The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

What a surprise to find this subject, these men, dealt with in a manner that shows good scholarship and enjoyable writing. I expected a drier late summer read. Instead it was a cold refreshing drink.

As I was reading Thomas Friedman's "Latitudes and Attitudes," I kept coming back to Louis Menand's "Metaphysical Club," where a major theme is how we form beliefs; and how we are to navigate through life in a universe shot through with contingency. When an absolute belief dominates one's thinking, when theocracy is held high and democratic dissension is not allowed: violence results. This is as true today with the Islamic Jihad as it was in the antebellum US, when differing beliefs on race and slavery led to Civil War. To appreciate this fully, one would need to read Menand's book. It isn't really about a philosophy club - indeed the club is hardly discussed. Nor is it a biography of the key members of that club - Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Chauncey Wright and Charles Sanders Pierce, John Dewey et. al. It's not even about an idea. It's about an approach to thinking - Pragmatism -"an account of the way people think - the way they come up with ideas, form beliefs and reach decisions." It's about the interplay of necessity, belief, free will and chance in the face of war, labor unrest and the dynamic growth of a young country. This is not a biography in the usual sense. Indeed, the main characters are "Representative Men" in Emerson's sense - or - l'homme moyen -- " the average man" in The Queteletan, statistical sense. These are the men who "for a given era...represent everything that is grand, beautiful and good." The book begins with Holmes - whose story opens and closes the book. Holmes serves the story as an encapsulation of the changes in America, from antebellum Boston-Brahmin beliefs in absolutism and abolitionism to the Supreme Court Justice whose jurisprudence rests on hard-won experience and the first widespread use of the concept of "the reasonable" man. This approach to biography was both fascinating and frustrating. Holmes is not Holmes, but the nexus of Emerson, the Civil War, and progressive politic in the court. William James serves as the point of departure for a comparison of the absolutisms of Agassiz vs. the contingency of Darwin, societal pluralism, race relations, and the assimilation of Eastern and Southern European immigrants into the American "race." Pierce is emblematic of the use of statistics in the analysis of personality traits (the Hetty Green case), and an object lesson in the clash of changing morals and a conservative academy. Dewey serves as the transition from the impractical Burlington (VT) school of Transcendental philosophy and Hegelianism (absolutisms) to a reformer of education, psychology, university-faculty tenure rights, sociology and labor practices.All of these ideas and currents wend through the individual lives and times Menand covers. The overall narrative structure of this book is equally fascinating and frustrating. The reader is forever led down tangents that circle back and intersect with some other section, thought, event, or person covered elsewhere. In this w

"The Metaphysical Club" spent a whole lot of time on bestseller lists, and won a Pulitzer Prize for its author, Louis Menand. Its subtitle, "A Story of Ideas in America," gives some indication on what the book is about, but until you actually read the book you cannot begin to grasp its depth and sheer brilliance. The biggest surprise is Menand's credentials; he is a professor of English at the City University in New York. That an English professor wrote an amazing synthesis of philosophy, sociology, and history is worthy of some type of prize.This book involves the reader on so many different levels that a review is sure to leave lots of information untouched. In short (very short!), Menand argues that studying the philosophical works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey will tell us about where America has been, and where it is now. Menand argues that these four people influenced the way we think and act today.Oliver Wendell Holmes fought in the Civil War as a young man. Later in life, he became one of America's leading legal theorists as a justice of the Supreme Court. The war deeply scarred Holmes, calling into question his conceptions of life and truth. In his legal rulings and scholarly articles, Holmes subscribed to the view that "certitude leads to violence," which means those with absolute ideas (like abolitionists and pro-slavery forces) won't compromise their belief systems. The result of this unwillingness to compromise is often bloody violence. Many of Holmes's rulings and writings support the belief that ideas, no matter how repugnant, should find full expression in society regardless of how unworthy they may be. Better to battle over a belief in socialism or communism through public debate then on the battlefield where thousands perish.Charles Peirce was a philosopher and mathematician. While he is relegated to relative obscurity today, Menand argues that Peirce is tremendously significant in American philosophical history. Peirce worked as a statistician for the government, but in his off time he wrote intricate philosophical arguments concerning the nature of ideas and belief systems. The underpinning of all of Peirce's writings is the belief that human knowledge cannot rely on the observations of individuals. Peirce argued that humans have limited sensory perceptions that detect limited information. Just because we see something in front of us does not mean that it is an absolute. Even the law of gravity may not be absolute because we cannot see it in action everywhere that it exists. The best way, or at least the way with the least room for statistical error, to come to some form of "true" knowledge is to rely on the collected perceptions of the community. This idea can be extended to a "community over the individual" mentality, and it reached its greatest expression in the writings of John Dewey.One of Peirce's ardent admirers was William James. James is best known today for the philosophy of

Both the editorial review and many of the individual reviews have mentioned that this is a study of four principal figures of pragmatism: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey. That depiction is, however, incomplete and misleading. THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB is, as the subtitle proclaims, a study of ideas in America. While it is true that these four individuals are the lynchpins around which much of the story revolves, Menand keeps in mind one of the main doctrines held by all these thinkers, that the social is more primary than the individual. This book is a study of the intellectual life of late nineteenth century America as a whole, and while Holmes, James, Sanders, and Dewey provide much of the focus, their individual stories do not exhaust the tale that Menand is trying to tell.Menand provides a brilliant portrait of the intellectual life of America in the post-Civil War era. The story is told from a generalist and not a specialist point of view. If one is interested in pragmatism, this provides the background and an outline of an introduction to the subject. As historical background, this book is unsurpassed. But it is crucial to keep in mind that it is background, not foreground. It does not begin to rival, for instance, such studies as Murry Murphy's tragically out of print study of Peirce's thought, or Gerald Myer's biography of James, or Bruce Kuklick's study of the development of American Philosophy. Apart from the works of the figures themselves, these are the secondary works to which one would go for greater depth on the subject. But none of these works provides Menand's delicious breadth.The number of subjects that Menand takes up is stunning. In some 440 pages he deals with such a variety of topics as abolitionism, slavery, Daniel Webster, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Emerson, the American reception of and reaction to Darwin, Louis Agassiz, Jane Addams, the Pullman Strike, W.E.B. DuBois, Alain Locke, Franz Boas, Benjamin Peirce, Chauncey Wright, theories of race, Boston societal structure, the development of the American university, several key decisions by the Supreme Court, Swendenborg, 19th Century conceptions of laissez-faire, the development of probability, the rise of statistical thinking, and a host of other issues. But what is striking is how well Menand integrates each new individual or idea with the rest of the work. He never introduces anyone just in order to chat about them; in each instance the introduction deepens and enhances the issue at hand. Each new idea helps take the story to the next stage. Finally, I want to point out just how marvelously well written this book is. The prose is never less than utterly clear; it frequently rises to the level of exhilarating. It is not just that the book tells a story that deserves telling. The book is so well written that it is flat out fun. It is the nearest thing to an intellectual page turner as one is likely to find.

This book, a blend of biography and intellectual history, truly has it all: a profound, original thesis; a beautiful narrative style; and a clear presentation of complex ideas without diluting their intellectual gravity. The book does for William James, Wendall Holmes, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey what Tony Judt's wonderful THE BURDEN OF RESPONSIBILITY did for Blum, Camus, and Aron--rescues critically important intellectual figures from obscurity and presents them in a graceful human form. The analysis of both character and theory is appreciative and appropriately irreverent. Menand wants you to see them and their ideas in the context of a society tolerant of both eccentricity and fanaticism, and in the context of a society that was fundamentally altered by the Civil War. Beautifully done, and an exhilarating read.A warning to specialists: This book is intended for a general audience.A warning to the politically correct: You may be offended.A warning to regionalists (like myself): It's not as simple as Yankee = the good guys, Southerner = the bad guys.The only criticism I have is slight. Menand neglects the contributions of Josiah Royce to the intellectual community of the period he is describing, but he more than makes up for it with vivid portraits of such forgotten figures as Louis Aggasiz, G. Stanley Hall, Eugene Debs, etc...If this one doesn't pull down the Pulitzer I'll be disappointed.

This is a rare book with ambitions to be scholarly and popular at the same time. On one level it is more successful as a popular exposition of complex ideas and thinkers. On another level, however, it succeeds both ways because it awakes in the reader an appreciation of the scope of intellectual life in the United States and a desire to understand and to perpetuate it.The key figures in the book are the great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the philosophers William James, Charles Pierce, and John Dewey. They were the basic American practicioners of, roughly speaking, a philosophy called pragmatism, which teaches that ideas are tools to be used to accomplish a purpose rather than abstractions which mirror to greater or lesser accuracy some independent reality.Menand examines each figure in light of his family life (Holmes, James, and Pierce all were products, in their different ways, of homes were ideas mattered; Dewey perhaps less so), temprament, reading, and educational and cultural background. He places a great deal of emphasis on the American Civil War as a basis, with his protagonists, for rejecting absolutistic views of principle and reality. An uncompromising commitment to absolutes led, for post Civil War thinkers, to the War and its carnage. This is an important historical claim and it works very well in the case of Oliver Wendell Holmes. I am not sure how convincing it is as an explanation of the thought of the other three figures. William James wrote an important essay "The Moral Equivalent of War" unmentioned in Menand's book, which talks about the apparent inability of modern life to find values to move the heart and spririt as the heart and spririt were moved in the passion of war. In other words, James, at least, was searching for values, and perhaps even for absolutes, rather than expressing a skepticism towards them.In addition to placing pragmatism in the context of the post Civil War era, Menand places great emphasis on the development of modern science, particularly Darwin's theory of evolution and statistical theory. These developments, for Menand, tended to discourage a view of the universe as fixed, rational, and purposeful. Knowledge became tied closely to theories of statistical generalization and theory of error, with an emphasis on what worked. Scientific theory in fact gets a larger place in the book than does the Civil War as a basis for the development of pragmatism and I think deservedly so. Menand stresses how intellectual development in the United States was tied to racial theories and to other theories such as spiritualism that we find markedly out of place today. This is not a new story, but it is well told and does show something important about how ideas we value can emanate from teachings we would reject or find strange.In addition to the four primary figures, Menand discusses a host of other philosophers and thinkers, predecessors, successors, and colleagues to Holmes, James, Pierce