The heroism of Sidney Hook.

ON MAY 14 in Washington, D.C., the philosopher Sidney Hook, recipient this year of the annual Jefferson Award of the National Endowment for the Humanities, delivered the accompanying Jefferson Lecture. It certainly would not be true to say that this was in any way the climax of Hook's career, but ceremonies and events do often possess their deeper meanings, and this was a fitting occasion: indeed a glittering one, at which one of our foremost philosophers of free institutions, recipient now of perhaps the most distinguished intellectual award bestowed by the government of the United States, honored his audience in turn by delivering in the capital of the Republic his thoughts at eighty-one.

Sidney Hook is almost as old as the present century, and he has lived its distinctive intellectual life with great intensity. A student of John Dewey, an early scholar and critic of Marxism and, long before it was generally acceptable, a fierce opponent of Stalinism, Hook as a philosopher is normally placed within the tradition of American pragmatism, as the intellectual continuator of the tradition of C. S. Pierce, William James, and John Dewey; and of course that is correct. In a recent essay on Hook, his friend and admirer Irving Kristol made an interesting point about this American tradition. In European political thought, Kristol said, democracy refers to a form of government, a regime, which today is considered superior to other forms and other regimes. But with these American philosophers, democracy is a more comprehensive thing, a "faith." For better or worse, that seems descriptively accurate. The democratic "faith" affects everything, aesthetics and religion, education and manners, as well as politics.

But there is another and equaly true way of seeing Hook and his work. In his lucidity and his astringency, he possesses a classical quality that links him with the early American philosophers of freedom, and he would have been at home intellectually with the eighteenth-century men who designed the original republican framework.

In his Jefferson Lecture, Hook assessed both the sciences and the humanities from the perspective of of survival of free institutions. He evaluated shrewdly the cultural roles of both, but concluded that, vital though they are, more is needed. He recalled a Reagan proposal in 1981 for a federal endowment for democracy, which is now in the process of organization, and supplemented this by asking for a national effort toward education in the history nand theory of free institutions. There is no doubt that we need education in American history focused upon such considerations--curriculum development at all levels, education in the lives of prominent statesmen of freedom and in the political theory behind republican freedoms. At one time, perhaps, such knowledge was traditional, absorbed and intuitive, but it is so no longer. In Hook's veiw, such education could mean the difference between the survival of free institutions and their demise here and around the world.

Over the years, Sidney Hook has himself been a hero in the intellectual struggle to defend free institutions. His endurance, nay, his relentlessness, has been immensely impressive. He is now completing his memoirs, and the portions that have appeared in magazines have been instructive and courageous. At 81, neither his combativeness nor his love of freedom has in the least been muted.