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A Student of Sidney Hook Dies

Barbara Branden.jpg




Barbara Branden, perhaps best known as the author of The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986), and as co-author, with then-husband Nathaniel Branden, of Who is Ayn Rand? (1962), died on December 11th.


The actress Julie Delpy played Barbara in a TV movie based on The Passion of Ayn Rand, and sharing that name, which aired in 1999. No less of a legend than Helen Mirren played the titular protagonist.


Given the above two paragraphs, you may well see the headline above as odd. But as Branden tells us in The Passion, and  as many of the obits have mentioned, BB did study philosophy with the Marxist/pragmatist/and eventual neocon Sidney Hook, at New York University. She defended Hook in conversations within the Randian circle as someone who was committed to reason.


I'd rather write about Hook than about Rand any day. In the era in which BB knew him, Hook was known as the author of Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx (1933)and  From Hegel to Marx (1936).


The aim of both of those books, and of much else that Hook wrote early on in his long scholarly career, was to cross-pollinate the ideas of the pragmatist tradition (which he understood in Deweyite form) with those of Karl Marx. This meant unhooking Marxist social philosophy from the remnants of its Hegelian metaphysical origins, and giving it a sounder basis in empirical/instrumentalist reasoning.


So Branden's admiration for Hook was a recognition of his devotion to reason so understood. And likely of the fact that Hook's devotion to reason actually required a lot of reasoning, not just a lot of pious declarations of the value of Reason! Nudge nudge.
 
I'll end this brief entry on a student of Hook with a brief quote from Hook (though not from either of the two books mentioned above -- I'll leave it to my diligent readers to dig up the source if they like): "Where reason makes a difference, it is as intelligence, not as embodied structure, and not as a metaphysical trait."



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