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PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC POLICY by Sidney Hook

Southern Illinois University

288 pages; $17.50

In his seminars at New York University, Professor Sidney Hook often asked students to define Bertrand Russell's beliefs. But no one could trap the gadfly who advocated the nuclear destruction of the U.S.S.R., the condemnation of U.S. imperialism, the adoption of idealism, rationalism or realism. Concluded the professor: "Next time anyone asks you, 'What is Bertrand Russell's philosophy?,' the correct answer is, 'What year, please?' "

When future seminars address themselves to Sidney Hook's work, the correct response will require only one word change: Any year, please. As these 21 feisty essays demonstrate, over the past four decades the teacher-philosopher has seen no reason to alter his course. He did not need Alexander Solzhenitsyn to inform him of the Gulag; back in the '30s Hook condemned the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, nations whose politics employed "vicious ersatz theologies." The Supreme Court's pendulum decisions on criminal justice have found Hook unchanged; he has long advocated the rights of the victim: "When we read that a man whose speeding car had been stopped by a motorcycle policeman, who without a search warrant forced him to open his trunk that contained ... corpses ... walks out of court scot-free because the evidence is ruled inadmissible—we can only conclude that the law is an ass."

Save for an early immersion in Marxism, Hook, 77, has found his place outside of movements or situation ethics. For this perversity he has been attacked by Communists, religious dogmatists, reactionaries and the '60s New Left, who charged conspiracy when Richard Nixon ordered reprints of a Hook article decrying campus violence. "You cannot bar other people from agreeing with you," concluded the author, and went on attacking blighted authority wherever he found it—including the White House.

In fact, hypocrisy and its concomitant, special pleading, have always been Hook's true bêtes noires: "The impassioned groups that shout in our courtrooms today 'All power to the people' are unaware that they are calling for mob rule of which many of their forebears were victims." Of reverse discrimination, Hook demands: "Would it be reasonable to contend that women should have been compensated for past discrimination against their maternal forebears by being given an extra vote or two ... ?" Nor is he indulgent to political philosophers—"those of us who are concerned with current issues ... we need only refer to Santayana's apologias for Mussolini and Stalin, Heidegger's support of Hitler, Sartre's refusal to condemn the concentration-camp economy of the Soviet Union."