Hook, Sidney, 1902-1989

American philosopher, professor, and writer.

American philosopher and author; founding member, Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1950.

Senior fellow at the Hoover Institute.

Biographical Note

The philosopher, author and social critic Sidney Hook was an active participant in many of the important political and intellectual debates of the twentieth century. Born in Brooklyn in 1902, he graduated from City College in 1923. At Columbia University, where he was a disciple of the pragmatist John Dewey, he earned a master's degree in 1926 and a PhD the following year. He went on to join the faculty of New York University in 1927, remaining there as Chairman of the Philosophy Department until his retirement in 1969. From 1973 until his death in 1989, he was a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

Although drawn to Marxism and the Soviet Union in the 1920s, he was one of the first of the New York Marxists to break with the Communist Party and with Stalin, becoming known for his consistent anti-Communist stance. In 1950, he joined with others to create the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization partly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, to counter Communist controlled cultural groups. He was generally seen as a conservative in foreign affairs, but considered himself a socialist in domestic affairs.

Hook's philosophy was based on pragmatism, secularism and rationalism. He wrote dozens of books and hundreds of articles, taught a course on the philosophy of democracy at NYU and influenced the thinking of several generations of teachers, philosophers and political figures. His life is recounted in an autobiography, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century, published in 1987.

A number of items in this collection concern the case of Harry Slochower who was called, in 1952, before the Internal Security Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate. He invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked about Communist associations and was dismissed from his position as a professor of German and comparative literature at Brooklyn College. In 1956 he appealed to the Supreme Court and was reinstated based on a ruling that he had been denied due process of law. He was again suspended on charges that he had made false statements under oath but, before the actual trial, he resigned and spent the rest of his life in the practice of psychoanalysis. (In 1957, Sidney Hook published Common Sense and the Fifth Amendment which discusses the implications of the Fifth Amendment in cases of teacher dismissal for alleged Communist activities.)