Sidney Hook

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Person.png Sidney Hook   Powerbase Sourcewatch SpartacusRdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
(philosopher)
Sidney Hook.jpg
BornDecember 20, 1902
New York
DiedJuly 12, 1989 (Age 86)
Stanford, California
EthnicityJewish
Alma materCity College, Columbia University
Member ofCommittee for the Free World, PRODEMCA
Interests • education
• politics
• ethics
PartySocial Democrats USA
American philosopher and anti-communist activist.

Employment.png Fellow

In office
1973 - 1989
EmployerHoover Institution

Employment.png Professor of philosophy

In office
1926 - 1972
EmployerNew York University
From 1948 head of the department

Sidney Hook was an American philosopher and anti-communist activist.

Background

He was born in New York City to Austrian Jewish immigrants, graduated from City College (B.S., 1923), gained a Ph.D. Columbia University in 1927. He taught at New York University (1927–72) and was head of its philosophy department two decades for over two decades.(1948–69). Originally a Marxist, Hook later became disenchanted with Marxism and became active in anti-Communist causes. On his retirement he become senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University (1973-89).

On Academic Freedom

The University Centers for Rational Alternatives (UCRA) was set up in 1968 by Sidney Hook, Miro Todorovich and others in response to the rise of student radicalism in the late 1960s.[1] UCRA argued that the student radicalism of the late 1960s represented a new 'Mcarthyism of the left'.[2] The group continued to exist into the 1990s even after Hook died in 1989, receiving funds between at least 1988 and 1994 from two of the most important conservative foundations (John M. Olin Foundation and The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.[3])

Hook himself wrote widely on the issue of academic freedom including his Academic Freedom and Academic Anarchy, published in 1969.[4] He returned to the topic regularly as well as writing extensively on threats to 'democratic practice' and the 'free society'.[5][6]

Hook defended the notion of academic freedom in its specific context. For him the 'mission' of the university was defined 'in terms of the pursuit of intellectual ends - discovery, clarification, criticism, aimed at reaching the various modes of truth.'[7] The search for truth is, writes Hook, the 'traditional objective of scholarship'.[7] 'In my view of academic freedom', wrote Hook 'any qualified teacher has the freedom to say or write or advocate' a contrary view about the University, 'but if he were to act on it and subordinate his teaching and research not to the controls of scholarship and evidence, he would be in violation of the duties and responsibilities of academic freedom'.[8] In such circumstances the offender 'should be held to account by their faculty peers'.[8]

This view was most forcefully expressed in the title of his 1953 book for the American Committee for Cultural Freedom: Heresy, Yes. Conspiracy, No. It can be argued that, although Hook was a critic of some aspects of McCarthyism, that this is a recipe for a McCarthyite witch-hunt of dissent. Ellen Schrecker, for example writes that 'cold war liberals like Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who deplored the excesses of the crusade but supported its underlying goals.'[9] This groups writing, claims Schrecker, 'constituted the McCarthy era's most authoritative intellectual justification for invoking sanctions against Communists and their allies'.[9]

Along with rights went responsibilities he noted. 'The faculty which extends its protection to its members who exercise their right to academic freedom must also be prepared to discipline those who violate the duties and responsibilities of academic freedom'.[10]

Hook argued that students must be made 'aware of the existence of conflicting claims; they must hear the other side; they must hear the criticism of the nonsense about the Nazification of American culture by the apologists for Gorbachev, Castro and Ortega, and their similars'.[11] This approach which valorises the empirical testing of claims is unexceptional, though it is perhaps not clear that Hook's description of the opposition is accurate. Nor is it easy to take seriously the implied claim that his own description of the two sides of the debate is somehow 'balanced'.

Hook's views on academic freedom were, of course, strongly contested by other academics. Thus for example, back in 1970, the chair of the philosophy department at Colorado, Berel Lang, noted that:

In his summer visits to the University, where he warms the ghost of the Cold War at an Institute which seems to have no other purpose, Hook has aligned himself with a group of men and a current of opinion which would willingly bring the University to the end of the Lehr- and Lernfreiheit which he piously extolls. So far as Colorado is concerned, he (and they) are much more immediately a danger than the SDS in its wildest dreams hoped to be.[12]

Anti-communist activism

In 1939 Hook set up the Committee for Cultural Freedom

to protest 'totalitarian' - meaning communist as well as fascist - 'acts of cultural dictatorship'.[13]

The Committee was supported by non-communist left periodicals such as the Partisan Review and Sol Levitas's New Leader.[14]

In 1951, Hook would go on to become chairman of the similarly named American Committee for Cultural Freedom, a national section of the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom.

 

Event Participated in

EventStartEndDescription
Congress for Cultural Freedom/Founding Conference26 June 195029 June 1950Founded the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The participants had a "a culpable incuriosity about funding" of the luxurious conference, which was later exposed as CIA money.
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References

  1. ↑ UNIVERSITY CENTERS FOR RATIONAL ALTERNATIVES INC, New York Times, 17-January-1972, Page 30; Column 3,
  2. ↑ cited in Noam Chomsky, In Defense of the Student Movement, Chomsky.net, 1971, Accessed 27-February-2010
  3. ↑ Recipient Grants, University Centers for Rational Alternatives, Media Transparency, Accessed 27-February-2010
  4. ↑ Hook, Sidney (1969) Academic Freedom and Academic Anarchy, New York: Cowles Book Company.
  5. ↑ Sidney Hook 1973 Education and the Taming of Power, La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company.
  6. ↑ Hook, S. (1986) ‘The principles and problems of academic freedom’, Contemporary Education, 58(1), Fall:6-12.
  7. ↑ a b Hook, S. (1986) ‘The principles and problems of academic freedom’, Contemporary Education, 58(1), Fall:6-12. Republished in Sidney Hook on Pragmatism, Democracy and Freedom: The Essential Essays, Edited by Robert B. Talisse and Robert Tempio, Amherst: New York: Prometheus Books, 2002, p. 409.
  8. ↑ a b Hook, S. (1986) ‘The principles and problems of academic freedom’, Contemporary Education, 58(1), Fall:6-12. Republished in Sidney Hook on Pragmatism, Democracy and Freedom: The Essential Essays, Edited by Robert B. Talisse and Robert Tempio, Amherst: New York: Prometheus Books, 2002, p. 410.
  9. ↑ a b Schrecker, Ellen (2002). The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents, Second Edition. Bedford , St. Martin's. p. 262.
  10. ↑ Hook, S. (1986) ‘The principles and problems of academic freedom’, Contemporary Education, 58(1), Fall:6-12. Republished in Sidney Hook on Pragmatism, Democracy and Freedom: The Essential Essays, Edited by Robert B. Talisse and Robert Tempio, Amherst: New York: Prometheus Books, 2002, p. 407.
  11. ↑ Emphasis in original: Hook, S. (1986) ‘The principles and problems of academic freedom’, Contemporary Education, 58(1), Fall:6-12. Republished in Sidney Hook on Pragmatism, Democracy and Freedom: The Essential Essays, Edited by Robert B. Talisse and Robert Tempio, Amherst: New York: Prometheus Books, 2002, p. 412-3.
  12. ↑ Berel Lang, Exchange on Sidney Hook, New York Review of Books, MAY 7, 1970
  13. ↑ The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? by Hugh Wilford, Frank Cass, 2003, p9.
  14. ↑ The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? by Hugh Wilford, Frank Cass, 2003, p125.
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