abruptly into the present by a bustle of student workers in front of me. The Hoover building that houses the archives features a wall of glass that looks out onto a large courtyard. Today, the courtyard is being transformed into a luncheon site. Elegant china and silverware are laid out. I return to my work, and I drift away again, borne by obscure eddies of socialisms past. Finishing a file, I glance up. There, not 15 feet away from me, sits a familiar figure, conversing happily. Poof! If you ever want to dispel a radical reverie, few apparitions are better suited for the job than Newt Gingrich. That episode, which actually took place last summer, conveys the vast divergence between Hook's youthful politics and his final surroundings. It helps to suggest the history behind the Hook controversy that has erupted over the past few weeks. I refer, of course, to the withdrawal of the historians John Patrick Diggins and Gertrude Himmelfarb, the essayist Irving Kristol, and the art critic Hilton Kramer from a conference to be held in October at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York in commemoration of what would have been Hook's 100th birthday. The bone of contention is the participation of the black-studies scholar Cornel West, who the neoconservatives reportedly said was not enough of a scholar. Diggins later said he had changed his mind, will attend, and will encourage the others to do so. Perhaps the conference will come off as planned, after all. It would be very welcome, indeed, should that come to pass. I had planned to attend the conference and was elated when West agreed to participate. Naively, I had assumed that all involved would share my enthusiasm for West's presence. One of the most recognized American intellectuals today, a left-wing thinker in high demand, West draws big audiences. He has written fondly of Hook in several places, including The American Evasion of Philosophy (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), which contains an engaging passage on Hook's neglected 1960 essay, "Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life." Mix neoconservatives with liberals and radicals, and the conference might prove to be just as peppery as Hook. All the political positions that Hook occupied or approximated, from left to right, would be represented. There would be a possibility of creative debate and dialogue. Hook once told his son that his real pleasure came from "a good fight." That we might provide. It would have to be a fair fight, though. In a notable 1954 essay, "The Ethics of Controversy," Hook laid out 10 principles. "Nothing and no one is immune from criticism," he wrote. "Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments." The clincher: "The cardinal sin, when we are looking for truth of fact or wisdom of policy, is refusal to discuss, or action which blocks discussion." These points derived from pragmatism's conviction that knowledge and inquiry require democracy. Hook admitted that they were platitudes. He himself did not always live up to them. Like other such rules of thumb, however, they have value as general guides for action. To my mind, they apply directly to the question of how to comport oneself when a conference includes participants one finds objectionable. Hook's maxims dictate engagement and dialogue, not abandonment of the field. Even more apposite is the story of Hook and the Waldorf-Astoria conference. In the spring of 1949, a call was issued for a Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the luxurious Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Sponsors included the physicist Albert Einstein, the playwright Arthur Miller, the novelist Thomas Mann, the sociologist Robert Lynd, and the philosopher Rudolf Carnap. Speakers included the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich. The conference was one of the last gasps of the Popular Front, the alliance of liberals and Communists forged in the 1930s. Despite a temporary interruption during the Stalin-Hitler Pact, the Popular Front was revived during the Second World War and lingered in the ill-fated Henry Wallace presidential campaign of 1948. By the mid-1950s, it would shatter under McCarthyism and the cold war. To the anti-Stalinist left, the Waldorf conference looked like a collusion of Stalinism with fellow-traveling liberals. Hook proposed to the program committee that he deliver a paper arguing that in science there are no national truths, no class truths, and no party truths -- a challenge, he believed, to Stalinist dogmatism. Two members of the program committee wrote to Hook that they thought it should be accepted. It was rejected. Did Hook, so snubbed, boycott the conference? On the contrary, he organized Americans for Intellectual Freedom (AIF), which rented a suite of rooms at the Waldorf, issued press releases critical of Soviet suppressions, and held an alternative panel at another location where a range of excluded views were expressed on culture and freedom. Set against this bold record, the neoconservatives' actions at CUNY look like a "New Failure of Nerve," to borrow the title of a famous Hook article in Partisan Review. Not only were they invited, unlike Hook in 1949, but they had been given the most prominent spotlight, a Friday evening roundtable. By Hook tradition, they had no cause to walk out. Still, it would be a mistake to imply that Hook's commitment to rational debate provides a pristine contrast to the neoconservatives' behavior. Politically, Hook overlapped with the neoconservatives. He outdid them in anti-Communism, was equally repulsed by 1960s radicals, and stood on the right in the culture wars of the 1980s. He called himself a social democrat to the end, but he was the sort of social democrat who voted for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. It is not hard to see why neoconservatives revere Hook, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Reagan in 1985. Frances Stonor Saunders's The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New Press, 2000) alleges that the suite held by Hook at the Waldorf was subsidized by funds funneled through a trade union by the Central Intelligence Agency. Hook's anti-Stalinism was unimpeachable. But his independence was, in retrospect, severely compromised by secret governmental bankrolling of the anti-Communist intellectual activities in which he took part. The record is murky about what, precisely, Hook knew and when he knew it. What can be said is that Hook had moved from his anti-Stalinist Marxism of the 1930s, rooted in working-class organizing and international solidarity, to increasingly uncritical support of the United States in the cold war. The AIF was far more vocal about Soviet infringements of cultural freedom than it was in condemning State Department denials of visas to left-wing European intellectuals seeking to attend the Waldorf gathering. Behind the scenes at the Waldorf, Hook did not always acquit himself well. He was scornful of the novelist Mary McCarthy and the literary journalist Dwight Macdonald when they and other anti-Stalinists sought to obtain conference passes, believing the request would not be granted. When it was, he hysterically advised them to carry umbrellas and chain themselves to their chairs so that they could not be easily removed from the hall. That proved needless. McCarthy and Macdonald were able to ask pointed questions about the treatment of Soviet writers, without incident. They even attended a cocktail party thrown by Communists that evening. Macdonald wrote wistfully that it reminded him of Trotskyist gatherings 10 years before: "no showmanship, no fun, no dash -- all very dutiful and worthy and abstract." Macdonald was more alienated by the American Legion know-nothings clamoring in protest outside the Waldorf than by the Stalinists. The Stalinists, at least, had read the same books, cared for the Jews, the blacks, and the "underdogs" in general. They were separated from the anti-Stalinist left only by one formidable stumbling block: their emotional and psychological dependence on the Soviet Union. Hook, gripped by an obsessive anti-Communism, was incapable of so poignantly recognizing the humanity of the opposing side. After his paper was refused, Hook never attended any of the Waldorf sessions. In the 1950s, he spoke loudly of academic freedom while calling for the removal of all teachers identified as Communist Party members. Perhaps the neoconservatives, in their fit of pique directed at the left, were close to one side of Hook, after all. After withering criticism of their boycott, however, maybe they can be persuaded to return to the fray. Irving Kristol once defined a neoconservative as a liberal who got mugged by reality. What happens when neoconservatives get mugged by reality? Let's hope they debate. Christopher Phelps, an assistant professor of history at Ohio State University at Mansfield, is the author of Young Sidney Hook (Cornell University Press, 1997). http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B13
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Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education