MORE ILLUSTRIOUS NAMES ASSOCIATED WITH JOHN DEWEY:
Early career as Marxist[edit]At the beginning of his career, Hook was a prominent expert on Karl Marx’s philosophy and was himself a Marxist. He attended the lectures of Karl Korsch in Berlin in 1928 and conducted research at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow in the summer of 1929.[2] At first, he wrote enthusiastically about the Soviet Union, and, in 1932, supported the Communist Party’s candidate, William Z. Foster, when he ran for President of the United States. However, Hook broke completely with the Comintern in 1933, holding its policies responsible for the triumph of Nazism in Germany. He accused Joseph Stalin of putting “the needs of the Russian state” over the needs of the international revolution.[3]
However, Hook remained active in some of the causes of the far Left during the Great Depression. In 1933, with James Burnham, Hook was one of the organizers of the American Workers Party, led by the Dutch-born pacifist minister A.J. Muste.[4] Hook also debated the meaning of Marxism with radical Max Eastman in a series of public exchanges.[5] (Eastman, like Hook, had studied under John Dewey at Columbia University.) In the late 1930s, Hook assisted Leon Trotsky in his efforts to clear his name in a special Commission of Inquiry headed by Dewey, which investigated Stalinist charges made against Trotsky during the Moscow Trials.