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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.

This book challenges liberals and conservatives alike. Hook pierces to the heart of momentous issues: human rights, racial equality, cultural freedom, and the separation of ethical behaviour from religious belief.

One of America's most influential social philosophers offers a restatement of traditional liberal-democratic views as they pertain to our constitutional form of government. The topics explored in Sidney Hook's book include the nature and extent of human freedom, the Bill of Rights, judicial review as it pertains to constitutional interpretation and the balance of powers among the three branches of government, censorship, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, social justice, the importance of intelligence in political and moral spheres, as well as civil disobedience and the right to revolution within a democratic order. Here we have a sustained, nonpartisan analysis of the place of the Constitution and judicial review within our democracy. Special emphasis is given to reconsidering the proper role of the Supreme Court if and when a Constitutional Convention is convoked to address this and related questions.

Sidney Hook (1902-1989) was a philosopher, a college professor, America's leading disciple of John Dewey, and, during the 1930s, perhaps America's most significant explicator of Karl Marx. He was also for many years arguably the country's most astute and important anti-communist intellectual. This volume is the first devoted to his private letters. Selected from the voluminous collection of his papers at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University and spanning the years 1929 to 1987, the letters contain Hook's views on such subjects as war and peace, Marxism and communism, the Soviet Union, the Spanish Civil War, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. Hook was a prolific letter writer, and he corresponded with a great variety of individuals. Some were strangers who had written to him concerning an article or book review he had just published, others were prominent intellectuals - among them Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to name just a few - and still others were public officials. Hook saw himself, above all, as a teacher, and as a teacher he felt it his duty to discuss with anyone who would listen his conception of the obligations of democratic citizenship. Hook had enormous faith in the power of education and reason and in the soundness of America's democratic institutions and values. That faith is reflected in these letters.

In this classic work, originally published in 1932, Hook set out to demonstrate to the radical and conservative philosophers and activists of the 1920s and 1930s that Marx was a systematic thinker who developed a sound set of philosophical principles. His major argument is that Marx was undogmatic in his approach to philosophy and a critical thinker who assimilated and synthesized a variety of ideas. Hook explains how Marx engaged both Hegel and the young Hegelians in order to develop the notion of the dialectic with Marx's take on historical materialism. The individual chapters engage the reader through the debates and discussions between Marx and young Hegelians such as Moses Hess, who influenced Marx in the study of social and economic problems Feuerbach, who influenced Marx's view of religion Bruno Bauer (antiliberalism) Arnold Ruge (philosophy as politics) and Max Stirner (ideals as illusions).

Report Of The Work Of The Central Committee Of The Communist Party Of The Soviet Union, By Stalin; And The Democratic And Dictatorial Aspects Of Communism, By Hook.

This is a new release of the original 1927 edition.

Contributing Authors Include Alice Ambrose, Max Black, Rudolf Carnap, And Many Others.

Report Of The Work Of The Central Committee Of The Communist Party Of The Soviet Union, By Stalin; And The Democratic And Dictatorial Aspects Of Communism, By Hook.

This is a new release of the original 1927 edition.

Contributing Authors Include Brand Blanshard, Max Black, William Barrett, And Many Others.

Considered by some the most controversial American philosopher of contemporary times, SIDNEY HOOK (1902-1989) was infamous for the wild swing in his political thought over the course of his career, starting out as a young Marxist before the Great Depression and ending up a vehement anti-Communist in his later years. Hook's conception of history and the individual's impact upon it is the subject of this intriguing work, first published in 1943. Subtitled A Study in Limitation and Possibility, it examines the concept of the "hero" as it relates to leadership in the modern world, the hero as a child of crisis, how the character of rulers affects society, how history swings on the contingent and the unforeseen, and much more. With sections on the Russian revolution and the influence of the hero on democracy, this unexpectedly entertaining book is an enthralling look at the theories that shaped Hook's thought and guided his changes in political alliance.

Contributing Authors Include Heinz Hartmann, Ernest Nagel, Lawrence Kubie, And Many Others. The Contents Of This Volume Comprise The Proceedings Of The Second Annual New York University Institute Of Philosophy, Held At Washington Square, New York, March 28-29, 1958.

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2011 Reprint of 1955 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. In this work Sidney Hook, a distinguished scholar, examines the chief issues which have divided Marxists from non-Marxists, and Marxists from each other. This volume of exposition, comment and readings is offered as an introduction to the study of Marxism in conflicting theory and practice. A valuable collection of original source readings are provided, including "The Communist Manifesto," "Historical Materialism," "The Fetishism of Commodities," "Religion and Economics," and much more by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Kautsky, Trotsky and Luxemburg.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Dedicated "to the memory of a Great Adversary," this 1940 work is a startling clarion call to embrace reason and rationality as the only way to solve social problems. Hook discusses: [ democracy and scientific method [ the meaning behind nonsense [ the folklore of capitalism [ ideas as weapons [ integral humanism [ science, atheism, and mythology [ science and the "new obscurantism" [ the mythology of class science [ and much more.

Since its inception, pragmatism has been criticized as and-metaphysical, its focus on scientific method and critical inquiry viewed as undermining one of the very foundations of traditional philosophy. Here, Sidney Hook begins his distinguished philosophical career by juxtaposing these terms to show that the pragmatic method cannot begin to help us solve human problems without holding to a particular view of how the world is arranged both physically and conceptually. But this does not imply that pragmatism holds to a traditional, rigid metaphysic; rather, it has an interactive dimension in which human problems are viewed as contingent upon the ways we structure our questions and design methods for finding solutions, both of which can change -- and the implied metaphysic evolve -- as inquiry uncovers new information about ourselves and the world.