The 100 Greatest Brooklynites of All Time: 70 to 61
Perhaps a less familiar name that others on this list, Hook was actually one of America’s great mid-century philosophers, and his work building and defining the American Pragmatist school remains useful (heh) and relevant to this day. Born in Brooklyn to Austrian-Jewish immigrants, Hook was initially taken with the great American socialist upheavals of the early 20s, and was an ardent supporter of Eugene Debs; the Stalinist purges of the 30s, however, and the American left’s seeming willingness to ignore totalitarian oppression along ideological lines, left Hook disillusioned with the New Left. It was this very problem—the way in which the observable world is so easily distorted through the lens of dogmatic ideology—that motivated Hook’s essential pragmatic philosophy. (And yes, seeing the world exclusively through ideological glasses remains one of this country’s greatest problems.)
