I. Pragmatism, Marxism, and Libertarian Humanism

“Freedom is a fighting word,” declared Sidney Hook in the late 1950s, at the height of the Cold War.³

As a philosopher who found himself inescapably drawn into the strident world of contemporary politics, Hook was forced to think about human freedom far removed from its expressions in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment. He recognized that the term “freedom” was as ambiguous as any abstract concept such as justice or truth or love. He also recognized that as an idea freedom was shot through with ironies, antinomies, and paradoxes. A fighting word, its many meanings would not easily be recollected in tranquility.

The character of freedom cannot be fully grasped by referring only to older notions of natural law and natural right, as though the imperatives of duty and the capacity to pursue happiness as a self-determining agent draw their inspiration from “Nature and Nature's God,” to use the terms of Thomas Jefferson. Hook regarded himself as a Jeffersonian, but he was also an ardent pragmatist and naturalist, one who believed that all reliable knowledge derived from experience illuminated by the assistance of scientific explanation. The study of nature itself may tell us little about the norms and ends that should guide our ethical life, but historical experience shows that the idea of freedom arose when people became conscious that a human need had run up against a constraint—some hindrance or obstacle that John Dewey liked to call a “problematic situation.” Freedom becomes one of the responses of the mind to such a situation, a political technique for overcoming problems that restrict human development, a legal method for resolving conflicting interests—not an end in itself but a means of settling issues that divide the human race.

Sidney Hook was a Marxist as well as a pragmatist, and he spent the major part of his intellectual life trying to separate the original ideas of Karl Marx from their totalitarian perversions under Lenin and Stalin. Marx believed in freedom as much as Dewey did, and both men shared a common premise that philosophy's task is not to interpret the world but to change it. Marx's eleventh thesis on the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1845) was as historically significant as the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce's essay “The Fixation of Belief” (1887). Both documents sought to demonstrate that philosophy turns to science in showing the way to knowledge by means of experimental naturalism, where practice rather than theory is the ultimate verification of an idea whose properties cannot be known unless we can observe the “effects” brought about by the deliberate introduction of change into life. As to freedom, Hook said of Marx that “the original inspiration of his thought was humanistic and libertarian. Property for him was a source of power, not so much to use as to exclude others from use. Consequently private property in the means of life carries with it power over those who must live by their use.”⁴

Sidney Hook and Robert Nozick occupy two different worlds when it comes to property as power, on the one hand, and property as liberty, on the other. One philosopher saw property as a potential instrument of oppression, the other as the natural right that guarantees freedom. The untimely death of Nozick in 2002 deprived the world of a voice of reason on the Right that was just as important as Hook's voice once was on the Left. Both Hook and Nozick were Jews of eastern European ancestry; both were born and raised in New York City and went on to become famous academic philosophers in their early years; and each served as an exemplary public intellectual, a critical thinker who sought to relate his discipline to contemporary issues of social policy.

Nozick first made his reputation with Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a treatise that takes us back to John Locke in order to argue that the state comes into existence to protect life, liberty, and property and has no purpose in reorganizing society for reasons of justice or equality. Years earlier, Hook made his reputation with From Hegel to Marx (1936), a treatise that takes us back to the mid-nineteenth century and the origins of socialist ideas in the thoughts of the young Hegelians and even anarchists such as Max Stirner.

But Hook also delved into a matter that drew the attention of Karl Marx as a young reporter. It dealt with a legal dispute involving German peasants who were being denied their traditional right to gather dead wood for fuel for their cottages. In the early part of the nineteenth century in Germany, many intellectuals had looked to the state as the expression of the common interests and ideals of society. The philosopher G. W. F. Hegel had helped to create the illusion that the state must be regarded as a transcendental force apart from the daily operations of government. But Marx followed closely the debate in the Rhenish Provincial Assembly regarding a proposed wood-theft law that would make the appropriation of dead wood from privately owned forest lands a crime. Small landowners had little interest in the legislation, for their fields had too few trees to make the matter of any consequence, and they lived in the neighborhood and could keep watch on their property. But the large land-proprietor could only have his wardens effectively defend his land if a law making wood-gathering a penal offense were passed and enforced. The matter was hotly disputed in the assembly, where it was concluded that both large and small property owners were entitled to equal rights of protection. “Marx seized this principle,” writes Hook, “and hurled it at the heads of the representatives, barbed with the following question: what protection was the state giving to the poor, the paupered wood-stealers themselves, who were also citizens of the political community? The poor were not stealing wood in order to sell it. They merely made sporadic raids on private forests in their vicinity in order to gather fuel for their cottages. The stringency of the winter and the high price of wood had intensified the abuse.” In fact, Hook continues, “the poor had always enjoyed the immemorial right (forgotten conveniently by the historical school of law) of carting off dead wood.” But now, on the pretext that such activity endangered the living trees, the poor were told to cease wood-gathering as the state stepped forward to defend the property of one class against the welfare of others. “The organs of the state,” wrote the young Marx in the Rheinische Zeitung, “have now become the ears, eyes, arms, legs, with which the interest of the forest owners hears, spies, appraises, defends, seizes, and runs.”⁵

Such harsh episodes in history drove Marx toward socialism, as it did his twentieth-century exponent, Sidney Hook. But Robert Nozick viewed property as an absolute right and the state as a minimal institution. In Hook's attitude toward history, the state was no more minimal than property was moral. Had Hook pondered Nozick's thesis, he might have thought of Max Stirner, the nineteenth-century anarchist who made the ego and its desire the supreme definition of life, and property and interests an exclusive possession.⁶

The pragmatist, as well as the Marxist, sees human nature as social, the fully autonomous individual as a conceit, and the opposition between private interest and the general good as a genuine conflict that must be acknowledged in various historical situations.

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick offers a telling critique of the Marxian theory of socialism, especially the labor theory of value.⁷

But the scene Hook describes in From Hegel to Marx does not imply the theory of Marxist exploitation in the strict sense of the term, for the wood was not produced but simply had rotted and died; hence, no labor and its presumed “surplus value” are implied. Historically, in England, as opposed to Germany, an earth covered with dead wood might have been regarded as the commons, a resource that the community shared, and the German law prohibiting wood-gathering would resemble the move to the enclosure of common lands that took place in eighteenth-century England. The plight of the German paupers may have had more to do with Locke than with Marx, since any access to nature was perhaps more vital than the activity of labor itself. Many of the subjects Nozick deals with in his critique of Marxism are handled astutely, but they may be irrelevant to the ways of law and the power of the state in the nineteenth-century Germany that Hook describes. Nozick judges Marxism defective in many respects. Labor (in particular, organized, union-led workers), Nozick argues, refrains from undertaking the risks of capitalist investment. He also holds that value has much to do with the productive effort of work and not the vicissitudes of the market and consumer demands. And he contends that the origins of private property came into existence as much from seizing the land as from tilling the soil. Nozick insists that property justly acquired can be legitimately held, whereas Hook the pragmatist is less interested in the origins of an institution than in its consequences as they relate to social justice. A possessiveness about private property that deprives poor people of access to fuel as a means of sustaining life and health may have been too much for even Locke. Hook turned toward socialism because he wanted to see the desperate, stooped-over, wood-gathering peasants liberated from the whip of necessity.

And Nozick? He, too, would have wished to see peasants liberated. Nozick believed that no one could be truly free under conditions of total deprivation, where the simplest needs of existence go unmet. Life must offer choices to be made and acted upon, and Nozick would hardly countenance an act of appropriation that worsened the condition of others. The case of the dead wood in the German forests may have had more to do with possession than appropriation, with simply owning land rather than expropriating the labor-value of those who work upon it. Nonetheless, the decision of the Rhenish Provincial Assembly in nineteenth-century Germany could very well have violated what Nozick calls the Lockean proviso:

It seems that in Nozick's formulation of the proviso, Locke might well have come to the rescue of the German peasants just as Marx did. The differences between Nozick and Hook on the subjects of property and political economy are as wide as those separating the libertarian from the socialist. Less apparent are the many philosophical issues they shared in common. “Over the years,” wrote Nozick in Philosophical Explanations (1981), “I have spent more time thinking about the problem of free will—it felt like banging my head against it—than any other philosophical topic except perhaps the foundation of ethics.”⁹

The question of free will and the sources of morality and ethics were also uppermost to Hook, who likewise believed that the answer to such issues lies less in institutions and authoritative doctrines than in the life of the mind. The libertarian anarchist Nozick and the democratic socialist Hook shared many concerns. Hook had a deep passion for freedom, and both he and Nozick believed that to enjoy the blessings of freedom one must undertake the task of understanding it in all its complexity. Since Nozick's views on freedom are better known than those of Hook, this essay will focus on the writings of the latter, with periodic side glances at Nozick's thoughts to register a possible caveat, a whispered demur, or perhaps a loudly spoken, steadfast counterconviction.

II. Free Will and Moral Responsibility

Nozick's thoughts on free will were almost purely philosophical to the extent that he remained convinced that its absence would stunt human stature and undermine all value considerations. Nozick believed that the possibility of free will enhanced personal dignity as well as moral responsibility, an issue that Hook took up in his 1958 essay “Moral Freedom in a Determined World.” Nozick also felt deeply that the world of action, to the extent that it could be explained as causally determined (meaning that events and actions can be traced to prior conditions), precludes the idea that choices are freely made. Nozick seems close to Friedrich Nietzsche and the German sociologist Max Weber in insisting that we freely choose our values or else we live by ingrained habit, and that we are responsible for our choices. If I understand Nozick correctly, his view is that morality is not something that resides beyond us in religion or metaphysical principles. On the contrary, it originates within us and is self-determined. So much for theory, but Hook, good pragmatist that he was, always related theory to practice, and he applied the quandary of moral determinism to the court of law.

Hook's essay, published in Commentary in 1958, presages issues in constitutional law that would emerge decades later, issues such as the “diminished capacity” of the accused criminal that supposedly renders him unresponsible for his actions, or the “victim” status of a cancer patient who sues tobacco companies for billions of dollars because a cigarette culture of nicotine is, so goes the reasoning, as irresistible as catnip. Locke defined freedom as one's capacity to act according to one's will, and libertarians believe that a free act results from the conscious volition of an agent rather than from some condition or emotion such as desire or passion. In the courtroom, however, the prosecuting lawyer replaces Locke and the attorney for the defense replaces the libertarian, as the one standing trial is depicted as more sinned against than sinning, one who is not the cause of his own actions. Appropriately, Hook's target was the great trial lawyer Clarence Darrow, who in 1924 had defended Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in the murder of fourteen-year-old Bobby Frank. The case outraged the public when it was discovered that Leopold and Loeb, two highly educated University of Chicago students, had decided to prove their Nietzschean “overcoming” of weakness and to will their own lives by taking the life of a young student. After quoting a poem by A. E. Housman, a soliloquy of a boy about to be hanged, Darrow in his closing remarks to the jury stated: “I do not know what it was that made these boys do this mad act, but I know there is a reason for it. I know they did not beget themselves, I know that any one of an infinite number of causes reaching back to the beginning might be working out in these boys' minds, whom you are asked to hang in malice and in hatred and injustice, because someone in the past has sinned against them.”¹⁰

Such reasoning, Hook protested, had little to do with moral freedom and responsibility. Suppose we have been affected by causes not of our own choosing, by original sin, for example, or suppose we choose to do what we do, and hence are not sinned against, are we then to be credited for our actions even if they produce evil results? That all choices may be determined is no more grounds for their excusability than if all choices are freely willed, and it is obvious that if we cannot condemn actions that are predictable or unavoidable, neither can we praise them. Hook questioned the thesis that because human beings are determined they are not to be morally responsible; for whenever it is possible to alter the determining conditions by awareness of alternatives, by intelligent reflection and informed action, no specific act can be regarded as unavoidable.

Bringing intelligence to bear upon human actions constituted Hook's theory of ethics, and it derived from Dewey's philosophy of pragmatism. Nozick tells us that the issue of ethics banged against his head as much as that of free will, and of course the two are closely related. Nozick dealt with ethics as a relation of the self with others, with the Kantian injunction against using another person for one's own ends, and Nozick's idea of morality involved awareness, responsibility, and sensitivity—an “ethical pull” that compels our responsiveness to others. Both Nozick and Hook believed that ethics could be a matter of rational demonstration; both were aware of the tensions between deontology and teleology, between knowing what is right apart from the good, on the one hand, and undertaking actions whose consequences promise to realize the good, on the other. Each philosopher, moreover, saw the mind as a value-seeking self, and while Nozick believed that we benefit from our moral actions by virtue of a growth and self-development that serves the needs of others, Hook remained convinced that we cannot know the implications of our actions for others until we know how to choose what course of action to take. Neither philosopher had much use for Nietzsche's notion that religion concocted the doctrine of free will so as to punish us with “the hangman's metaphysics.”

In his 1949 essay “The Ethical Theory of John Dewey,” Hook observes that an action that simply satisfies needs and fulfills wants is inadequate, for when such an action is questioned it “becomes necessary to give adequate or relevant grounds for regarding what is desired as desirable and what is enjoyed as enjoyable.” Ancient classical philosophers, although rarely addressing the issue of free will, did see creatures of desire remaining in a state of ignorance beyond reason and moral responsibility. Closer to our time, Max Weber saw the conflict of different values as insoluble as “a war of the gods.” Hook, in contrast, saw no grounds for pessimism even when modern science had superseded older moral categories, when an empirical concentration on the factual had relegated the ethical to the margins of inquiry, when the “is” could be verified but the “ought” only pondered.

In his essay on Dewey, and in “A Critique of Ethical Realism” (1929) and elsewhere, Hook challenges the view that moral values and principles have an objective status independently of the human subject and his or her situation and emotions. The ethical realist is aware that knowledge of our changing moral attitudes over time need not threaten the conviction that supreme ethical values, notions of good and bad, may remain invariant. But the idea of good as an object of desire involves choice often based upon needs, interests, and even passions, a process of deliberation between conflicting impulses in which critical reflection serves the role of comprehending and clarifying. It was Hook's conviction that between the immediately desired and the ultimately desirable comes the role of intelligence, which compels us to consider both the causes of why we want to do what we have an urge to do and also the consequences of so thinking and acting. Only then can human conduct be elevated from the descriptive to the normative, from the “is” to the “ought,” giving the desired the quality of the desirable.¹¹

One wonders how this Hook-Dewey formulation might work out in applied social policy in a court of law. An attorney for a tobacco company could try to convince the jury that a cancer-stricken complainant had the freedom to consider both the causes prompting him or her to smoke and the consequences of consuming two packs a day. The attorney for the complainant, in contrast, would no doubt claim that cigarette advertising is designed to keep smokers in a state of primitive desire, with its visual imagery promising pleasure, relaxation, beauty, elegance, erotic innuendo, and other spurious delights that feed on the fables of fulfillment, a feeding frenzy in which reflective intelligence is helpless to control desire and its passions and obsessions.

As an aside, one might add an observation. Contemporary French poststructuralists claim that human desire was about to break into the realm of freedom until capitalist society brought its mechanisms of repression to bear on the mind. Do not they need to reconsider their premises?¹²

Unreflective, unadulterated desire is precisely what consumer capitalism feeds upon. The more the desire, the more the dividends. For the Madison Avenue advertising agency, the best appeal is to the helpless, offering an image that projects desire onto things, what Marx called the “fetishism of commodities.” For sales purposes, the best consumer may be the addict. But Hook the Marxist, as one who believed in free will, would have to defend corporate capitalism against the complaints of the addicted.

It may be that contemporary French poststructuralists are preoccupied with power, domination, and manipulation because they would like to see political philosophy serve the emancipatory purposes of life. Sidney Hook had the same goal. Many philosophers had placed ethical teaching within the domain of authority, some theory of being that is independent of human experience or some doctrine unrelated to needs and interests. As a pragmatic naturalist, Hook sought to relate value to freedom, to the choice of what one ought or should do when confronting a problematic situation. Decision and action became central to the philosophy of pragmatism, and freedom finds its expression in the possibility of alternatives and in the agony of choice. Such a description may tell us how freedom is exercised. The question that haunted Hook's generation was of another magnitude. Historically, the struggle toward freedom meant breaking the bonds of the past. In recent history, freedom's antagonist became the future itself.

III. Friedrich von Hayek and Leon Trotsky

Locke may have laid the foundations for freedom in the seventeenth century, and in the nineteenth century Marx may have demonstrated how freedom cannot fulfill itself without collective ownership and democratic control. But in the mid-twentieth century, the question was not how freedom was won but how it came to be lost. With Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, and Stalin's Russia having crushed the spirit of liberalism, the heritage of Western civilization seemed to be in peril. In 1940, as America was debating whether to enter World War II, even fiercer debates broke out among philosophers, and articles appeared in The New Republic and elsewhere with titles such as “Our Guilt in Fascism.”¹³

Pragmatism seemed to be on trial, for while Dewey and Hook had offered a philosophy that would make intelligence responsive to problematic situations, neither thinker had any policy advice to give America when confronting European totalitarianism. How to interpret fascism and Stalinism became an obsession to the New York intellectuals of the late 1930s, for neither phenomenon had any premonition in orthodox Marxist theory or in classical liberalism, where tyranny was assumed to belong to the past and to have been overcome by the march of progress. But the return of tyranny in modern times perplexed the intellectual, and Dewey and Hook feared that if the United States went to war against Hitler, American democracy at home would be at risk.

The one thinker on the scene who appeared to have the answer to totalitarianism was the then rather obscure Austrian economist Friedrich A. von Hayek. His little book The Road to Serfdom (1944) became a best-seller right after the war and convinced many, the public at large as well as the philosophical community, that he was telling America what, for a long time, it did not want to hear. Years later, Hayek's writings would also be taken seriously by Robert Nozick—particularly the Austrian's criticisms of theories of distributive justice. Hayek claimed that human intelligence is too limited to enable governments to know enough about each person's situation in order to distribute economic benefits according to meritorious categories. With England's socialist state in mind, and with a side glance at America's New Deal, Hayek feared that both countries could well be traveling along the road to serfdom. Hayek held that freedom from government intervention is the first principle of political freedom, and he argued that in European dictatorial regimes this principle was violated when the state took over private enterprise. The political regimentation of the economy, Hayek told his readers, paved the way for fascism and communism, and in America, with the regulations imposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, one could witness what came to be called “creeping socialism,” a sure sign that liberty is succumbing to servitude. What made Hayek's thesis so appealing to the public was his conviction that socialism was the “disease” of the intellectual class.¹⁴

In a brilliant debate between Hook and Max Eastman, appearing in 1945 in The New Leader and later reprinted in Hook's Political Power and Personal Freedom (1959), Hayek's thesis was expounded with wit and undeniable conviction, on the one side, and scrutinized with logic and irrefutable demonstration, on the other.¹⁵

Eastman was one of the most charismatic figures in twentieth-century intellectual history. Once an editor of The Masses (from 1912 to 1918) of the Greenwich Village era, a poet who wrote paeans to the Bolshevik Revolution, a translator and champion of Trotsky who smuggled out of Russia Lenin's last will and testament given to him by his widow, Krupskaya, a document that warned against Stalin coming to power, Eastman was also one of the first to turn against the Soviet Union. Preceding other disillusioned intellectuals of the left, he became an early anticommunist whom Stalin himself called “a gangster of the pen.”¹⁶

At the end of World War II, Eastman challenged Hook's socialist conviction that a planned economy can be democratic. He reiterated Hayek's thesis that such notions as “public welfare” and “common interests” have no sufficiently defined meaning to prescribe a specific course of action, and, hence, the idea of the collective good may simply be a mystique for the augmentation of state power.

Hook responded that Hayek's case had yet to be proven in America's democratic society; the results were not in about the New Deal. But in Europe, according to Hook, Hayek got the scenario backward. Neither in Mussolini's Italy, nor in Hitler's Germany, nor in Stalin's Russia did a state-managed, planned economy precede the death of democracy. On the contrary, fascism and communism alike were antidemocratic, and each movement first seized the power of the state to destroy any possibility for political democracy to develop.¹⁷

In Hayek's scenario, a collectivized economy is the first step toward totalitarian power, whereas in the communist scenario a privatized economy guarantees the domination of capitalism. Both perspectives seem to partake of economic determinism, with the mode of production decisive, whether it be collectivist or privatist. But Hook had already questioned determinism as a principle of explanation. A few years prior to his debate with Eastman, Hook began to reconsider his socialist assumptions and his Marxist education, and he came to recognize that, in history, political action may be more decisive than economic development, that history is made not by the processes of production but by the paradoxes of mutation, by the appearance of leaders who break the genetic chain of history and bring forth fundamental change and, hence, make freedom possible. With this observation I come to the thesis of one of Hook's most profound texts, Reason, Social Myths, and Democracy (1940).

This book, which revealed again Hook's passion for freedom and his awareness of all its complexities, and which scrutinized the concept of the dialectic and left it in shambles, failed to receive the attention it deserved, as did his The Hero in History (1943). One reason for this failure, perhaps, was that to write about history as the story of heroes invoked Thomas Carlyle and the alleged fascist mystique of great men as the dynamic element in history, a point of view that the drama critic Eric Bentley warned against in his Heroes and Hero-Worship (1944). But Hook's Reason, Social Myths, and Democracy appeared in 1940, the same year that saw the publication of James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution and Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station. Both of these latter texts surpassed Hook's in sales and favorable receptions, and the message of both was, curiously, deeply deterministic. The ex-Trotskyist Burnham argued that history would be determined not by the mode of production but by the shift of power from owners to managers, from property and money to bureaucracy and technology, and the “new class” would be the basis of new ruling elites. Wilson believed that Lenin's arrival at the Finland Station in 1917, after the Czarist regime had fallen and the Bolsheviks had yet to seize power, was the culmination of the Italian philosopher G. B. Vico's conviction that the social world is the work of man, not of God, and that history can be made by acting upon it. Wilson praised Lenin as the political philosopher who showed the world how to carry out thought in the world of action. But while Wilson was working on his book, the Moscow show trials were taking place in 1937–38, and writers could only wonder about a regime that would have former Bolshevik leaders publicly confess their “crimes” before facing the firing squad, a ghastly spectacle later captured in Arthur Koestler's 1941 novel Darkness at Noon. One can notice a quiver of doubt in Wilson's text about the future of the Soviet Union, but he regarded Lenin almost as an inevitable force of nature. Yet Hook, who had been a friend of Wilson, a fellow writer who also contributed to the Partisan Review, saw things entirely differently. Hook raised a simple but telling question: What if Lenin, in crossing the Gulf of Finland, had fallen through the ice and drowned? To contemplate the October Revolution without Lenin is like contemplating the American Civil War without Abraham Lincoln.

It is by reading Hook's Reason, Social Myths, and Democracy and The Hero in History, both of which came out during the years of the Second World War, that one fully senses Hook's impatience with determinism and its perversions, and his passion for freedom and its possibilities. In a way, his quarrel was not so much with Marx as with the Marxists. For Marx himself had always emphasized the agency of human activity as much as the inexorability of history. But thinkers such as George Plekhanov (1857–1918), the Russian philosopher of historical materialism, insisted that the individual, no matter how great, is dispensable in historical understanding. Had Lenin slipped under the ice, another leader would have stepped forward to take his place, for history remains the domain of economic necessity and moves by its own logic. Similarly, the geniuses of culture, figures like Shakespeare and Goethe, are less the creators than the products of their times and can hardly be said to change the course of history. Hook made short shrift of such arguments, as he did of those of the English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), who insisted that the leader can make changes in society only to the extent that society has made changes in the leader, and those of Hegel, who believed that the “cunning of reason” demonstrated not that people make history but that history works itself out through their actions, even behind the back of their intentions.

The figure Hook focuses upon, however, is Leon Trotsky, the intellectual hero, at least for a while, of the New York intellectuals, the brilliant writer who would show up at meetings and cause the crowd to gasp, “The pen (Pero) has arrived!” Edmund Wilson, noting all the calumny heaped upon Trotsky by the Stalinists, summed up his glowing estimate in 1940: “And as the fires of the Revolution have died down in the Soviet Union at a time when the systems of thought in the West were already in an advanced state of decadence, he has shown forth like a veritable pharos, rotating a long shaft of light on the seas and the reefs all around.”¹⁸

Hook examined the mystique of Trotsky as beacon in two places: “Reflections on the Russian Revolution” (a chapter in Reason, Social Myths, and Democracy) and “The Russian Revolution: A Test Case” (a chapter in The Hero in History). After Hook's critique, the “veritable pharos” no longer shone so brightly.

Hook used the rise of Soviet Communism as evidence that history is not determined but instead may well turn on the appearance of the purposeful, event-making leader. The hero in history is a man or woman (Hook cited Cleopatra, Theodora, and Catherine II of Russia) whose decisive actions have a preponderant influence in determining an issue or happening whose consequences would have been profoundly different had such action not been taken. In the course of modern Russian history, that phenomenon was Lenin. It is unfortunate that Hook, who died in early 1989, did not live to see the fall of Soviet Communism. For Mikhail Gorbachev was the event-making leader whose actions set in motion the train of events leading to Communism's unexpected and sudden collapse. Urged by President Ronald Reagan, at a summit in May of 1988, to join him in beginning nuclear disarmament, Gorbachev also announced that the Soviet Union would no longer send in tanks to put down uprisings in its satellite regimes, and in late 1989, the regimes began to crumble like a house of cards. But one wonders if Gorbachev qualifies as a hero or a great man in history. After all, he did not intend to bring down Communism but to save it by reforming it. What, then, did Lenin intend when he seized power in the name of Karl Marx?

Trotsky would have had no trouble answering the question. History moves with “inexorable necessity,” he claimed; hence, the October Revolution had “a deep natural inevitability” regardless of who the leaders were. Hook conceded that the fall of the Czarist system may have been unavoidable, especially in the tumult of World War I, but it did not follow that the Bolsheviks should have swept into power not as a possibility but as an actuality, particularly since the Bolsheviks were a minority party nowhere as representative as the peasant-based Social Revolutionaries or the party's real majority faction, the Mensheviks, and nowhere as committed to democracy as the liberal Constitutional Democrats (Kadets). Hook showed the inconsistency in Trotsky's claim that Lenin was “needed” to make the October Revolution and, at the same time, that his existence was “a product of the whole past of Russian history.” In truth, Lenin was needed because Marx scarcely prophesized revolution in backward Russia, and Lenin himself acknowledged that workers on their own could not make a revolution; it had to be forced upon the country by a vanguard. Trotsky was in an even more difficult situation with his book The Revolution Betrayed (1937), in which he claimed that “the tendencies of bureaucratism” that made possible Stalin's totalitarian reign resulted from the “iron necessity” of a development that gave birth to a privileged minority, and “it is perfectly obvious that the poorer the society which issues from a revolution, the sterner and more naked would be the expression of this ‘law.’ ”¹⁹

Trotsky, Lenin's revolutionary comrade, faced a double fallacy: the Bolsheviks took power in a poor, undeveloped country, precisely where Marx deemed successful democratic revolution highly improbable, and then blamed the conditions of poverty for producing the bureaucracy that gave Russia despotism instead of democracy. In Trotsky's thinking, everything had to have happened as it had happened, both the revolution and its degeneration. But how, Hook asked, can an idea like revolutionary socialism be betrayed unless it “presupposes the grounded possibility of another type of action”?²⁰

Had Robert Nozick been part of Hook's older generation, he may have refined the question even further. Nozick expressed bemusement when he considered that some philosophical schools of thought have “held that freedom is knowledge of necessity.” Why are you free when you do what you've got to do? “The puzzle is why knowledge of what one is stuck with should constitute freedom rather than, say, knowledge of unfreedom.” Does knowledge of necessity, the awareness of the “causal conditions” behind a development, mean that such knowledge will not result in an action's “not being done or wanted”?²¹

To feel the force of necessity is to accept a life of submission and obedience when, in fact, freedom may be born in resistance and disobedience.

Where Hook addressed the philosophy of history to challenge determinism, Nozick did so to challenge contextualism. In a long footnote in The Nature of Rationality (1993), Nozick questions whether the history of science or the history of ideas can be reduced to a contextual situation in which the thinker is wrestling with a specific problem or intervening in a particular controversy. Both of these possibilities imply that there are no universal issues or timeless topics in the world of thought but only immediate responses to concrete circumstances. Cannot the political theorist be trying to uncover timeless truths that apply to various situations? Must Machiavelli be valid only for sixteenth-century Florence and Madison only for eighteenth-century Philadelphia? Both Hook and Nozick resisted the assumption that freedom is compromised by the necessity of circumstance or context.²²

However philosophers wrestle with this issue, in politics the sense of necessity in the face of momentous events seems irresistible. Lincoln felt it during the Civil War, and indeed the very beginning of the American Republic had as much a sense of fate as of freedom. The opening line of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence announces: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary….” This is one paradox of American freedom: Americans declared their independence from England by claiming that they had no choice but to do so. The Jeffersonian tradition left America with many more paradoxes, and Hook explored them in the spirit of a true philosopher, the thinker who enables us to see problems without claiming to have solved them.

IV. Human Rights, Democracy, and Judicial Review

Hook arrived at his study of freedom by way of prior Marxist and pragmatist convictions. Although the writings of Karl Marx came to be associated with radicalism and those of John Dewey with liberalism, the oeuvres of both men express little patience with the classical tradition of liberal political philosophy, a tradition arising from Hobbes and Locke and resting on the social contract theory of natural rights. Marx saw formal political freedom as meaningless until private property is abolished and the worker and citizen become one. Dewey believed that the doctrine of natural rights brought about the atomization of society and the eclipse of the public. One philosopher looked to the proletariat to usher in the economic transformation of industrial society; the other looked to scholars and students to usher in a new “beloved community” in which education, not revolution, would be the vehicle of liberation. But when Hook wrote on freedom he had to address ideas and institutions neglected in Marxism and pragmatism, especially the nature of human rights, the role of the state, and the legitimacy of judicial review. In a liberal America where Marxism had failed to establish its roots and pragmatism had failed to transform the national character, Hook had to think anew.

Hook's The Paradoxes of Freedom was delivered as the Jefferson Memorial Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, in the spring of 1961. The ironies are rich. Berkeley would soon be the scene of campus uprisings demonstrating angrily against the Vietnam War—a politics of protest spirited philosophically, to a certain extent, by thinkers of the Hegelian-soaked Frankfurt School, whose idea of “Critical Theory” brought back to life the mystique of dialectical reason that Hook, Eastman, and Wilson thought they had buried once and for all in their writings of the late 1930s.²³

Another irony is even more telling. Although Hook's lectures were presented in honor of Jefferson, the topics that Hook addressed—the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and racial desegregation—were topics that had left Jefferson uneasy as an advocate of states rights over national sovereignty. The anarcho-libertarianism of Nozick would perhaps be closer to the spirit of Jefferson than would the democratic socialism of Hook, who said that he had once thought of himself as a Jeffersonian until he met others who also did so, and he intended The Paradoxes of Freedom to be an examination, not an incantation. Dewey once observed, in his introduction to the selected writings of Jefferson, that the liberal American political philosopher had the right values but used the wrong language. Dewey avoided elaborating the point, but in some ways his most notable student, Hook, did it for him in his Berkeley lectures.²⁴

The first incantation that Hook examines is the Jeffersonian conviction of unalienable rights. Hook regarded freedom as a “fighting word” because the human rights that make political freedom possible are in conflict, and the values that sustain freedom may be plural, ambiguous, and contestable. In the area of law, he saw nothing absolute or essentialist in the U.S. Constitution or Bill of Rights, nothing metaphysical and universal, nothing predicated on a definition alone or on a sense of necessity rather than contingency. One of Hook's targets was Alexander Meiklejohn, the legal scholar who had declared: “No one who reads with care the text of the First Amendment can fail to be startled by the absoluteness. The phrase ‘Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech,’ is unqualified. It admits of no exception … under any circumstance.”²⁵

Hook cites Jefferson from his First Inaugural, where the president emphasized that for a right to be “rightful” it must be “reasonable,” and, Hook notes, “to be reasonable is to be absolute about nothing except about being reasonable.” The imperative to be reasonable is a value preference, and Hook asks: “In morals is there any concrete value or right which one can define as unconditionally or absolutely valid in all circumstances?”²⁶ Conflicts are inevitable in relations between, for example, the right to free speech and the right to personal safety, the right to liberty and property and the right to life and self-preservation, the citizen's right to habeas corpus and the government's right to suspend it “when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it,” as the Constitution reads. All rights are conditional and relative to circumstance, and “no matter how the conflict between rights be resolved, one or the other right must be alienable.”²⁷

Hook agreed with David Hume that the needs that brought government into existence establish the criteria for determining whether or not government should be continued, revised, or overthrown. He also agreed with Jeremy Bentham that the assertion of one's rights could be the “retrenchment of liberty” on the part of another and that every law presupposes the constriction of someone's freedom.²⁸

Although Hook had reservations about the “egoistic hedonism” in utilitarianism,²⁹ as a pragmatist he insisted that the quality of an act cannot be assessed independently of its consequences for society. Thus, he took on Justice Hugo Black's contention that the language of the Constitution “is composed of plain words easily understood,” words that are “‘positive,’ ‘absolute,’ ‘emphatic.’ ” That the Supreme Court could be locked in a “prolonged conflict” over the First Amendment suggests that the Constitution is far from being transparent or immediately comprehensible.³⁰ The Constitution itself lays down a set of liberties that may be in conflict, for example, the right to bear arms and the right to public safety, the right of an owner to his property, and the right of government to restrict the misuse of said property. The Constitution itself offers no guidance as to which right has priority, and Hook suggests in The Paradoxes of Freedom that the best way to understand law is not by defining what it is but by observing what it does and judging it according to the values of a democratic society.

But here Hook the socialist had to contend with Jefferson the individualist. During Hook's era, the opposition to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal came from Republicans who identified themselves as Jeffersonians, even though FDR himself hailed Jefferson as his predecessor. Hook notes that in Jefferson's time the doctrine of rights provided the means by which the authority of the state could be resisted in a society that had yet to feel the full fruits of democratic self-government. Hook acknowledges that Jefferson saw no significant role for the nation-state (and Joseph J. Ellis, in his 1998 book The American Sphinx, suggests that if we want to know what government should do about education, crime, pollution, unemployment, drugs and AIDS, malfeasance in the corporate world, and the rule of money in the political, we shall find no answer in the thought and life of Thomas Jefferson). And Jefferson himself, Hook notes, presents America's political culture with a series of paradoxes in his conviction, one held even more strongly today, that men and women are free only to the extent that the state is not free to interfere with their lives. In rebutting this position, Hook reasons somewhat as Alexander Hamilton reasoned in The Federalist (1787–88) and as John Adams did in his three-volume Defence of the Constitution (1787), when they observed that power and liberty are not necessarily in all instances incompatible and that the state as an instrument of power may serve human needs and not always pose a threat to human freedom. “By way of summary,” Hook notes, “I can point to at least three crucial truths which this interpretation [the state as enemy] underplays, and sometimes overlooks”:

One way to be intelligent is to recognize what Jefferson himself taught, that the past has no binding authority over the present and that the dead should not be allowed to control the living. Although Hook did not invoke Jefferson's dictum of the “sovereignty of the present generation,” he could well have done so in the following passage, in which he quotes Jefferson saying: “Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.” In light of the state of communications in Jefferson's day, Hook adds, “this would very probably have been true.”

Hook's statement reads like a peroration to the New Deal. The case he made for democracy as the expression of freedom had broad support during the 1930s and 40s, when the popular Franklin Roosevelt had won four straight elections to the presidency and the New Deal's developing welfare state had enjoyed legitimacy. By the time Hook wrote The Paradoxes of Freedom in 1961, however, much of the public had turned against a strong executive, the New Deal and the welfare state had reached their limits, and another branch of government began to assert itself—the Supreme Court. It was the decisions of the Court that now made possible the rights of minorities that Jefferson's democratic majority had denied. Knowing full well that Jefferson despised judicial usurpation, what he called “the tendencies of judges to enlarge their jurisdiction,” the challenge Hook faced was to see if judicial review could be reconciled with democracy.

It would be less than honest to claim that Hook succeeded in reconciling the two, one expressing authority, the other freedom. He recognized that in the past the Court often took the side of big business against the rights of labor, but even in more recent times, in regard to civil rights, when the Court upheld cases of minorities, he remained unimpressed even though he supported school desegregation. He had no use for the decision of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Here the Court “sought to make amends, and reversed itself with pitifully inadequate and illogical arguments which suffer from comparison with the eloquent and logical dissent of Justice Harlan in 1883 in which he sought in vain to uphold Congress's right ‘to destroy the branches of slavery after its roots had been destroyed.’ ”³³

The issue of race was the major issue that Hook's faith in democracy failed to resolve. Of Jefferson's faith in the people, Hook claimed it may or may not be justified. “But a genuine democracy can rest on no principle which contradicts it. That is why the modern defenders of judicial supremacy—since we are all democrats now!—strain themselves by heroic feats of semantic reinterpretation to acknowledge this faith too. But in vain!”³⁴ In the debate over repealing the Judiciary Act of 1801, Hook observed, Hamilton, in the caustic words of Gouverneur Morris, did not wax rhapsodic about democracy but instead “blurted out the truth about his faith and those of his fellow Federalists: ‘Why are we here? To save the people from their most dangerous enemy: to save them from themselves.’ ”³⁵

Curiously, when Hook writes of freedom he is open to its paradoxes. But when he writes of democracy he will not allow it to rest on any contradictory principle. When he wrote of the contradiction between natural right and popular sovereignty, or between the liberty of the individual and the tyranny of the majority, or between those who would use the ballot to preserve democracy and those who would use it to welcome a dictatorship (the tragic scenario of the Weimar Republic), Hook sensed the presence of such conflicts in American history and the modern world. But, like Dewey, he had no answer to them other than to call for more democracy and more intelligence. Pragmatism promised to help us get through life by showing how to confront a “problematic situation.” But when it came to the problem of democracy, the pragmatists shunned looking into Alexis de Tocqueville's text for much the same reason the Jesuits once shunned peering into Galileo's telescope.

That African Americans, women, and ethnic and other minorities had to turn to the courts to assert their rights suggests a cruel irony of democracy, if not a paradox or contradiction, and the post–World War II Nuremberg trials indicate that if justice is to be done, the people are not to be allowed to be judges in their own cause. The democratic people so precious to Hook and Dewey may not have needed to be saved from themselves, but certainly others did have to be saved from those who did not feel the need to be saved. In the course of American history, the egalitarian values that Jefferson espoused had to be realized in the very political institutions he opposed: a strong executive and an activist judiciary. The values of democracy would be made possible only by the government's mechanism of control and the rulings of judicial fiat. The pragmatists always believed that the human mind could get along without authority; not once did Dewey or Hook consider that freedom based on rights might have to be realized through it.