Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation

by Sidney Hook

Book Overview

Published in 1933, at a time of widespread unemployment and bank failures, this book by the young Sidney Hook received great critical acclaim and established his reputation as a brilliant expositor of ideas. By "revolutionary interpretation" Hook meant quite literally that Marx's main objective was to stimulate revolutionary opposition to class society.Hook later abandoned the revolutionary views expressed in this volume, but he never abandoned his warm positive views of Marx as a thinker and a fighter for freedom. He eventually concluded that 20th century history had proved both him and Marx wrong about the necessity of revolutionary means to achieve their mutual social goals. But, says his son Ernest B. Hook in an introduction, this concession of error "he did not see . . . as an admission of intellectual weakness, but the natural position of a reasonable person when, in the light of observation and experience, he concludes he has erred."This expanded edition makes readily available for scholars an influential work long out of print and provides critical insight into the intellectual development of one of the 20th-century's great thinkers.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1573928828
• ISBN13: 9781573928823
• Release Date: December 2002
• Publisher: Prometheus Books
• Length: 465 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 5.3" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

A Classic of American Marxism Returns

Here after decades of supression we have an updated edition of a classic work of American Marxism. This was the book that gave Hook his reputation as this countries most original Marxist thinker in the 1930's. Rejected by the Communist Party USA as revisionist for his pragamatist/Marxist co-mixing, Hook eventually became a dedicated Cold Warrior and refused to allow this book to be reprinted. (He even tried to have it taken out of libraries!) Now his son had authorized this new addition that contains enough supplemental material to satisfy nearly all sides regarding Hook's contentious legacy. In this new edition we find Hook's son giving us a full scale apolagia for his fathers political drift from revolutionary to cold war polemicist; C. Phelps providing an excellent historical introduction that finds merit with the young Hook's democratic Marxism for todays generation of radicals; a reprint of a 1968 essay by L. Feuer giving the standard cold war-liberal (soon to be neoconservative) view of Hook's relation to Marxian scholarship; and P. Berman's very interesting remake of one of Hook's own essays, in which he, Berman, interviews a dead Hook (as Hook himself did in 1955 when he interviewed Marx in Heaven).As to the Text itself, what Hook essentially did was introduce English speaking readers to the praxis orinted tradition of western Marxist intellectuals such as G. Lukacs and K. Korsh, years before they became better known through translations of their works. This I have argued elsewere was more profound than the famous notion that TOWARDS THE UNDERSTANDING OF KARL MARX should be seen as a work of Deweyian-Marxism. Most impressive of the book's assets are Hook's explantions of Marx's dialectical method and his defence of the democratic nature of the Marxian revolutionary ideal. These stand heads above his later attempts to repudiate them, which is likley why he did not want this work reprinted.Those interested in a more detailed look at my views on this subject can read my article "Praxis American Style" in HISTORICAL MATERIALISM No. 4 1999. Also one should read Alan Wald's THE NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS and C. Phelps excellent YOUNG SIDNEY HOOK.