Three cheers for Christopher Phelps! - -- Yoshie
http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue25/drucke25.htm http://www.workersliberty.org/wlmags/wl53/reviews.htm The New York Review of Books: Theodore H. Draper (brother of Hal) ... Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 by André Liebich April 9, 1998: Sidney Hook's Revolution Young Sidney Hook by Christopher Phelps December 4, 1997: ... www.nybooks.com/authors/6562 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=881 http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/catalog/data/023109/023109664X.HTM http://www.igc.org/solidarity/phelps68.txt Towards the Understanding of Sidney Hook:
The Recovery of Marxism
by Christopher Phelps
THIS ARTICLE IS adapted from the forthcoming book
"Young Sidney Hook" by Christopher Phelps, to be
published by Cornell University Press in Fall
1997. Copyright c1997 by Cornell University.
Used by permission of the publisher.
Ten years ago, Alan Wald's widely reviewed "The
New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of
the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the
1980s" (1987) reignited discussion of the American
Marxist intellectual tradition in a revolutionary
socialist and anti-Stalinist vein. The ATC
editorial board believes the impending 1997
publication of Christopher Phelps' "Young Sidney
Hook" will be an important advance in that
discussion.
In this selection from "Young Sidney Hook", Phelps
recounts the publication and importance of Hook's
"Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx" (1933), a
brilliant work of Marxist philosophy which the
later Hook, as an ardent Cold Warrior, never
allowed to be republished. Phelps also explains
how Hook broke with the Communist Party, embarking
on a fruitful five-year period as an independent
Marxist.
Prior to this excerpt, Phelps tells of Hook's
childhood in New York's immigrant slums, explains
the genesis of his revolutionary politics in
militant high school opposition to the First World
War, outlines his conversion to pragmatism under
the influence of his teacher John Dewey, sketches
his visits to Germany and the Soviet Union to
research Marx and Hegel, and clarifies his
proximity to the Communist Party, including public
support for the Communist ticket in
the 1932 presidential campaign.
We believe that "Young Sidney Hook" will make an
important contribution to current discussions of
socialism and democracy and testifies to the
undiminished potential for a historical
materialist approach to intellectual history. Its
most controversial aspect, however, is likely to
be its fresh perspective on American pragmatism.
Pragmatism, which maintains that the value and
veracity of ideas is best determined by their
consequences in practical experience, is currently
experiencing a renaissance in philosophy,
literature, politics, legal theory, and feminism.
Traditionally Marxism and pragmatism have been
seen as antithetical: Marxists have viewed
pragmatists as opportunists, pragmatists have
viewed Marxists as dogmatists. The leading
contemporary pragmatist, Richard Rorty, advocates
"postmodern bourgeois liberalism" and is deeply
influenced by the skepticism of the linguistic
turn.
Phelps reminds us of a very different moment in
the history of pragmatism: the young Sidney Hook,
who viewed Marxism and pragmatism as mutually
historical, naturalist, democratic, and
experimental in method.
Christopher Phelps, an editor of "Against the
Current", is Visiting Assistant Professor of
History at the University of Oregon.
============================================================
AS HIS CONFLICTS with the dominant forces within the Communist movement mounted, Sidney Hook put the finishing touches on "Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation" (1933), a masterful examination that even today remains one of the most compelling guides to Marx's thought. The book took germinal form in some of Hook's writings and talks of the late 1920s. It was, in finished form, his greatest accomplishment of the early 1930s.
The book's release, timed to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Marx's death, coincided with the "bank holiday" declared by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in March 1933, a date which seemed to mark the nadir of capitalism's basic financial institutions.
The premise of "Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx was that Marxism" is not an armchair philosophy of retrospection, but a philosophy of social action; more specifically, a theory of social revolution." [1] Since Marx's death, that understanding, Hook argued, had been buried beneath an accumulation of interpretations to the contrary. The first and most powerful half of "Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx" was devoted, hence, not to explicating Marx but to a critical history of his interpreters.
The eclipse of the active element in Marxist theory was due, Hook held, mainly to the rise of reformist Social Democracy in nineteenth-century Germany, a phenomenon which he explained by historical factors: Economically, Germany rose to imperialist stature, permitting state insurance and rising wages for skilled workers, and encouraging nationalism and conservative trade unionism; politically, the combined influence of Bismarckian repression and subsequent liberalization caused timidity among leading socialists, a penchant for restrained language and a desire to maintain electoral respectability. <snip> M.P.