Marxism and Beyond

by Sidney Hook

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0847671593
• ISBN13: 9780847671595
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Length: 225 Pages
• Weight: 2.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The intellectual legacy of an outstanding democrat

This collection of essays, published in 1983 (in the last decade of the author's life) serves as an apt summary of the philosopher Sidney Hook's intellectual legacy as America's pre-eminent scholar of Marxism. To the end of his long life, Hook never abandoned his belief that the essence of Marx's thought was alien to the monstrous totalitarian regimes that, for much of the twentieth century, bore his name. The principal long essay in this book aims to give a 'synoptic exposition' of Marx's thought, and is the finest - and certainly the clearest - such attempt I know. At the same time, Hook allied his respect for Marx's thought to a passionate belief in the defence of western liberal democratic values against Communist tyranny. This idiosyncratic combination informs almost every essay in this volume, which comprises philosophical treatments of Marx, some excoriating book reviews of those who overlook the moral imperative of a vigorous prosecution by the western democracies of the Cold War, and various expositions of Hook's own credo as an anti-Communist social democrat.Inevitably the reader's estimate of the success of this set of arguments will depend on the degree to which he believes Hook succeeds in allying his sympathies for Marx with his anti-Communist principles. To my mind, Hook's attempt fails because he underestimates the extent to which Marx's notion of Communist society - a perfect social unity - is essentially, and not accidently, totalitarian. Hook reviews - highly favourably - in this volume the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski's magnificent Main Currents of Marxism, but never really comes to grips with this insight that Kolakowski first articulated some 30 years ago. Nonetheless, Hook's courage and eloquence in defending western civilisation against Communist despotism are displayed at length in this book. There is a particularly fine review demolishing David Caute's tendentious attempt, in his book The Great Fear, to draw an analogy between Stalin's purges and McCarthy's denunciations: as Hook acidly comments, whereas McCarthyism produced an abridgement of civil liberties, Stalinism produced rivers of blood. As an exponent of a principled anti-Communism of the Left, Hook stands in the company of George Orwell and Arthur Koestler. This book is an apt testament to the qualities of intellectual honesty and a devotion the principles of a free society.