Chronicles of Higher Education, July 12, 2002 Left Hook, Right Hook: the Rules of Engagement
By CHRISTOPHER PHELPS It is August, a brilliant, sunny California morning. I am seated at a table reading correspondence from the Marxist years of the pragmatist philosopher Sidney Hook. My surroundings, incongruous given the folders of revolutionary socialist meditations spread before me, are the quarters of the Hoover Institution archives at Stanford University. Named after the Republican president, the institution is a top conservative think tank. Hook held a fellowship there for the last 15 years of his life. Its archives hold 185 boxes of his papers, immaculately organized. Born to immigrants in Brooklyn, Hook was a scrappy radical from an early age. A high-school Socialist, he adopted Communist sympathies in the 1920s and early 1930s before courageously opposing authoritarianism in the Communist movement at a time when most radicals looked upon the Soviet Union uncritically. For five or six years, he preserved his revolutionary Marxism as an anti-Stalinist radical, writing his two best books, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx (1933) and From Hegel to Marx (1936). Just before World War II, Hook began to expound an increasingly hardened anti-Communist liberalism, and by the time of the cold war, he was famous for his unending stream of writings against Communism. Immersed in Hook's letters, I experience a historian's daydream. Trotsky is alive in Mexico. The Spanish Civil War is raging, the Moscow purges are wiping out the Old Bolsheviks, and sit-down strikes are sweeping the United States. I am brought back abruptly into the present by a bustle of student workers in front of me. The Hoover building that houses the archives features a wall of glass that looks out onto a large courtyard. Today, the courtyard is being transformed into a luncheon site. Elegant china and silverware are laid out. I return to my work, and I drift away again, borne by obscure eddies of socialisms past. Finishing a file, I glance up. There, not 15 feet away from me, sits a familiar figure, conversing happily. Poof! If you ever want to dispel a radical reverie, few apparitions are better suited for the job than Newt Gingrich. That episode, which actually took place last summer, conveys the vast divergence between Hook's youthful politics and his final surroundings. It helps to suggest the history behind the Hook controversy that has erupted over the past few weeks. I refer, of course, to the withdrawal of the historians John Patrick Diggins and Gertrude Himmelfarb, the essayist Irving Kristol, and the art critic Hilton Kramer from a conference to be held in October at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York in commemoration of what would have been Hook's 100th birthday. The bone of contention is the participation of the black-studies scholar Cornel West, who the neoconservatives reportedly said was not enough of a scholar. Diggins later said he had changed his mind, will attend, and will encourage the others to do so. Perhaps the conference will come off as planned, after all. full: http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i44/44b01301.htm ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
