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Louis Menand

The Metaphysical Club Hardcover – 1 May 2001

by Louis Menand (Author)

4.4 352 ratings

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Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for History

A riveting, original book about the creation of modern American thought.

The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Well Holmes, Jr., future associate justice of the United States Supreme Court; 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 depent -- like germs -- on their human carriers and environment. And they thought that the survival of any idea deps 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 Civil War and s in 1919 with Justice Holmes's dissenting opinion in the case of U.S. v. Abrams-the basis for the constitutional law of free speech. The first four sections of the book focus on Holmes, James, Peirce, and their intellectual heir, John Dewey. The last section discusses some of the fundamental twentieth-century ideas they are associated with. This is a book about a way of thinking that changed American life.

Print length

546 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Farrar Straus & Giroux
Publication date

1 May 2001
Dimensions

16.51 x 3.81 x 24.13 cm
ISBN-10

0374199639
ISBN-13

978-0374199630
See all details

Louis Menand
181
Paperback
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Product description

About the Author

Louis Menand is a professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a staff writer at The New Yorker, and has been a contributing editor of The New York Review of Books since 1994. He is the author of Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context and the editor of The Future of Academic Freedom and Pragmatism: A Reader.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar Straus & Giroux; 1st edition (1 May 2001)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 546 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374199639
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374199630
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.51 x 3.81 x 24.13 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 1,360,726 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 2,408 in 19th Century U.S. History
- 2,900 in Metaphysical Philosophy
- 9,011 in Philosopher Biographies

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4.4 352 ratings

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Louis Menand

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Louis Menand, professor of English at Harvard University, is the author of "The Metaphysical Club," which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in History. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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after it was recommended as introductory reading by one of my lecturers

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 April 2018

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I had no knowledge of the Pragmatists before reading this book, after it was recommended as introductory reading by one of my lecturers. Accessible to a reader who is interested in history and philosophy, this is a great gateway to the subject.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 August 2014

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Superb account of the development of American thought in the 100 years following the Civil War.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 November 2012

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The Book Looked brand new and the price was cheap and reasonable. I would definitely recommend the book to everyone.

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dino

Was expecting more reviews

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 November 2010

This is one of my favourite books which I recently re-read. I was just idly browsing amazon and was amazed that there were only two reviews for the book - I was expecting fifty-odd 4 - 5 star ratings. Maybe the book's sub-title and cover put people off, but it's not really US-specific. It's simply a very well-written history of some illustrious individuals from a similar time and place who published their thoughts on what constitutes a workable approach to life. I guess it would help your enjoyment if you were in broad sympathy with their views, but it's unlikely you'll agree with everything. Personally I just enjoyed reading about their ideas and being stimulated to freshen up my own.

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robin friedman

How Ideas Matter in America

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 September 2015

Louis Menand's Pulitzer-Prize winning "The Metaphysical Club" is a rare book which manages to be both scholarly and popular. As a popular work, it offers an accessible exposition of complex ideas and thinkers. On a more scholarly level, the book succeeds because it awakens 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 Metaphysical Club" include the great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes and the philosophers William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey. They were the basic American practitioners of 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 Peirce all were products, in their different ways, of homes were ideas mattered; Dewey less so), temperament, 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 concerns the apparent inability of modern life to find values to move the heart and spirit as the heart and spirit 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 many other philosophers and thinkers, predecessors, successors, and colleagues to Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey. The title of the book is based on an almost legendary "Metaphysical Club" that met all-too briefly in the 1870's under the auspices of Chauncey Wright, the "Cambridge Socrates". Ideas and intellectual life flourish briefly and quietly, but they may illuminate people's lives for times to come.
The book is chatty in tone with many disgressions on matters such as the Dartmouth College Supreme Court case, the Pullman Strike, Jane Addams and Hull House, and Louis Agassiz's expedition to Brazil. The digressions make it hard at times to keep to the thread of the narrative, but they do cast light on the era and on the development of thought in the United States.

The book does not expound in detail the thought of its principal characters. For that the reader will need to turn to texts, and the book encourages him or her to do just that. Menand is not overly critical or analytical about the success of pragmatism. He points out that the later Civil Rights Movement in America could not have succeeded with pragmatism as a base but rather required a commitment to principle and absolutes found more in other writers.

Pragmatism is a distinctive achievement of thinkers in the United States. This book teaches about it well and, perhaps not entirely consistently with the theory of pragmatism itself, promotes respect for the role of ideas in our country and for the value of the life of the mind.

Robin Friedman

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rob crawford

A movement of ideas, from the Civil War to the Cold War

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 November 2013

This is an absorbing, fascinating, complex, and obscure book all rolled into one. It is a kind of flowing narrative of ideas as they evolved, with succinct but frustratingly incomplete references to their substance, and the men and a few women who gave birth to them. It is also thick with historical context. Yet it is not intellectual history, not a philosophical argument, and not biography. As such, the book is an odd hybrid that did not quite constitute the full meal I was hoping to find.

Menand begins with the Transcendentalists just prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, with the second great awakening of Evangelical Christianity as the backdrop. This was a time when intellectuals thought in absolutes, that there was some underlying truth to uncover that was compatible with a life of faith. It could be observed and known. In the case of the Transcendentalists, they were skeptical of groups and institutions, but still believed they could arrive at some individual truth that would mean something to others. I saw this as akin to a Platonic ideal merged with protestant theology, ideas which the world only dully reflected. The abolitionists were part of this, zealots who would drag the entire country into war in support of their mission; southern slave owners were similar, though with a diametrically opposed fanaticism of their own. An entire generation of youths went to their slaughter in the service of these ideals, marking the survivors as skeptics and doubters of such certainties for the rest of their lives. It affected budding philosophers, including William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and others.

At the same time, these philosophers absorbed 2 crucially important scientific concepts: statistics and Darwin's theory of natural selection. Statistics taught that you could not count on exact results to prove a point, but an average of many separate observations; that meant that observers and individuals could not always be trusted to find or see the one "truth". Far more importantly, Darwin introduced an entirely new way to interpret the natural world: it incorporated not just chance as affecting outcomes, but challenged the notion that there was some discernable, deterministic plan or end in accordance with God or whatever Platonic ideal you might choose. Menand explains these developments at great length, sometimes in too much detail, such as the chapter on a court case involving the comparison of signatures. These developments set them in opposition to the great scientists of their time, such as Agassiz, who was a Linnean creationist, willing to categorize organisms but without any theory to organize his observations beyond a vague theology.

A new way was forged in an informal grouping (The Metaphysical Club) that met for just one year. From this, William James formulated his philosophy of pragmatism. Rather than seek set and unchanging truths, James concluded that one's ideas and ideals - one's personal truth - were chosen as useful to one's goals or aspirations. In other words, truth was instrumental, a means to an end. It was a kind of relativism in philosophy and psychology, James' domains as the leading American thinker of his age. Intellectual colleagues in others areas applied these ideas to their disciplines, Holmes in law - promoting free speech in new ways as part of the political process to arrive at better results, even when people are wrong - and Dewey in education, founding new kinds of schools to support individual development and helping to institutionalize academic freedom as a public good. However, if relativist, they believed in discipline, even sacrifice, in the service of social ideals. They were optimists, reformers of the existing systems rather than revolutionaries, and they embodied the new, democratic consensus that arose from the crushing of the confederate rebels. Their vision was tolerant and inclusive, though the rights of blacks were ignored for the sake of harmony.

The end result was the establishment of related methods in all disciplines. In science, process became all-important, no longer yoked to pre-conceived notions but allowing whatever conclusions emerged from exhaustive observation and confirmed by professionals - there might be paradigms, but even they could fall, and the effort was collective, even social. In psychology, it meant that individual striving for truth and personal goals was paramount, though conforming to social purpose. Finally, in politics and law, the democratic process should allow the best ideas to emerge from the widest possible debate, a new kind of pluralism at the moment that immigrants were swamping the Anglo-Saxon ruling class. This consensus, relativist and naive as it was, lasted more or less until the Cold War, when either/or ideals again came to the fore in the fight between capitalism and communism, but also in the fight for civil rights, which was particularly unyielding and absolutist. It was then that the metaphysical club's ideals were overtaken by a new consensus. Interestingly, Menand argues that the current era may see a new relevance in tolerance and democratic process.

This book is often a difficult read. Whenever I was well acquainted with the ideas, it was an excellent evocation of an intellectual confluence, but when I didn't know the ideas, it was hard to follow. To be sure, this is due to the holes in my own understanding - and it inspires me to read in new areas - but it was a nagging frustration. On balance, it is worth the effort, though not as complete a portrait of an age as similar works, such as Ronald Steele's "Walter Lippmann and the American Century", which fully explained every intellectual movement of which he was a part. Of course, Menand is a peerless writer of prose, his ideas are always interesting, and I learned an immense amount. The biographical details are also very fun.

2 people found this helpful

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