(FORTUNE Magazine) – Several decades ago, when I was an undergraduate at New York University, I had the enormous good fortune to discover Sidney Hook. A brilliant and inspiring lecturer, he was chairman of the philosophy department; he was also a powerful presence outside the university, endlessly working to reshape intellectuals' views about foreign policy, academic freedom, and quite a lot in between. Observing over the years that he never lost an argument, I gradually learned to agree with him on all major matters, although I worry about his economics. Presumably I am not alone in worrying: Hook calls himself a socialist but has nevertheless been a hero of conservatives for years. His autobiography, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (Harper & Row, $29.95), can be read as a high-level running commentary on the major rows among intellectuals during the past 60 years or so. Hook, now 84, has always been a formidable logician and doubly formidable in debate because he tends to be on top of the empirical evidence. So in reading about his rows over the years, you get to learn a lot about, say, the Hiss-Chambers case or the effect of McCarthyism on the campuses. (Hook leaves you thinking that Senator McCarthy's impact on academic freedom was trivial compared with the assault mounted by radicals in the Sixties and later.) You also get marvelous vignettes of the intellectual eminences the author knew, including Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Albert Einstein. The portrait of Russell is a special gem. I would never have guessed the great philosopher had the peasant cunning evidenced in his advice about assignations. ''Hook,'' he once counseled, ''if you ever take a girl to a hotel and the reception clerk seems suspicious, when he gives you the price of the room have her complain loudly, 'It's much too expensive!' He's sure to assume she is your wife.''