 One additional aspect of Hook’s consideration of the relationship between pragmatism and Marxism was his attempt to set up an “experimental” test for the vindication or refutation of Marxism as an historical theory. Hook’s analysis of the role of the heroic person at different periods in history that was carried out in his 1943 study The Hero in History can be interpreted as developing such a “crucial experiment.” In the final chapter of this study, the role of Lenin as the hero of the Russian Revolution is examined. It is evident on Hook’s account that the Russian Revolution cannot be adequately understood as an historical transformation that was carried out under inevitable dialectical laws. The empirical historical narrative of the period does not cohere with a theoretical construction according to which the social forces of production of pre-Soviet Russia were being fettered by the class relations of production of a capitalist society resulting in an inevitable revolutionary transformation.