ABSTRACT
By conscious design, Sidney Hook has chosen to write a public record rather than a personal statement. At the risk of incurring the wrath of a great scholar, the ultimate problem with Hook's book is not only its arbitrary distinction between public affairs and private lives but the inability or unwillingness to weave a philosophic garment out of political cloth. Hook, the guardian of a pure Marxism purged of Leninism-StalinismMaoism, is contemptuous of everyone from Sartre to Horkheimer who sought to improve on the original by modernization. The task of construction has long passed from the hands of the philosophers to those of the social and physical scientists. Marxism and Beyond provides a showcase for an elder scholar who is exceptionally gifted and knowledgeable in the fundamentals of Marxist literature. Although his Festschrift comes at the end of the twentieth century, Sidney Hook's singular achievement has been to close out the nineteenth.
