Their Dialectics and Ours

Abstract

This paper chronicles a “missed connection” between the young Herbert Marcuse and his American contemporary, the philosopher Sidney Hook, and finds an unexpected complementarity in their efforts to reinvigorate the Marxist tradition against the backdrop of Stalinism. It examines the two philosophers’ first exchange in the early 1940s, by which time Hook had abandoned both his political and intellectual radicalism. Finally, it shows that the terms of Hook’s objection to Marcuse’s critical theory prefigured the tradtional left’s resistance to Marxist-humanism following the dissemination of Marx’s early manuscripts two decades later.