Reading Marx through the lens of America, and America through the lens of Marx, was a preoccupation of left-wing intellectuals throughout the twentieth century. During the 1930s, many turned to Marx to help them make sense of the Great Depression. The philosopher Sidney Hook’s groundbreaking 1933 book, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx, which a reviewer called “the most significant contribution to Marxism which has as yet appeared in America,” melded pragmatism, the quintessentially American philosophy of his teacher John Dewey, to the radical internationalism of Karl Marx. Hook interpreted Marx through Dewey’s pragmatic notion that all ideas must be Read more