Christopher Phelps Why Wouldn’t Sidney Hook Permit the Republication of His Best Book?

The reissue of Sidney Hook’s Towards the Under- standing of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation is nothing short of a publishing event. 1 Since its original publication by the John Day Company in 1933, the book has been virtually unobtainable, a rare Žnd in second-hand stores, a subterranean classic. In the 1970s, one small socialist group created a bootleg edition for study circles – photocopied and bound between red covers, naturally . For seventy years, however , availability to the general reading public was limited because the book’s author prevented its republication. Sidney Hook (1902–89) was a disputatious philosopher whose life spanned from the age of Eugene V. Debs, when Hook Žrst adopted socialism while in high school, to the era of Ronald Reagan, during which Hook spent his last years as a fellow

1 This is a modiŽcation of a talk given at the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division in Philadelphia on December 28, 2002, at a session sponsored by the Society for the Philosophical Study of Marxism on ‘The SigniŽcance and Relevance of Sidney Hook’s Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx ’. The new edition of Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx is edited by Ernest Benjamin Hook and includes a historical introduction by Christopher Phelps and supplementary materials by Paul Berman and Lewis S. Feuer.

Historical Materialism , volume 11:4 (305–315) ©Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2003 Also available online – www.brill.nl 306• Christopher Phelps at the conservative Hoover Institution in California. Along the way , Hook was a sympathiser of the Communist movement in its formative period of the 1920s. In 1933, he turned toward the anti-Stalinist Marxist Left, Žrst as a leading intellectual in the American Workers’ Party headed by A.J. Muste and subsequently as a fairly loose sympathiser of the Trotskyists (with whom the Musteites fused). The Moscow Trials of 1936–8 sent Hook rightward to hard-line liberal anti-Communism, which he espoused and developed well before the Cold War, when he became notorious as an anti-Communist writer for The New York Times and other prominent outlets. Despite Hook’s later wish that his 1933 account of Marx’s philosophy never reappear, not even after his death, his son Ernest Benjamin Hook and publisher Paul Kurtz at Prometheus Books recognised that Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx is a keystone of American intellectual history that deserves to be in print. At last, with this new edition, readers of every persuasion may easily obtain Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx and judge for themselves its signiŽcance and meaning. The question I pose of why Hook refused to republish his best book is admittedly an exercise in conjecture. It is neither a philosophical nor an historical question. Hook left no clear declaration of his reasoning for refusing republication of the work, and no one can really apprehend the workings of a mind no longer here to explain itself. But exploring the question allows a useful entryway toward an understanding of Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx.

I. Let me begin with four possible reasons I take to be inadequate, before proceeding to what I believe to be the actual reason Hook refused to permit republication of the Žrst and best of his various books on Marx. One possible reason is embarrassment over the book’s intellectual quality. Philosophers, like historians, tend to become more reŽned and ambitious with time, and to regret early works that look, in hindsight, foolish, or immature. This is not the case with Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx . The book was and is an unqualiŽed success. In the popular press, The New York Evening Post called Hook ‘ a courageous pioneer ’, and the Philadelphia Public Ledger declared Hook ‘not only one of the very few bona Žde academicians in America who knows anything about Marx, but ...one of a