 Educational issues were intertwined with broader issues of American society. The issue of affirmative action for college admissions, for example, related to the social issue of the nature of American democratic pluralism. Hook supported a conception of American democracy as a society that had been built upon individual rights and equality before the law, where greater equality was to be realized by virtue of the fact that the United States was a society of multiple opportunities with differing patterns for upward mobility. In contrast, Hook perceived affirmative action, with its corollary of quotas assigned to designated groups as a conception of American democracy as a system of group rights, where greater equality was to be realized by distributive measures. For Hook, rights were ascribed to the individual and not to individuals as members of majority or minority groups. Consequently, discrimination on grounds of race was illegitimate, whether it was designed as an expression of majority prejudice against a minority or as a benign instrument of rectificatory justice. Accordingly, for Hook, programs of affirmative action could be justified if they functioned to help a deprived individual student overcome deficiencies in his educational background or to eliminate any bars to opportunity that had been erected by discriminatory laws or practices. Programs of affirmative action, however, that resulted in quotas for minority group participation involved discrimination against the rights of other individuals. Since each individual was entitled to equality before the law and equality of rights, no individual was entitled, on grounds of membership in an historically deprived group or racial or ethnic minority, to advantages that violate equality of rights and justify discrimination against other individuals on racial or ethnic ground. While the social ideal of overcoming economic inequality was legitimate, the means for its realization could not involve replacing individual rights with group rights or justifying discrimination against individuals who were considered equal before the law. Hook took note of the great progress toward equality that had taken place in American society from the turn of the century through the 1980s. Hook expressed confidence in the capacities of a democratic society to overcome inequalities in economic distribution and in social participation of ethnic minorities without transforming the legal structure of the American system that had prevailed through those decades. As a lifelong supporter of John Dewey, Hook believed that democratic society, if it embodied the critical method, would be capable of progressive improvement.