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‘Zestfully good, urbane and original, “The Metaphysical Club” enlivens virtually everything it touches, and on its frequent diversions it touches many things: natural selection and racism; probability distributions and disputed wills; the Dartmouth case and academic freedom. Anybody interested in modern America will find rewards aplenty.’ Economist
‘Brilliant…Menand brings rare common sense and graceful, witty prose to his richly nuanced reading of American intellectual history – a story that takes in (to name only a few of the other players) Emerson, Hegel, Kant, the second Great Awakening, probability theory, the nebular hypothesis, the Pullman strike, academic freedom and the ever-present issue of race.’ New York Review of Books
‘A hugely ambitious, unmistakably brilliant intellectual history, nothing less than an explanation of the social historical, economic and spiritual forces that caused American thinking to change radically…A landmark work of scholarship and a popular history of profound sweeping change of enormous worth.’ New York Times
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A riveting, original book about the creation of the modern American mind.
The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., founder of modern jurisprudence; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist, and the founder of semiotics. The Club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea – an idea about ideas. This book is the story of that idea. Holmes, James, and Peirce all believed that ideas are not things “out there” waiting to be discovered but are tools people invent – like knives and forks and microchips – to make their way in the world. They thought that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals – that ideas are social. They do not develop according to some inner logic of their own but are entirely dependent – like germs – on their human carriers and environment. And they thought that the survival of any idea depends not on its immutability but on its adaptability. ‘The Metaphysical Club’ is written in the spirit of this idea about ideas. It is not a history of philosophy but an absorbing narrative about personalities and social history, a story about America. It begins with the American Civil War and ends with World War I. This is a book about the evolution of the American mind during the crucial period that formed the world we now inhabit.
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The author traces the development of the concept through the biographies of four key intellectuals - Charles Pierce, William James, John Dewey and Oliver Wendell Holmes - and a collection of other characters, who corresponded, debated and whose work intersected. He shows how the ideas emerged naturally out of the aftermath of the civil war as the intellectual culture of the States readjusted itself. The four figures he focuses on worked in very different fields (jurisprudence, psychology, logic and education) and this makes for a very wide-ranging book.
By taking a biographical approach, the author avoids a dry intellectual work, and brings his subject alive. Menaud has a gift for clear explanation and simplifying (without reducing) philosophical concepts. The anecdotes and examples he uses to tell his story (the court case of Hetty Robinson, showing how probability theory started being used in evidence, for example) are well-chosen, well-told and illustrate the development of a philosophy which roots itself in its social context. He also analyses the faults in the philosophical theory, and the problems that later philosophers found with it, which led to its loss in intellectual currency.
This book would be enjoyed by a wider audience than just those interested in philosophy - it is highly recommended to anyone who enjoys both biography and history.
That said, the most staggering thing for me, reflecting a hole in my knowledge that this book did a huge amount to fill, was the reflection that America has been postmodernizing for a lot longer than I had ever imagined.
And all of this from an exceedingly READABLE book.
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