Correspondence

In Re: Sidney Hook

Editors:

Poor Sidney Hook! Another issue of DISSENT, and Hook again seems to be butt of inexplicable sideswipes, subtle inferences, and essentially meaningless innuendoes. But you are not alone! W. H. Chamberlin in the April 21, 1954 Wall Street Journal also takes up the cudgels against Hook’s “complacent attitude,” but for different reasons than yours, of course. I won’t even mention the Stalinists because any analogy would be almost as unfair as those you make between Hook and other favorite scapegoats.

His only “crime,” as far as this misguided observer can see it, has been to formulate a broad program for preventing Communists and McCarthyites from assuming prerogatives no responsible and realistic democracy can allow. True there are varying particulars one may take issue with, as I do also, but not in the form of unpleasant and underhanded comparisons.

On the other side of the coin, however, is Hook’s almost lone philosophical defense of democratic socialist and humanist values; his ability, contrary to the organizational anarchy which now pleases many DISSENT writers, to work within such groups as the Union for Democratic Socialism and the L.I.D. to actively further and propagate socialist values; and, finally, his recent explicit statement, which reflects the core of much of his life work, that “. . . if democratic traditions and institutions are preserved in the current world-wide totalitarian crusade against them, they will acquire a more socialist content.”

I suggest that unless DISSENT wishes to follow in the sour, unpleasant path of sectarianism, it had better draw up bills of particulars against the straw dummies it evidently enjoys kicking around, or else spend its time in more fruitful and constructive inquiry. After all, you might as well realize that DISSENT really has no monopoly on virtue.

GABY KOLKO

[The references to Sidney Hook which have disturbed Mr. Kolko appeared in several articles, and the authors of these have been asked to write brief replies.— Ed.]

Mr. Hook, no matter what his early reputation, has distinguished himself in the last few years by leading the ideological reaction in liberal thought, and among such achievements has been his equivocal relation to civil liberties on matters like rooting the Communists out of the universities—as though America’s security (if one is to take such phrases seriously) were threatened by an occasional fellow-traveler or party member in various scattered universities. What I find most depressing and irritating in Mr. Kolko’s letter, is that from the considerable number of provocative articles in the first two issues of DISSENT, he chooses to be most provoked by two references to Hook, one merely factual by Paul Mattick, one facetious by myself. Hook has never been particularly distinguished by Christ...