LESSONS FROM A TRAILBLAZING NEOCONSERVATIVE’S CAREER: SIDNEY HOOK
Around the time of the American war in Iraq, neoconservatism was seen as the ideology underlying the ambitions that drove the US government’s belligerence. It was viewed as the political standpoint of prominent Bush administration officials like Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, and Paul Bremer, the first head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Less noted, though, was that there had already been a highly influential wave of neoconservative thinkers in the 1970s and 1980s who vigorously struggled during the early Cold War against Soviet communism and then against the New Left and the counterculture. Here the most high-profile figures were Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, and Norman Podhoretz, some of whom had considerable influence in the Nixon and Reagan eras. But there is one influential thinker and activist who is mentioned less often these days, Sidney Hook (1902–1989), ringleader, and mentor of some of the leading figures in the first wave of American neoconservativism and a titan in the fight against Soviet communism.
Why is Hook’s career worth examining? For one thing, he had a great impact on the generation of neoconservatives that became highly visible during the 1970s and 1980s. He also maintained his influence over a long period of time so his shifts in thought and action reveal important trends among political intellectuals. In fact, he helped to initiate or reinforce some of the more important intellectual developments of his time. During the grim days of Stalin’s purges of revolutionaries and the disappearance of freedom of thought in Russia, Hook made sure that followers of the Soviet political line knew exactly what they were endorsing. When the threat of totalitarianism was at its greatest during the World War II era, Hook warned that internal weakness, the failure to take responsibility for the defense of democracy due to a retreat into supernaturalism, could lead to a failure of nerve in Western democracies and considerably dim the prospects for the survival of freedom. And during the early Cold War era, Hook asked the pertinent question of just how much freedom of thought should be granted to those whose aim is to terminate such freedom. The Disputed Legacy of Sidney Hook by Gary Bullert appeared in 2022, so scholars do recognize his central presence in the tangled political debates of prewar and postwar America over a 40-year period.
But Hook’s career can also teach us valuable lessons about the perils that intellectuals face when they are heavily engaged in conventional political struggles. He is a clear example of an intellectual who became too attached to positions that made sense in one set of circumstances but then could no longer account for unanticipated and quite new developments. Although a pragmatist philosopher, Hook was unable to adapt his own standpoint to the new conditions; he stopped responding to central political issues with a fresh and timely perspective. His political career also teaches us a valuable lesson about neoconservatism. It once had vitality and able defenders but by the time of the war in Iraq, it had degenerated into a sterile ideology whose adherents used it as a vehicle for power and influence.
I studied philosophy in the 1960s as a graduate and undergraduate student at New York University when Hook was the department chair. I took four classes with him and read many of his books, so I became very familiar with his views. His intelligence and willingness to take unpopular stances on the major issues impressed me, even though my own political positions were radically different. Given Hook’s all-out support of the Vietnam War, we were at opposite poles of the political spectrum.
Sidney Hook was a phenomenon, supremely confident in the power of his own mind, passionate about the value of ideas and their role in social life, an ardent polemicist and lover of intellectual battles who was totally committed to the importance of reason and evidence in the formation of belief, and always willing to educate through rational argument. As William Barrett pointed out, Hook never failed to courageously, doggedly, and without hesitation take up positions unpopular within the American left intelligentsia, whether in favor of Marx in the 1920s, against Stalinism in the 1930s, in opposition to the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s, or highly critical of the New Left and the student movement in the 1960s. What made him unique, though, was his love of confrontation, his great skill as a polemicist, and his reputation as an “intellectual street-fighter.” It was hard not to be in awe of a political intellectual of such stature,
From his early teenage years, Hook was a socialist. After studying pragmatist philosophy with John Dewey at Columbia, he became one of the first American philosophers to write sympathetically about Marxism, although mixed with a strong dose of pragmatism. His Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx (1933) and From Hegel to Marx (1935) were the fruits of his engagement with Marxism. However, during the 1930s, he increasingly recognized the oppressiveness of the Soviet regime and strongly turned against Soviet communism, one of a large group of American leftists to do so. Hook’s role in the shift of American intellectuals from radical left standpoints to conservative ones was crucial.
What later became known as neoconservatism started in the mid-1940s when Hook initiated a move away from viewing the left as a source of hope and positive reform. He helped to redirect attention to the dangers of the left, which he judged was not sufficiently alert to the need to fight communism in the coming Cold War. In the early 1950s, he was a whirlwind of energy as he single-mindedly organized American intellectuals to combat the relentless penetration of communism ideology and the resulting threat to cultural freedom. A passionate advocate of the ideas later identified with neoconservatism, Hook provided intellectual leadership for younger colleagues like Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell who became prime movers of this increasingly influential political force.
Similar to other participants in the first great wave of neoconservative thought, Hook started off as an ardent partisan on the left, yet became increasingly conservative. His experience of Stalinism during the 1930s with its lying, cynicism, blatant disregard of human life, and total lack of moral values made it easier to ignore the abuses of American military power and the octopus-like reach of Americanism during the Cold War. It was engraved in his mind that Soviet communism was so reprehensible that it had to be vigorously fought with no quarter given. Since the United States was the only power capable of stopping its advance, he gave his unstinting support to government policies, overlooking abuses of power and forfeiting his critical perspective. Hook let go of his critique of American capitalism and replaced it with an affirmation of American institutions that he believed supported and nourished freedom. He called this approach choosing the lesser evil but his cooperation with the CIA in its cultural activities required him to embrace deceit and propaganda in service to a higher good, the defeat of communism.
Hook’s shift of allegiance away from the left should not be attributed to a simple reaction against his earlier positions. No doubt, the events of the time played a large part in educating him about the untenability of his once fervent leftwing views. It is also revealing that in the 1960s, he still considered himself a democratic socialist, although his political views were indistinguishable from neoconservative positions and his stance on foreign policy was closely aligned with that of the US government. His stance reminds me of another leading neoconservative, Daniel Bell, who in the 1970s declared himself liberal in politics, socialist in economics, and conservative in culture. And there was Irving Kristol’s well-known statement that a conservative is a liberal who was mugged by reality. In other words, the ideals of freedom, equality, and justice are not at fault; the fault lies in the naive belief that there is a blueprint for realizing them which requires government action in the economic and political spheres. Liberals thought they possessed the blueprint and knew the policies that would bring their ideals into being. But neoconservatives believed that history showed they were wrong and ignored the past at their peril.
How, then, does Hook think we ought to go about realizing our ideal? What makes up a good reason or argument for an action or policy? According to Hook, following John Dewey, we ought to do whatever will make our desires or interests a reality. Politically, we should engage in piecemeal reform, discard ideological commitments, and avoid what Hook called the “fanaticism of virtue.” But Hook himself at times did not adhere to this experimental attitude. His anti-communist and anti-left posture became more and more doctrinaire, not subject to revision in the light of the best available evidence. After all, as the years went by, it was clear that Hook’s brand of anti-communism no longer served the common good and was responsible for the great tragedy in Vietnam.
What Hook thought were good reasons at the time can now be more easily seen as based on mistaken assumptions. He supported the Vietnam War, while blind to the power of nationalism in Africa and Asia and the accompanying resistance to any kind of neocolonialism and empire building. From the present vantage point, concentrations of corporate and military power since the 1970s have been far more inimical to freedom than movements of the left. Moreover, the trend toward greater economic equality that existed during the 1960s and early 1970s has been reversed. And ecological disruption has become a looming menace to humanity’s continued existence, prompting the need for concerted international action. The left has critiqued capitalism for its exclusive focus on economic growth and material prosperity while ignoring the relations between humans and nature.
Hook’s championing of the hegemony of the United States as the lesser evil to Soviet communism during the early Cold War period made sense. Against a disciplined, merciless, and totally determined opponent like the Soviet Union, Hook thought the United States had no alternative but to engage in struggle using whatever means were available. Hook had experienced the danger of Nazism and the reluctance of first Germans and then other Europeans to combat it with strong resolution and determination. Since the Soviet Union, like Nazi Germany, was a totalitarian state, it had to be resisted with great urgency. World War II occurred, in part, due to the lack of understanding and will in democratic societies, and this mistake must not be repeated. Hook’s fear was that the American left was not sufficiently aware of this danger, and he felt that it was his role to sound the alarm and oppose policies that suggested appeasement rather than vigilance.
But Hook failed to recognize that the Soviet bloc had become a conservative rather than revolutionary force by 1960. Even in the 1950s, at least in the United States, intellectual support for Soviet communism was minimal and few on the left were attracted to it. The Hungarian uprising against Soviet domination in Hungary (1956) and the appearance of Milovan Djilas’s The New Class (1957) were the nails in that particular coffin. For the radical left, the Third World became the source of hope, especially the Chinese and Cuban revolutions. And the power of the United States continued to increase until at the time of Hook’s death it was the only superpower. The imperative was no longer to protect the US against a rising and implacable totalitarian enemy but to keep the US from abusing its power and continually extending its reach, the great temptation of powerful nations when there are few countervailing forces to limit their freedom of action.
There are important lessons here. For Hook and the first wave of neoconservatives, the experience with the Soviet betrayal of the revolution colored their judgment and became a consuming passion. It infiltrated into their perception of the American left and domestic issues. The concern of these intellectuals in their Marxist days for equality and justice gave way to an upholding of the status quo and strong critiques of the use of government to redress social ills. European intellectuals with their longer-lasting flirtations with the Soviet Union did not turn against the left with the same vehemence; the result was postwar social democracy, arguably a more humane form of government that nevertheless protected the democratic freedoms of its populations.
The combativeness of neoconservative intellectuals, and Hook was their model, led to a celebration of a hard-bitten realism. The mixture of thought and action, ideals and practicality that characterized the civil rights movement provides a helpful contrast to the neoconservative outlook. Part of the issue is temperament. Hook understood that his own temperament and philosophy were related. He recognized that a peace-loving person would tend to focus on theology, gravitate toward idealism, and ponder human’s unchanging nature. On the other hand, a person with a more confrontational temperament, reveling in struggle and loving human variety, someone like Hook himself, would be an activist, attracted to experimentalism and pragmatism.
A balance of the two temperaments would accommodate the need for sensitive thought and unsentimental action, but this balance was elusive for neoconservatives like Hook. In Martin Luther King, John Lewis, and other civil rights leaders, such an integration came closer to realization. This points to another lesson. Reason and science alone, as Dewey and Hook proposed, were not sufficient for people to act in a moral and compassionate way. There also has to be inner development or else the consequences can be negative indeed. As Krishnamurti pointed out: “The person who can split an atom but has no love in his heart becomes a monster.”
