On Tue, 25 Jun 2002 16:37:45 -0400 Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
writes:
> [just back and catching up...]
>
> Chronicle of Higher Education - web daily - June 20, 2002
>
> Neoconservative Scholars Pull Out of Conference After Learning That
> Cornel West Will Attend
> By PIPER FOGG
>
> Several prominent neoconservative scholars and writers have backed
> out of a conference at the Graduate Center of the City University of
>
> New York -- after finding out that Cornel West was among those who
> would be participating. Organizers of the conference, which will
> examine the legacy of a neoconservative hero, Sidney Hook, said the
> scholars objected to Mr. West's presence because they thought he was
>
> "not enough of a scholar" of Hook.
Whatever one might think of West's work as a whole, the fact is he did provide in *The American Evasion of Philosophy* a groundbreaking treatment of the young Sidney Hook's work when he was a Marxist, and West was successful I think in demonstrating its contemporary relevance. In that sense, he helped pave the way for Christopher Phelps' more recent study *Young Sidney Hook* which treats at length, the young Hook's attempt to synthesize a humanist Marxism (which was heavily influenced by Georg Lukacs and Karl Korsch) with a Deweyian pragmatism.
I suspect that this is what is getting the goat of the neocons, who would like to have us all by the judgement that the older Sidney Hook had succeeded in burying Marxism, and that his own youthful Marxism is of interest mainly because he had later turned against it. In fact Hook seems to have been of two minds concerning his Marxist work. On the one hand in his memoir *Out of Step*, he boasted that his book *Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx* had helped to convert students at Oxford and Cambridge to Communism (one wonders about the Cambridge spies). On the other hand, Hook in his will specified that book was never to be reissued (although I have heard that Prometheus Books is ti reissue it in a few years).
>
> "I had never been presented with a list of participants," said
> Hilton
> Kramer, an art critic and editor of The New Criterion who had
> originally agreed to speak at the conference, scheduled for October.
>
> "When I saw that Cornel West was a participant, I decided that it
> wouldn't be appropriate" to attend. He declined to elaborate.
>
> Hook, a philosopher who would have been 100 this year, was a radical
>
> Marxist in his younger days but passionately embraced anticommunism
> later in his life, making him a hero to many neoconservative
> scholars. In 1985, Ronald Reagan awarded Hook the Presidential Medal
>
> of Freedom. He died in 1989.
>
> "The idea, initially, was to collect a slate of intellectuals from
> different disciplines and different backgrounds" for a discussion of
>
> Hook's work, said Robert B. Talisse, an assistant professor at
> Vanderbilt University who is one of the organizers of the
> conference.
>
> The conference organizers had lined up a heavy-hitting group of
> neoconservatives that included John Patrick Diggins, a history
> professor at the CUNY Graduate Center; Mr. Kramer; Irving Kristol, a
>
> senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute; and Gertrude
> Himmelfarb, a professor emerita of history at the CUNY Graduate
> Center. Liberal scholars were also set to attend, among them
> Christopher Phelps, an assistant professor of history at Ohio State
> University at Mansfield; Richard Rorty, a philosophy professor at
> Stanford University; and Robert B. Westbrook, an intellectual
> historian at the University of Rochester.
>
> Mr. Diggins, Ms. Himmelfarb, and Mr. Kristol are among those joining
>
> Mr. Kramer in boycotting the event, conference organizers said. Mr.
> Diggins, who is in France, was not available for comment. Mr.
> Kristol
> and Ms. Himmelfarb declined to comment.
>
> Mr. West was not originally on the program. But in March, after Mr.
> Rorty dropped out, the organizers looked for a prominent
> replacement.
> They chose Mr. West, a philosopher whose writing on race has made
> him
> a nationally known figure. Mr. West has been in the news recently,
> after he decided to leave Harvard University for Princeton
> University, after a public falling-out with Harvard's president,
> Lawrence H. Summers. (See an article from The Chronicle, April 15.)
>
> But conference organizers said they selected Mr. West because of his
>
> scholarly work in philosophy, Hook's field. Mr. West is the author
> of
> The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism
> (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), which contains a substantial
> discussion of Hook's work. Mr. West is also the editor of
> Post-Analytic Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 1985).
>
> When Mr. Diggins found out about Mr. West's participation, said
> conference organizers, he threatened to pull out and take others
> with
> him if they didn't rescind the invitation to Mr. West.
>
> Matthew Cotter, a history graduate student at CUNY and one of the
> conference organizers, said he learned in March that Mr. West had
> agreed to come, but waited six weeks before telling Mr. Diggins, who
>
> was his academic adviser last year. Mr. Cotter said he wanted to
> make
> sure that Mr. West was definitely coming. "When I broke the news to
> Jack, he was quite furious," he said. "He questioned Cornel West's
> scholarship. ... He felt he'd been duped."
>
> Mr. Cotter called the tactics of those who pulled out of the
> conference "dogmatic." "They seem to be the same tactics Sidney Hook
>
> spent his entire intellectual career challenging," he said.
Well I don't know about that. Hook after during the McCarthy era, wrote a pamplet *Heresy Yes, Conspiracy No* which defended the rights of universities and school boards to questions concerning whether they were member of the CPUSA, and to expel those who were members. I am not at all sure that the older Hook would have disapproved of the tactics of his neocon friends.
>
> Mr. Phelps agreed. "It's not clear to me how it serves to pull the
> plug on a conference just because you disagree with a given
> participant's point of view," he said.
>
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