An Invitation Ruffles Philosophical Feathers

Michael Pugliese debsian at pacbell.net
Sat Jun 29 10:40:25 PDT 2002


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.



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