 Heresy, Yes – Conspiracy, No represented, from Hook’s perspective, a contribution to the defense of democracy and cultural freedom in an environment in which both democracy and cultural freedom were under attack from the Soviet Union. As previously mentioned, Hook was a leading member of the editorial board of Partisan Review. During the 1950s, this journal was the premier anti-communist publication in the United States. The leading intellectual figures who represented opposition to the policies of Joseph Stalin and the leaders of the Soviet Union in their internal policies and to the international policies of the Soviet Union wrote on the nature of Soviet society and policy for this journal. These figures included such leading writers from Western Europe as George Orwell, André Malreaux, and Ignazio Silone as well as the American black novelist Richard Wright and such intellectual luminaries from Eastern Europe as Czeslaw Milosz, Arthur Koestler and Manes Sperber. As the leading journal within the anti-communist spectrum, Partisan Review was confronted by the moral issue of McCarthyism. The activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the late 1940s and early 1950s represented a problem for anti-communism in two dimensions. On the one hand, from the public relations perspective, McCarthy’s inaccuracies and exaggerations provided a sword to the critics of anti-communism. One quip of the period that represented this aspect was the thesis of liberal opponents of McCarthy that they were “anti-anti-communists.” More significantly, on substantive moral grounds, as Hook recognized, it was not tenable for an intellectual movement that charged Stalinism with framing its enemies in purges, trials and rehabilitation camps to be complicit with a movement which would falsely accuse persons of being communist agents or members of the Communist Party. The result was the decision by a majority of the editorial board of Partisan Review, including Sidney Hook, to condemn McCarthyism and to lend its support to the opponents of Senator McCarthy. In terms of the contemporaneous moral context, it is relevant to note that Professor James Burnham, who was a colleague of Sidney Hook at the Department of Philosophy at New York University, disagreed with this position and resigned from the editorial board of Partisan Review. Burnham’s argument was that it was a fallacy of moral equivalence to compare the enormity of immoral evil carried out by communism in its attack on democratic institutions with the moral flaws that had taken place during Senator McCarthy’s strategy and tactics of seeking to uncover Soviet agents who were guilty of espionage in the U.S. State Department or Government.