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.

The 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.

"In preparing this remarkable book, Ernest Hook persuaded an eminent group of scientists, historians, sociologists and philosophers to focus on the problem: why are some discoveries rejected at a particular time but later seen to be valid? The interaction of these experts did not produce agreement on 'prematurity' in science but something more valuable: a collection of fascinating papers, many of them based on new research and analysis, which sometimes forced the author to revise a previously-held opinion. The book should be enthusiastically welcomed by all readers who are interested in how science works."--Stephen G. Brush, co-author of "Physics, The Human Adventure: From copernicus to Einstein and Beyond

""Prematurity and Scientific Discovery contains interesting and insightful papers by numerous well-known scientists and scholars. It will be of wide interest, not only to science studies scholars but also to working scientists and to science-literate general readers."--Thomas Nickles, editor of "Scientific Discovery, Logic, and Rationality