Sidney Hook

Born in Brooklyn to parents of Austrian heritage, Sidney Hook became a prominent postwar pragmatist philosopher. Hook began teaching at New York University in 1927 and spent several decades at the institution, shaping generations of American thinkers until his retirement in 1969. In his youth, Hook was a committed communist, and he traveled to Moscow as a visiting scholar in 1929. He broke away from communism in the early 1930s, and after World War II, he worked closely with American anticommunist efforts. Still, he remained a socialist and continued to write extensively on the place of freedom and debate in democratic societies.