Description
Book SynopsisThe Disputed Legacy of Sidney Hook examines the sixty-year career of one of the foremost public intellectuals in the United States. Sidney Hook’s convictions were widely disseminated through books, academic journals, newspapers articles, lectures, and several organizations that he founded. Hook’s legacies include being a leading Marxist-Leninist scholar, his long-standing commitment to secular humanism, his legacy as a legendary polemicist, his cultural conservatism if not neoconservatism, and his defense of democracy and John Dewey’s pragmatic and Cold War liberalism. Bullert concludes that Hook’s core philosophy is best typified by his Deweyan pragmatism, vigilant anti-communism, and secular humanism.
Table of ContentsChapter 1: The Mature Sidney Hook
Chapter 2: Hook, Dewey, and the Committee for Cultural Freedom
Chapter 3: Pragmatic Liberalism and the Crisis of World War II.: Does It Work?
Chapter 4: Sidney Hook’s Cold War Liberalism
Chapter 5: Vietnam: The United States as the “Evil” Empire
Chapter 6: From N.Y.U. to “Retirement” at Stanford
Chapter 7: Pluralism and the Pragmatic Liberal Tradition
Chapter 8: Sidney Hook and Neoconservatism
