Sidney Hook on Pragmatism, Democracy, and Freedom : The Essential Essays

by Hook, Sidney

• ISBN13: 9781591020226
• ISBN10: 1591020220
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-10-01
• Publisher: Prometheus Books

Summary

Sidney Hook is arguably America's most controversial intellectual. After beginning his career as this nation's foremost Marxist scholar, he became in the late 1930s the leading anticommunist intellectual and defender of freedom against all forms of totalitarianism. This volume collects twenty-five of Hook's most incisive essays in political philosophy. Clustered into five main sections, the essays discuss pragmatism and naturalism, Marx and Marxism, Democratic theory and practice, and the defence of a free society. In an insightful introduction, editors Talisse and Tempio argue that underlying the wide range of subjects covered by Hook was his unwavering commitment to the "method of intelligence," which contends that any proposal, whether scientific, moral, or political, must be treated as a hypothesis to be confirmed or unconfirmed by the experimental evidence and deliberation of an unfettered community of inquiry. The editors place this methodology at the core of all of Hook's philosophical and political work. This excellent collection makes a superb introduction to the thought of a leading intellectual who for too long has been neglected by mainstream American philosophy.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. 9
Editors' Introduction: The Legacy of Sidney Hook	p. 11
Philosophical Contexts: Pragmatism and Naturalism
Experimental Naturalism	p. 29
Naturalism and First Principles	p. 46
Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life	p. 68
The Place of Reason in an Age of Conflict	p. 91
Studies in Marx and Marxism
Communism without Dogmas	p. 111
What Is Living and Dead in Marxism	p. 147
Karl Marx versus the Communist Movement	p. 181
The Cult of Revolution	p. 202
Democratic Theory
Naturalism and Democracy	p. 225
The Philosophical Heritage of the Atlantic Democracies	p. 250
Conflicts in Ways of Belief	p. 267
The Democratic Way of Life	p. 275
The Ethics of Controversy	p. 289
The Degradation of the Word	p. 296
Democratic Practice
Democracy and Social Protest: Neither Blind Obedience nor Uncivil Disobedience	p. 307
Are There Limits to Freedom of Expression?	p. 321
The War against the Democratic Process	p. 327
Education and Creative Intelligence	p. 358
A Critique of Conservatism	p. 375
In Defense of a Free Society
Education in Defense of a Free Society	p. 389
The Principles and Problems of Academic Freedom	p. 401
In Defense of the Cold War: Neither Red nor Dead	p. 414
Human Rights and Social Justice	p. 424
Toward Greater Equality	p. 440
The Intellectual in America	p. 449
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