December 17, 2001
Embarrassing early books Authors change course: Hook embraced communism, then anti-Stalinism
Jeet Heer National Post During the Reagan presidency, the philosopher Sidney Hook was often celebrated as the venerable sage of anti-communism. Government officials such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, the UN ambassador, and George Shultz, the secretary of state, regularly wrote Hook fan letters, while Reagan conferred the Presidential Medal of Freedom on him in 1985.
Hook never hid the fact that his thinking on communism had undergone a dramatic change, and that as a young man he had befriended Leon Trotsky. But he was uncomfortable enough with his communist past that he did not want people to read one of his best books, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx, which will soon be available for the first time in more than 60 years.
Just as writers of fiction are sometimes embarrassed by their early work, academics often wish the public would forget about their juvenalia. This is especially true if they change their minds about important issues.
In 1933, Hook published his second book, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Marx's death. As the subtitle indicates, Hook wrote the book as a committed supporter of revolutionary socialism, although he had already engaged in a series of disputes with the Communist Party that would ultimately lead him to become one of the leading U.S. anti-Stalinist thinkers. While Hook's book was attacked in the communist press, his original attempt to draw parallels between Marx and the American intellectual tradition of pragmatism earned praise from a wide variety of thinkers ranging from Harold Laski to Trotsky.
Indeed, Trotsky, who was already in exile from the Soviet Union, read Hook's book with interest, filling his copy with scribbled notes and engaging in a public debate with Hook on the meaning of dialectics. Hook found Trotsky more congenial than the purblind and dogmatic American Communist Party, and spent the next three years supporting a variety of Trotskyist parties.
By the late 1930s, largely as a result of the horrors of Stalin's purges, Hook became completely disillusioned with revolutionary politics and abandoned Trotsky as well. He became an anti-communist socialist, exactly the position he had frequently mocked in Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx. As Hook's status as an American anti-communist grew, he understandably wanted to distance himself from his youthful writings. During his lifetime, Hook resisted frequent requests to bring out a new edition.
According to biographer Christopher Phelps, author of Young Sidney Hook (Cornell University Press, 1997), despite this act of self-suppression, Hook's book continued to have an underground existence. In the late 1960s, the International Socialist published a mimeograph, bootlegged reprint of the book. According to Phelps, in the early 1990s, another "guerrilla edition" was released "by some radical with a scanner."
Hooks' book continued to be admired by leftists thinkers as diverse as Noam Chomsky and Russell Jacoby. As Jacoby notes, unlike Hook's later and more polemical work, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx was a genuine original contribution to philosophy. Phelps agrees. "As a full-length work of philosophy, Hook never did anything comparable again," he says.
Now, nearly seven decades after its first publication, Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx will again be available in an over-the-counter edition. Prometheus Books, founded by long-time Hook disciple Paul Kurtz, plans to reissue the book, with a historical introduction by Phelps. Phelps believes the book will help revive Hook's reputation, not only as a Marxist activist but also as a philosopher who made an important contribution to pragmatism. Partially because Hook allowed Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx to fall out of print, his original work in trying to link pragmatism with continental philosophy has been forgotten. Thus in Louis Menand's recent book The Metaphysical Club, a voluminous history of pragmatism, Sidney Hook goes entirely unmentioned, even though he was one John Dewey's favorite students.
Sidney Hook is not the only intellectual who has had to grapple with the issue of an embarrassing early work. In 1986, Michael Allen Fox, a philosopher at Queen's University, published The Case for Animal Experimentation, a book that drew on a variety of moral traditions to argue for maintaining the ethical distinction between humans and animals. Not surprisingly, the book was savaged by animal-rights activists. What was unexpected was the fact that Fox was won over by his hostile reviewers. "The more I read of my critics, the more I came to the conclusion that the difference between humans and animals is of degrees, not kind," Fox now says. "Speciesism is indefensible."
Fox's more recent position is outlined in his book Deep Vegetarianism. Although he disagrees with the arguments in The Case for Animal Experimentation, Fox is still takes pride in his early work. He notes that the book was praised by some reviewers for making an argument that brought together different moral traditions as well as empirically based research.
Would Fox allow The Case for Animal Experimentation to be republished? "I would probably say OK, but with the proviso that I be allowed to write an introduction explaining how my thinking has changed," he says. "If the publisher said 'no new introduction,' I would have a serious quandary. Even then, I would probably say, 'publish it'. I don't support the suppression of research, even in the case of my own work."
David Horowitz, an intellectual who journeyed from the New Left of the 1960s to the neo-conservatism of the 1980s, also has grappled with the problem of an embarrassing early work. In 1965, Horowitz published The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War, one of the first revisionists histories of post-World War II diplomacy. Like other revisionists historians such as William Appleman Williams, Horowitz argued that the primary responsibility for the Cold War rested with the United States, not the Soviet Union. The thesis sparked strong opposition from more orthodox historians.
In 1973, the young historian Robert J. Maddox, now at the University of Pennsylvania, published The New Left and the Cold War, which sought to refute revisionists by making a close empirical scrutiny of the claims made by leading members of the group.
Some of the most stinging words in Maddox's book came in the chapter analyzing Free World Colossus. Horowitz "left scarcely a canon of historical scholarship intact," Maddox complained. "He never used a primary document when a secondary or tertiary source was available, he repeatedly cited the unsupported assertions of others as though they constituted proof for his own assertions, and oftentimes he appeared to have confused his role as author with that of editor." Illustrating the last point, Maddox juxtaposed two lengthy passages of Free World Colossus with virtually identical quotes from Howard K. Smith's The State of Europe (1949).
Looking back at Free World Colossus, Horowitz accepts the "conceptual" critique made by Maddox and other Cold War liberals that the book suffered from a moral double standard by constantly judging the United States more harshly than the Soviet Union. However, Horowitz continues to resist Maddox's accusation of "plagiarism" and "shoddy scholarship." In defending his younger self, Horowitz notes that "I wrote the book when I was 22 or 23. I was not a history major. I gave credit to everyone I cited. I did some paraphrases."
Given his changed politics, how would Horowitz feel about a re-issue of Free World Colossus? Like Fox, he would go along with it, but would try to make sure the publisher allowed him to write a fresh introduction.
===== Kevin Dean Buffalo, NY ICQ: 8616001 http://www.yaysoft.com
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