Abstract

This dissertation considers the first half of the career of the Twentieth-Century American political philosopher, Sidney Hook, who developed a renowned but widely misunderstood synthesis of American pragmatism and European Marxism, and became a controversial anti-communist and a founder of Cold War liberalism. Although he is best known today for his relationship to the "New York intellectuals" of the Partisan Review and Commentary, Hook should be first understood as a leader of a group of philosophers whom we call the "New York naturalists". Inspired by John Dewey, Morris Cohen, and F. J. E. Woodbridge, these philosophers believed that they could and should find a middle path between absolute idealism and reductive mechanism and apply scientific method, broadly conceived, to all fields of human endeavor. Hook found in naturalism a solution to his early sense of division between the life of the mind and social action. ;Hook developed his Dewey-Marx synthesis as Dewey's graduate student at Columbia, simultaneously studying Marx and the Young Hegelians with Vladimir Simkhovitch. His reading of Marx paralleled, but did not derive from, the work of Karl Korsch and Georg Lukacs. As a young professor at New York University, Hook tried to use his Marxism to mobilize a revolutionary movement in the United States among workers and intellectuals. Although Hook made some converts among intellectuals, the Communist party tried to muzzle his "revisionism" in 1933. Under strong criticism from Cohen and Dewey, and increasingly disturbed by the totalitarian nature of Communists and the unwillingness of enthusiastic leftists to think critically, Hook gradually abandoned his Leninism. After a crisis involving the American reception of the Moscow trials in 1937, Hook became a committed anti-communist, without recanting his socialism. ;As a Cold War liberal, Hook continued to do battle for naturalism, against the "counterreformation" in education led by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. He emerged from the Second World War as a public intellectual with national stature, but his naturalism and socialism were tragically subordinated to his anti-communism