Word: hooks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When future seminars address themselves to Sidney Hook's work, the correct response will require only one word change: Any year, please. As these 21 feisty essays demonstrate, over the past four decades the teacher-philosopher has seen no reason to alter his course. He did not need Alexander Solzhenitsyn to inform him of the Gulag; back in the '30s Hook condemned the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, nations whose politics employed "vicious ersatz theologies." The Supreme Court's pendulum decisions on criminal justice have found Hook unchanged; he has long advocated the rights of the victim...
Save for an early immersion in Marxism, Hook, 77, has found his place outside of movements or situation ethics. For this perversity he has been attacked by Communists, religious dogmatists, reactionaries and the '60s New Left, who charged conspiracy when Richard Nixon ordered reprints of a Hook article decrying campus violence. "You cannot bar other people from agreeing with you," concluded the author, and went on attacking blighted authority wherever he found it-including the White House...
...fact, hypocrisy and its concomitant, special pleading, have always been Hook's true bêtes noires: "The impassioned groups that shout in our courtrooms today 'All power to the people' are unaware that they are calling for mob rule of which many of their forebears were victims." Of reverse discrimination, Hook demands: "Would it be reasonable to contend that women should have been compensated for past discrimination against their maternal forebears by being given an extra vote or two ... ?" Nor is he indulgent to political philosophers-"those of us who are concerned with current issues...
...simply an "intelligent political participation on the part of citizens"-a phrase indistinguishable from November editorials in small-town newspapers. His attack on Lillian Hellman, whom he calls "The Scoundrel in the Looking Glass," exhumes old records to catch the autobiographer in a variety of duplicities and concealments. Hook concludes that "the manner in which [she] refers to ... anti-Communist liberals shows that what she cannot forgive them for is not so much their alleged failure to criticize [Joseph] McCarthy but ... their criticism of the crimes of Stalin and his successors during the forty years in which she apologized...
...Still, Hook is at his keenest at war with ideas or with historians. Arnold Toynbee's pious but inexact theories, T.S. Eliot's elitist culture of the future, Alger Hiss's claim of innocence - these are the stuff of enduring debate, and even when his case is exaggerated, Hook never fails to stimulate or enlighten. He is less successful when he praises. John Dewey's writings are described in dust-jacket prose: "chock-full of fruitful insights" and at times he can sound like Kahlil Gibran: "Democracy is like love in this: It cannot be brought...