 Since, as previously noted, Hook’s interest in Marxism was not an abstract theoretical one, but involved his personal commitment and activity in the arena of contemporaneous politics, it was virtually inevitable that the focus of his concern would shift toward the major events that emerged as the dominant historical realities of the 1930s. Hook’s political thought was pioneering in the critical intensity that he brought to bear upon two major movements of the 1930s: Stalinism and Nazism.