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464 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2001
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About the author
Louis Menand
43听books200听followersLouis 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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January 15, 2021
Denying the Privilege and Presumption of Power
Philosophy is, more often than it likes to admit, a response to traumatic political events. It is therefore frequently less about the concepts it makes explicit - knowledge, truth, correct action - than it is about dealing with the lingering consequences of profound social upset. The Metaphysical Club documents this thesis in its analysis of the roots of American Pragmatism.
Few might recognise today that the various schools of American Pragmatism associated with philosophers from C. S. Peirce in the 19th century to Richard Rorty in the 21st century have their origins in a specific national tragedy, the American Civil War. The intention of the first 鈥榩ragmaticists鈥� (as Peirce called them) was to release the world from the doctrinaire use of reason that they perceived led to that conflict.
Often confused with 鈥榲ulgar relativity,鈥� Pragmatism is really a recognition that none of us actually knows what constitutes reason. The criteria of right thinking change about as frequently as what is thought. The contribution of pragmatic philosophy has been to establish truth as a necessary ideal but error as an equally necessary condition of inquiry. The essential lesson is one of humility rather than scepticism.
As the pragmatist philosopher Edgar Singer quipped in the 1930鈥檚, 鈥淎 fact is that which is not contradicted by any other fact.鈥� This maxim is useful to keep in mind when dealing with various Trumpian attacks on science and the media as well as the fake news that has become routine on social media.
All knowledge is incomplete and defective. This is a consequence of human finitude. Nevertheless, some claims to knowledge are better than other claims. Distinguishing between what constitutes approaches to the truth and intellectual dead ends is what Pragmatism seeks to accomplish - mainly to help us stop killing each other.
Pragmatism therefore implies a liberalism of thought that denies privileged or preferred modes of thinking. At the same time it seeks to reconcile contrary modes of thinking in the 鈥榣arger truth.鈥� Its ethical virtues are respect for the intentions of others, confidence that there is indeed a larger truth to be had, and the patience to persist in the search. These are commonly called by their classical names of Faith, Hope, and Charity.
Philosophy is, more often than it likes to admit, a response to traumatic political events. It is therefore frequently less about the concepts it makes explicit - knowledge, truth, correct action - than it is about dealing with the lingering consequences of profound social upset. The Metaphysical Club documents this thesis in its analysis of the roots of American Pragmatism.
Few might recognise today that the various schools of American Pragmatism associated with philosophers from C. S. Peirce in the 19th century to Richard Rorty in the 21st century have their origins in a specific national tragedy, the American Civil War. The intention of the first 鈥榩ragmaticists鈥� (as Peirce called them) was to release the world from the doctrinaire use of reason that they perceived led to that conflict.
Often confused with 鈥榲ulgar relativity,鈥� Pragmatism is really a recognition that none of us actually knows what constitutes reason. The criteria of right thinking change about as frequently as what is thought. The contribution of pragmatic philosophy has been to establish truth as a necessary ideal but error as an equally necessary condition of inquiry. The essential lesson is one of humility rather than scepticism.
As the pragmatist philosopher Edgar Singer quipped in the 1930鈥檚, 鈥淎 fact is that which is not contradicted by any other fact.鈥� This maxim is useful to keep in mind when dealing with various Trumpian attacks on science and the media as well as the fake news that has become routine on social media.
All knowledge is incomplete and defective. This is a consequence of human finitude. Nevertheless, some claims to knowledge are better than other claims. Distinguishing between what constitutes approaches to the truth and intellectual dead ends is what Pragmatism seeks to accomplish - mainly to help us stop killing each other.
Pragmatism therefore implies a liberalism of thought that denies privileged or preferred modes of thinking. At the same time it seeks to reconcile contrary modes of thinking in the 鈥榣arger truth.鈥� Its ethical virtues are respect for the intentions of others, confidence that there is indeed a larger truth to be had, and the patience to persist in the search. These are commonly called by their classical names of Faith, Hope, and Charity.
July 29, 2010
Although this is a supposed quadruplicate biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, it鈥檚 really an unparalleled intellectual history of America from the Civil War up through the turn of the century. Thankfully it doesn鈥檛 try to be a comprehensive intellectual history, and it doesn鈥檛 try to trot out every 鈥渋mportant鈥� thinker of the age and analyze them for relevance. It鈥檚 mainly a circuitous and winding story of how that most American of philosophical systems, 鈥減ragmatism,鈥� with its suspicions of transcendent ideals and its awareness of multiple contexts, emerged gradually out of the mystical antebellum New England world of Emerson and Thoreau. It鈥檚 seemingly disparate chapters, which focus on such people as naturalist Louis Agassiz and reformer Jame Addams, at first seem difficult to pin together, but gradually the reader realizes that this is a way to show how many individual threads were woven into pragmatic philosophy.
While other writers act like philosophers were only reading other philosophers, Louis Menand uses multiple biographies to show how real life and real events shaped abstract thought. For instance, William James saw the failure of Louis Agassiz鈥檚 quest for an overarching natural explanation of the animal world, one that relied on God鈥檚 placement of all animals in their current environments (a quest which led him, with James, to look for evidence of glaciers in Brazil), as confirmation of a world mainly governed by blind evolution and chance. Holmes鈥檚 experience at the tragic Battle of Ball鈥檚 Bluff in the Civil War soured him on all high ideals, and his 鈥渟urvival of the fittest鈥� theory later influenced his theory of judicial restraint (by which he hoped to let interest groups battle it out in politics) and paradoxically made him a liberal hero. Charles Pierce鈥檚 wrestling with astronomical observations as an employee of the US Coastal Survey led him to look at the fallibility of all human judgment and search for a probabilistic theory of thought. John Dewey鈥檚 concern over the 1894 Pullman strike, and his connections to Jane Addams, made him search for a tolerant pluralism that would encompass all apparent conflict into an actual unity.
Interestingly, a large part of the book is a biography of that strange, in-bred world of 19th century Boston (of course centered around Harvard), where everybody seemed to be a cousin or son or wife of a famous thinker and writer, and where everybody was part of their own philosophical club. Menand shows that before one can talk about a philosophy, one needs to talk about the peculiar environment that philosophy emerged from. The pragmatists would of course have entirely agreed.
I can honestly say that I鈥檝e never read a book like this anywhere, one that brings so much to the table and makes it all seem so interconnected. Menand is someone who actually knows how to mold a good story out of abstract ideas, and who makes all these ancient, intractable debates seem important and worthwhile.
January 2, 2020
Pragmatism is uniquely American. It is America's only home-grown school of philosophy. THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB is Louis Menand's award-winning book about the emergence of pragmatism as a distinct school of thought. The book's vehicle for describing the early decades of pragmatism is a discussion of a group of thinkers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who participated in a loosely organized club that, in fact, called itself "The Metaphysical Club". The participants developed the founding principles of pragmatism in the final decades of the 19th century, though they appear not to have been aware that they were inventing a new way of thinking until the very eve of the 20th century.
An important feature of pragmatism, not the only feature by any means, but the feature that I will focus on in this short review, is that it rejects absolutes. Menand traces this back to the horror of our Civil War and a perceived need for a philosophy that would accommodate multiple points of view in order to avoid conflict in the future.
A difficulty with absolutes in government is that there may be no way to resolve conflicting points of view when they are based on absolutes, except though violence. American scholars after the Civil War tried to solve the problem that Lincoln struggled with: how can a nation founded on the principle of self-government peacefully resolve an issue when its citizens are irreconcilably divided based on absolute positions (for example, an inalienable right vs God's will)? The pragmatists' approach was to re-define truth for purposes of governing (though this varies among pragmatists, some regard it a comprehensive theory of truth) in order to tie truth to solving problems and no longer to inflexible Platonic ideals, which was the prevailing way of thinking about truth in the United States before the civil war. Some thought that such an approach was more realistic for a dynamically pluralistic society like ours - where we are not going to agree on everything, even fundamental things.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the great American legal scholar and Supreme Court Associate Justice, participated in the Metaphysical Club. He was also an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War and, astonishingly, sustained serious wounds in battle on six separate occasions. Menand seems to believe that Holmes鈥� war-time experience shaped his later thinking about government and law. Holmes was on the Court when it decided the seminal legal case, Erie v. Tompkins. I mention Erie here because it illustrates what can happen when we abandon the habit of thinking about truth in terms of absolutes.
For decades, our federal court system assumed that federal judges would look to something referred to as "federal common law" to decide legal claims that were based on state law, but were being litigated in federal court. The assumption was that common law was the same for all wise judges because law is based on principles that are unchanging in nature. To understand this, imagine that the common law is written on golden tablets (in the sky like Plato's famous theory of forms). The assumption is that if a judge is wise enough and free from distracting passions, he can discern what's written on those tablets without regard to whether he is a state or a federal judge. A federal judge need not read the decisions of the courts in the relevant state. Instead, he can simply read the golden tablets. If you will forgive the over-simplification, that was how many people thought about truth before the pragmatists.
After the war, as legal scholar and state court judge in Massachusetts, Holmes recognized that once we abandon a Platonic view of the law, and accept that the law is not based on absolute ideals, but on ever-changing human values, then we can understand that law will be different in different jurisdictions. That understanding will lead us to the realization that the concept of a federal common law does not make sense. Different states have different values and can fashion different laws to reflect those values. And of course, values change and so law will change. Accordingly, once we abandon the Platonic ideal, federal judges adjudicating claims based on state law, must study the law of the state in question to discern the applicable rule of law to decide the case. The rule will not be the same from state to state. Nor will the outcome be the same, even on similar facts. In Erie, the Court embraced this view and over-ruled an old case called Pennoyer v. Neff, in which Chief Justice Storey, who authored the opinion, had implicitly relied on the Platonic conception of law.
Menand discusses Holmes at length in THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB, though not specifically the Erie case. He might have. It nicely illustrates a point that he seems to want to make.
The balance of the book focuses on the thinking of the great triumvirate of pragmatism: Charles Sanders Pierce, William James and John Dewey. These are fascinating men and uniquely American. It is difficult to imagine that they could have arrived at 鈥減ragmatism鈥� in any other place or time.
Menand won the Pulitzer Prize for his book and deservedly so. THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB is a very readable book about the history of ideas in America during a period that uniquely influenced politics, philosophy and law in the United States.
Menand is a professor of English and not a professional philosopher. Some professional philosophers have criticized Menand's interpretation of pragmatism. I would urge anyone who is thinking about reading THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB not to let these criticisms discourage you. I found Menand's book to be an excellent re-introduction to pragmatism. James, the best-known of the Pragmatists, might well say that professionals have no monopoly on good philosophy.
An important feature of pragmatism, not the only feature by any means, but the feature that I will focus on in this short review, is that it rejects absolutes. Menand traces this back to the horror of our Civil War and a perceived need for a philosophy that would accommodate multiple points of view in order to avoid conflict in the future.
A difficulty with absolutes in government is that there may be no way to resolve conflicting points of view when they are based on absolutes, except though violence. American scholars after the Civil War tried to solve the problem that Lincoln struggled with: how can a nation founded on the principle of self-government peacefully resolve an issue when its citizens are irreconcilably divided based on absolute positions (for example, an inalienable right vs God's will)? The pragmatists' approach was to re-define truth for purposes of governing (though this varies among pragmatists, some regard it a comprehensive theory of truth) in order to tie truth to solving problems and no longer to inflexible Platonic ideals, which was the prevailing way of thinking about truth in the United States before the civil war. Some thought that such an approach was more realistic for a dynamically pluralistic society like ours - where we are not going to agree on everything, even fundamental things.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the great American legal scholar and Supreme Court Associate Justice, participated in the Metaphysical Club. He was also an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War and, astonishingly, sustained serious wounds in battle on six separate occasions. Menand seems to believe that Holmes鈥� war-time experience shaped his later thinking about government and law. Holmes was on the Court when it decided the seminal legal case, Erie v. Tompkins. I mention Erie here because it illustrates what can happen when we abandon the habit of thinking about truth in terms of absolutes.
For decades, our federal court system assumed that federal judges would look to something referred to as "federal common law" to decide legal claims that were based on state law, but were being litigated in federal court. The assumption was that common law was the same for all wise judges because law is based on principles that are unchanging in nature. To understand this, imagine that the common law is written on golden tablets (in the sky like Plato's famous theory of forms). The assumption is that if a judge is wise enough and free from distracting passions, he can discern what's written on those tablets without regard to whether he is a state or a federal judge. A federal judge need not read the decisions of the courts in the relevant state. Instead, he can simply read the golden tablets. If you will forgive the over-simplification, that was how many people thought about truth before the pragmatists.
After the war, as legal scholar and state court judge in Massachusetts, Holmes recognized that once we abandon a Platonic view of the law, and accept that the law is not based on absolute ideals, but on ever-changing human values, then we can understand that law will be different in different jurisdictions. That understanding will lead us to the realization that the concept of a federal common law does not make sense. Different states have different values and can fashion different laws to reflect those values. And of course, values change and so law will change. Accordingly, once we abandon the Platonic ideal, federal judges adjudicating claims based on state law, must study the law of the state in question to discern the applicable rule of law to decide the case. The rule will not be the same from state to state. Nor will the outcome be the same, even on similar facts. In Erie, the Court embraced this view and over-ruled an old case called Pennoyer v. Neff, in which Chief Justice Storey, who authored the opinion, had implicitly relied on the Platonic conception of law.
Menand discusses Holmes at length in THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB, though not specifically the Erie case. He might have. It nicely illustrates a point that he seems to want to make.
The balance of the book focuses on the thinking of the great triumvirate of pragmatism: Charles Sanders Pierce, William James and John Dewey. These are fascinating men and uniquely American. It is difficult to imagine that they could have arrived at 鈥減ragmatism鈥� in any other place or time.
Menand won the Pulitzer Prize for his book and deservedly so. THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB is a very readable book about the history of ideas in America during a period that uniquely influenced politics, philosophy and law in the United States.
Menand is a professor of English and not a professional philosopher. Some professional philosophers have criticized Menand's interpretation of pragmatism. I would urge anyone who is thinking about reading THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB not to let these criticisms discourage you. I found Menand's book to be an excellent re-introduction to pragmatism. James, the best-known of the Pragmatists, might well say that professionals have no monopoly on good philosophy.
March 17, 2025
How Ideas Matter In America
Louis Menand's "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 digressions 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
Louis Menand's "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 digressions 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
March 26, 2014
The premise is that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, John Dewey and, to a lesser extent, Charles S. Peirce (who is the only one of the four that I'd never heard of until I read this book) were the first intellectuals of American modernity (a phrase that seems to communicate the correct amount of portent where simply "modern thinkers" would have fallen short) and that being young men who knew each other during the American Civil War (and who travelled in the same social circles) shaped a great deal of their intellectual temperament.
A densely intricate history of American intellectualism after the Civil War that I'm glad I read, although it may have been a wee more challenging to my ADD comprehension than it was rewarding. Menand didn't compress or narrow the results of his research in a way that might have made for a more accessible read and I'm glad of that, but it at times seemed he could have--even with the extensive detail--constructed the narratives and the points he was trying to make through them in a more linear fashion. I found myself wishing the book had hyperlinks so that when he connected a minor academic figure he had introduced several chapters previously to a matter presently at hand, I could click back and refresh my memory. I could have used the index more diligently, but I'm ADD and lazy, too.
Upon finishing the book I'm a bit distracted by the extent to which he ignored the issue of socioeconomic class in the book. Yes, perhaps how the nascent philosophy of pragmatism wrestled with ingesting Darwinism was a consuming issue for the Harvard elite and their ilk, but how much impact if any did that have on the day to day lives of the lumpen proletariat?
Overall, though, I enjoyed it, have half a mind to reread it at some point down the line and may seek out other books by Menand. A height, for me, was the point he made about modernity near the end of the book:
"Modernity is the condition a society reaches when life is no longer conceived as cyclical. In a premodern society, where the purpose of life is understood to be the reproduction of the customs and practices of the group, and where people are expected to follow the life path their parents followed, the ends of life are given at the beginning of life. People know what their life's task is, and they know when it has been completed. In modern societies, the reproduction of the custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence, and the ends of life are not thought to be given; they are thought to be discovered or created. Individuals are not expected to follow the life path of their parents, and the future of the society is not thought to be dictated entirely by its past. Modern societies do not simply repeat and extend themselves; they change in unforeseeable directions, and the individual's contributions to these changes is unspecifiable in advance. To devote oneself to the business of preserving and reproducing the culture of one's group is to risk one of the most terrible fates in modern societies, obsolescence."
Wow. It's like I always knew that on some level but it feels good to have someone lay it all out so nicely. I wish I'd found more high points like this in the book.
A densely intricate history of American intellectualism after the Civil War that I'm glad I read, although it may have been a wee more challenging to my ADD comprehension than it was rewarding. Menand didn't compress or narrow the results of his research in a way that might have made for a more accessible read and I'm glad of that, but it at times seemed he could have--even with the extensive detail--constructed the narratives and the points he was trying to make through them in a more linear fashion. I found myself wishing the book had hyperlinks so that when he connected a minor academic figure he had introduced several chapters previously to a matter presently at hand, I could click back and refresh my memory. I could have used the index more diligently, but I'm ADD and lazy, too.
Upon finishing the book I'm a bit distracted by the extent to which he ignored the issue of socioeconomic class in the book. Yes, perhaps how the nascent philosophy of pragmatism wrestled with ingesting Darwinism was a consuming issue for the Harvard elite and their ilk, but how much impact if any did that have on the day to day lives of the lumpen proletariat?
Overall, though, I enjoyed it, have half a mind to reread it at some point down the line and may seek out other books by Menand. A height, for me, was the point he made about modernity near the end of the book:
"Modernity is the condition a society reaches when life is no longer conceived as cyclical. In a premodern society, where the purpose of life is understood to be the reproduction of the customs and practices of the group, and where people are expected to follow the life path their parents followed, the ends of life are given at the beginning of life. People know what their life's task is, and they know when it has been completed. In modern societies, the reproduction of the custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence, and the ends of life are not thought to be given; they are thought to be discovered or created. Individuals are not expected to follow the life path of their parents, and the future of the society is not thought to be dictated entirely by its past. Modern societies do not simply repeat and extend themselves; they change in unforeseeable directions, and the individual's contributions to these changes is unspecifiable in advance. To devote oneself to the business of preserving and reproducing the culture of one's group is to risk one of the most terrible fates in modern societies, obsolescence."
Wow. It's like I always knew that on some level but it feels good to have someone lay it all out so nicely. I wish I'd found more high points like this in the book.
October 27, 2019
賷胤賵賮 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 毓賱賶 亘毓囟 兀賴賲 丕賱兀賮賰丕乇 賵丕賱賯氐氐 丕賱鬲賷 兀賱賴亘鬲 丕賱賮賰乇 賮賷 丕賱賯乇賳賷賳 丕賱鬲丕爻毓 毓卮乇 賵丕賱毓卮乇賷賳. 賱卮禺氐賷丕鬲 賰丕賳 賱賴丕 毓馗賷賲 丕賱兀孬乇 毓賱賶 禺丕乇胤丞 丕賱賮賰乇 賵丕賱兀丿亘 賵丕賱鬲丕乇賷禺 賵丕賱毓賱賵賲 賵丕賱賮賱爻賮丞 賵丕賱爻賷丕爻丞貙 亘賲丕 鬲賰鬲賳賮賴 賲賳 廿賳爻丕賳賷丕鬲 賲賱鬲賴亘丞 賮賷 丕賱噩匕賵乇 貙 爻丕賴賲鬲 亘卮賰賱 兀賵 亘丌禺乇 賮賷 賰鬲丕亘丞 兀賵 鬲睾賷賷乇 賲噩乇賶 丕賱鬲丕乇賷禺 .
賰賱 毓賯賱 賲賳 賴匕賴 丕賱毓賯賵賱 毓賰爻 亘卮賰賱 賲禺鬲賱賮 丌乇丕丐賴 賵鬲氐賵乇丕鬲賴 丕賱孬乇賷丞 毓賳 賲賮賴賵賲賴 丕賱賲毓賯丿 賱賱丨賷丕丞 賵丕賱毓賱丕賯丕鬲 丕賱亘卮乇賷丞貙 賵胤乇賯 亘賳丕亍 兀賵 鬲胤賵乇 丕賱賲毓乇賮丞.
兀賲孬丕賱: 賵賷賱賷丕賲 噩賷賲爻貙 兀賵賱賷賮賷乇 賵賷賳丿賱貙 賵賴賵賱賲夭 丕賱丕亘賳貙 鬲卮丕乇賱夭 爻貙 噩賵賳 丿賵賷. 賵丌禺乇賵賳 鬲賯丕胤毓鬲 丨賷丕鬲賴賲 賲毓賴賲 賰 賴丕賱賵賷賱貙 乇賷鬲卮丕乇丿 丿丕乇賵賷賳貙 噩賳 賲丕賰爻賵賷賱貙 賵賱丕亘賱丕爻貙 賰丕賳胤貙 賵丌禺乇賵賳. 賱賲 賷賰鬲賮賷 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 賮賷 鬲賯丿賷賲 丕賱爻賷乇丞 丕賱毓賱賲賷丞 賱 賴匕賴 丕賱卮禺氐賷丕鬲貙 亘賱 鬲噩丕賵夭賴丕 賱爻賷乇鬲賴賲 丕賱匕丕鬲賷丞貙 賰賲丕 胤丕賮 毓賱賶 兀賴賲 丕賱賳賯丕卮丕鬲 賵丕賱丌乇丕亍 丕賱賳賯丿賷丞 丕賱鬲賷 賳丕賱鬲 賲賳賴賲 賲丕亘賷賳 賲賵丕賮賯 賵賲賮賳丿+ 爻乇丿 鬲賷丕乇 丕賱兀丨丿丕孬 丕賱賲賴賲丞 賲賳 丕賱丨乇亘 丕賱兀賴賱賷丞 賮賷 丕賱賵賱丕賷丕鬲 丕賱賲鬲丨丿丞 廿賱賶 丕賱丨乇亘 丕賱兀賲乇賷賰賷丞 丕賱兀爻亘丕賳賷丞 貙 丨鬲賶 丕賳丿賱丕毓 丕賱丨乇亘 丕賱兀賲乇賷賰賷丞 丕賱賮賱亘賷賳賷丞貙 賵兀孬乇 賴匕賴 丕賱丨乇賵亘 賮賷 廿卮毓丕賱 丕賱氐乇丕毓 兀賵 丕賱賳夭賵毓 賱賱鬲丨賵賱 毓賱賶 兀氐毓丿丞 賲禺鬲賱賮丞貨 爻賷丕爻賷丞貙 毓賱賲賷丞 貙 丕賯鬲氐丕丿賷丞貙 丕噩鬲賲丕毓賷丞貙 賵兀禺乇賶. 賵賰賷賮 兀孬乇鬲 賴匕賴 丕賱兀丨丿丕孬 毓賱賶 丨賷丕丞 賴匕賴 丕賱卮禺氐賷丕鬲貙 賵兀賱賴賲賴丕 賮賷 鬲胤賵賷乇 賵禺賱賯 兀賴賲 丕賱兀賮賰丕乇 賮賷 丕賱賵賱丕賷丕鬲 丕賱賲鬲丨丿丞 丨賵賱 :丕賱鬲毓賱賷賲 賵丕賱丿賷賲賯乇丕胤賷丞 賵丕賱丨乇賷丞 賵丕賱毓丿丕賱丞 賵丕賱鬲爻丕賲丨貙 亘賰賱 賲丕 賷丨賲賱賵賴 賲賳 廿乇孬 廿賳爻丕賳賵賷- 孬賯丕賮賵賷 賲胤亘賵毓 亘兀賵囟丕毓賴賲 丕賱卮禺氐賷丞 賵 亘賷卅鬲賴賲 丕賱丕噩鬲賲丕毓賷丞.
亘毓囟 兀賴賲 丕賱兀賮賰丕乇 賵丕賱賯氐氐 丕賱鬲賷 鬲賳丕賵賱賴丕 丕賱賰鬲丕亘:
丕賱毓亘賵丿賷丞 亘爻賷丕爻丕鬲賴丕 丕賱賲禺鬲賱賮丞 廿賱賶 丨丿 廿賱睾丕卅賴丕 .
馗賴賵乇 兀氐賱 丕賱兀賳賵丕毓- 賳馗乇賷丞 丕賱鬲胤賵乇 賵賲丕 乇丕賮賯賴丕 賲賳 廿卮賰丕賱丕鬲.
鬲兀爻賷爻 噩丕賲毓丞 賴丕乇賮丕乇丿.
丕賱賲孬賷乇 賮賷 賴匕丕 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 賴賵 鬲鬲亘毓 賰賷賮賷丞 賳卮賵亍 亘毓囟 兀毓馗賲 丕賱兀賮賰丕乇 賮賷 兀賲乇賷賰丕 賵丕賱鬲賷 鬲亘丿賵 賮賷 賮鬲乇丕鬲 夭賲賳賷丞 賲毓賷賳丞貙 兀賳賴丕 丕鬲禺匕鬲 賲賳丨賳賷丕鬲 賲囟胤乇亘丞 賵睾賷乇 賲鬲賵賯毓丞 丨鬲賶 乇爻賵禺賴丕 毓賱賶 兀乇囟 孬丕亘鬲丞 .
賴匕丕 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 丕卮鬲睾丕賱 賮賷 鬲兀賵賷賱 丕賱鬲丕乇賷禺 毓亘乇 賯乇丕亍丞 鬲丕乇賷禺 丕賱兀賮賰丕乇 兀賵 兀乇賰賷賵賱賵噩賷丕 丕賱賲毓乇賮丞貙 賵賲丌賱丕鬲賴 丕賱廿賳爻丕賳賷丞.
丕賱鬲乇噩賲丞 噩賲賷賱丞.
October 10, 2017
Modernity. I've heard it mentioned so many times but have never paused to think of what it means. In this book, Louis Menard gives a simple definition. Modernity is the break from the cyclical world where one generation succeeded another by taking on the same tasks, to one where each generation is faced with a new world. Once, the son would become a farmer to replace his father. The peasant of medieval times would sire a peasant to be. Now the janitor can be father to the astronaut.
In the pre-modern world there was no concept of Progress for society (or technology). Medieval painters had no difficulty showing ancient times and current times in the same painting. There was only progress of the individual toward salvation and often even that was not considered possible (see Calvinism). Little was expected to change in a world that called for struggle and endurance. Everyone was just serving time until Judgement Day. Without science, whatever concepts were created that people were willing to believe were the truths that could be lived under for one generation after another without question. Curiosity was discouraged because it was pointless; the deep questions were already answered.
The understanding that there was a purposeful God who, though inscrutable, had a plan, made it possible to escape the fear of the unknown that continually knocked on everyone's door. Whatever terror was presented by disease or weather or simple accident, all was known to God who knew best.
Then came modernity. As science grew to explain everything on the surface, it explained nothing at depth only raising doubt where certainty was most desired.
The Metaphysical Club is a rich adventure that marks the way from the old view to the new, from the certainty of belief to the insecurity of today. The four men around whose intellectual lives the book is built (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey) illustrate through their thoughts and actions the transformation of the world (on the American scene) and how human beings have come to deal with uncertainty as fact.
I don't mean uncertainty about what to wear tomorrow, I mean profound uncertainty about the universe we inhabit and the thoughts that sculpt our identities. Even the idea of free will is doubtful. This is the territory of profound anxiety where all that we value is questioned.
Moving easily though matters of faith, elements of statistics, the mania for eugenics and so very much more, each new chapter takes in another aspect of society to reinforce the narrative of intellectual and social transition Menand so skillfully describes.
How do we know "the truth"? Yes, we can say that the world accords with much of what we know, but couldn't this indicate only that our minds have evolved to deal with the environment of which they are a product, rather than any objective understanding of reality? Perhaps we are certain only of a charade.
And what of our dearest beliefs? What of good and bad, right and wrong? What is there of them outside of our heads? We create concepts (metaphysics) that have no reality in themselves, yet we act as if they were real. Does it matter if they have no hard reality if we believe they do and act accordingly? Are the laws of science any more real than those of faith? Faith "worked" when it was the system within which everyone lived. Now science provides the system.
The Metaphysical Club takes us from the moral certainties based on faith of the Civil War period to the foundation of reality on chance demonstrated by Darwin and his idea that intelligence is simply a product of blind chance, an accident on planet Earth.
The thoughts and actions of the four principles of the book (along with background from their parents' generation) allow us to see how this happened and the intellectual challenge in the accommodation, with generous samples of the schools of thought that were involved along the way (Transcendentalism, Socialism, etc.)
To say that God knows all is simple and satisfying. Our being here as an accident of chance may be entirely deceptive, but is nonetheless all we have to work with, alone as we are in an otherwise meaningless universe. This is both terrifying and challenging. This book is about those who looked directly at the challenge, teased out the implications and attempted to meet them.
In the pre-modern world there was no concept of Progress for society (or technology). Medieval painters had no difficulty showing ancient times and current times in the same painting. There was only progress of the individual toward salvation and often even that was not considered possible (see Calvinism). Little was expected to change in a world that called for struggle and endurance. Everyone was just serving time until Judgement Day. Without science, whatever concepts were created that people were willing to believe were the truths that could be lived under for one generation after another without question. Curiosity was discouraged because it was pointless; the deep questions were already answered.
The understanding that there was a purposeful God who, though inscrutable, had a plan, made it possible to escape the fear of the unknown that continually knocked on everyone's door. Whatever terror was presented by disease or weather or simple accident, all was known to God who knew best.
Then came modernity. As science grew to explain everything on the surface, it explained nothing at depth only raising doubt where certainty was most desired.
The Metaphysical Club is a rich adventure that marks the way from the old view to the new, from the certainty of belief to the insecurity of today. The four men around whose intellectual lives the book is built (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey) illustrate through their thoughts and actions the transformation of the world (on the American scene) and how human beings have come to deal with uncertainty as fact.
I don't mean uncertainty about what to wear tomorrow, I mean profound uncertainty about the universe we inhabit and the thoughts that sculpt our identities. Even the idea of free will is doubtful. This is the territory of profound anxiety where all that we value is questioned.
Moving easily though matters of faith, elements of statistics, the mania for eugenics and so very much more, each new chapter takes in another aspect of society to reinforce the narrative of intellectual and social transition Menand so skillfully describes.
How do we know "the truth"? Yes, we can say that the world accords with much of what we know, but couldn't this indicate only that our minds have evolved to deal with the environment of which they are a product, rather than any objective understanding of reality? Perhaps we are certain only of a charade.
And what of our dearest beliefs? What of good and bad, right and wrong? What is there of them outside of our heads? We create concepts (metaphysics) that have no reality in themselves, yet we act as if they were real. Does it matter if they have no hard reality if we believe they do and act accordingly? Are the laws of science any more real than those of faith? Faith "worked" when it was the system within which everyone lived. Now science provides the system.
The Metaphysical Club takes us from the moral certainties based on faith of the Civil War period to the foundation of reality on chance demonstrated by Darwin and his idea that intelligence is simply a product of blind chance, an accident on planet Earth.
The thoughts and actions of the four principles of the book (along with background from their parents' generation) allow us to see how this happened and the intellectual challenge in the accommodation, with generous samples of the schools of thought that were involved along the way (Transcendentalism, Socialism, etc.)
To say that God knows all is simple and satisfying. Our being here as an accident of chance may be entirely deceptive, but is nonetheless all we have to work with, alone as we are in an otherwise meaningless universe. This is both terrifying and challenging. This book is about those who looked directly at the challenge, teased out the implications and attempted to meet them.
June 2, 2024
This was well written. John Dewey and the pragmatists have long held a place near the top of my intellectual pantheon. That may be how this read got started. How it ended was a much broader look at a landscape of American life in the two generations that came of age during and after the Civil War.
Louis Menand told this microhistory by way of the influences and relations that shaped the lives and ideas of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, Williams James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Dewey. The tale of their generation's ascendance is also the tale of the eclipse of the ideas and institutional models that previously held sway in the antebellum North. Menand shows how this plays out in several spheres of American life including in the ideas about race relations, the foundations of the scientific enterprise, jurisprudence, the struggle between capital and labor, and higher education, among other areas. It's to his credit that Menand makes each of these forays come alive as part of his panorama.
My quibble, and it's a pretty minor one, is that I would have liked to see Menand spend a little more time on the actual bios of his protagonists. The sketches provided are more often their intellectual bios along with their social milieus. A dozen additional pages for Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey may have provided additional grounding for their work and ideas. It may also have further grounded the social and personal struggles that each of these men faced, some more successfully than others, in taking part of their generation's inheritance and path clearing for future generations.
In any case, Menand would like us to understand that these men were part of the first generations of modern Americans. As such their lives and times feel both remote and strangely close to us all these years later. The sketch Menand provided is both interesting in itself and perhaps instructive about the type of social and intellectual endeavors we need in our times in the 21st century to work through our own issues at home and abroad.
Louis Menand told this microhistory by way of the influences and relations that shaped the lives and ideas of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, Williams James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Dewey. The tale of their generation's ascendance is also the tale of the eclipse of the ideas and institutional models that previously held sway in the antebellum North. Menand shows how this plays out in several spheres of American life including in the ideas about race relations, the foundations of the scientific enterprise, jurisprudence, the struggle between capital and labor, and higher education, among other areas. It's to his credit that Menand makes each of these forays come alive as part of his panorama.
My quibble, and it's a pretty minor one, is that I would have liked to see Menand spend a little more time on the actual bios of his protagonists. The sketches provided are more often their intellectual bios along with their social milieus. A dozen additional pages for Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey may have provided additional grounding for their work and ideas. It may also have further grounded the social and personal struggles that each of these men faced, some more successfully than others, in taking part of their generation's inheritance and path clearing for future generations.
In any case, Menand would like us to understand that these men were part of the first generations of modern Americans. As such their lives and times feel both remote and strangely close to us all these years later. The sketch Menand provided is both interesting in itself and perhaps instructive about the type of social and intellectual endeavors we need in our times in the 21st century to work through our own issues at home and abroad.
August 31, 2018
This is such a brilliant and thoughtful book. I came here after reading Louis Menand's slash and burn review of Fukuyama's new Identity book. The review was excellent and I was curious about Menand's own thoughts. What's fascinating about this book is that it just sort of starts. It doesn't have a build up or an intro and it doesn't tell you what it's going to be about. It's about America and philosophy and law. I learned so much and was spellbound the whole time.
July 20, 2015
Popular philosophical history doesn't get better than this - rigorous (a good hundred pages of footnotes meticulously back up every quote and incident) and not shy on depth, but still enormously readable. Menand combines fascinating personal anecdotes with the political and intellectual history of the time to create a seamless flow of thought, moving logically from one idea to another. (In fact, if there's any criticism to be made of this book, it's that in making everything fit so perfectly, its author elides some of the complexity of his subject matter.)
At the heart of the book is a club briefly formed by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, but the club's antecedents and results are really what the book is about. Menand follows the impact of the Civil War, on the one hand, and scientific developments and the rise of skepticism on the other, in changing the established weltanschauung of the Boston Brahmins and American intelligentsia. The first caused the post-war generation (as wars often do) to turn against ideology. They believed that even noble ideas were not worth such bloody sacrifices. The second, the ideas of statistical probability and regression to the mean, opened a new world: one in which everything was deterministic, but within a certain zone of error; one in which species could evolve through random mutations, with the best characteristics slowly being selected, and in which ideas and societies could similarly evolve through freedom of thought. Thus the idea of a static natural world, which was mirrored by the mind, and a corresponding system of beliefs, was replaced by a more flexible idea of an ever-changing world with no fixed goals or values aside from what is useful, and a mental image which is constructed by the process of the mind's interaction with the world.
Epistomologically, this meant the philosophy of pragmatism (that what is true is merely what it is useful to believe); in jurisprudence, this meant allowing the law to change in accordance with the flux of human experience, and not some unchanging underlying logic which the lawyer must discover. And in policy, as exemplified by John Dewey, this meant a greater openness to social change - a belief that the gaps between thought and action must be bridged. Dewey was famous as an educational reformer, but he also worked to promote the advancement of women and minorities, worker's unions, and pacifism.
These thinkers (and the many others described herein) had many differences - for example, James was famous as a defender of belief in God, something Holmes had little time for - but their views taken as a whole illustrate the sea change which created the modern, pluralist, scientifically (as opposed to theologically) oriented society of today. The ideas (despite the major cultural changes of the Cold War and subsequent events, which Menand touches on in an Epilogue) are an essential part of understanding contemporary culture. This book explains it with pulsating anecdotes and crystal clarity, combining in the best possible way the spirits of the intellectual historian and the raconteur.
At the heart of the book is a club briefly formed by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, but the club's antecedents and results are really what the book is about. Menand follows the impact of the Civil War, on the one hand, and scientific developments and the rise of skepticism on the other, in changing the established weltanschauung of the Boston Brahmins and American intelligentsia. The first caused the post-war generation (as wars often do) to turn against ideology. They believed that even noble ideas were not worth such bloody sacrifices. The second, the ideas of statistical probability and regression to the mean, opened a new world: one in which everything was deterministic, but within a certain zone of error; one in which species could evolve through random mutations, with the best characteristics slowly being selected, and in which ideas and societies could similarly evolve through freedom of thought. Thus the idea of a static natural world, which was mirrored by the mind, and a corresponding system of beliefs, was replaced by a more flexible idea of an ever-changing world with no fixed goals or values aside from what is useful, and a mental image which is constructed by the process of the mind's interaction with the world.
Epistomologically, this meant the philosophy of pragmatism (that what is true is merely what it is useful to believe); in jurisprudence, this meant allowing the law to change in accordance with the flux of human experience, and not some unchanging underlying logic which the lawyer must discover. And in policy, as exemplified by John Dewey, this meant a greater openness to social change - a belief that the gaps between thought and action must be bridged. Dewey was famous as an educational reformer, but he also worked to promote the advancement of women and minorities, worker's unions, and pacifism.
These thinkers (and the many others described herein) had many differences - for example, James was famous as a defender of belief in God, something Holmes had little time for - but their views taken as a whole illustrate the sea change which created the modern, pluralist, scientifically (as opposed to theologically) oriented society of today. The ideas (despite the major cultural changes of the Cold War and subsequent events, which Menand touches on in an Epilogue) are an essential part of understanding contemporary culture. This book explains it with pulsating anecdotes and crystal clarity, combining in the best possible way the spirits of the intellectual historian and the raconteur.
Read
March 6, 2012I have a habit of using philosophy books as self-help. And when I discovered the pragmatists, it was such a breath of fresh air... all of the sudden, so many variations on my general malaise became irrelevant. William James and Richard Rorty seemed to point the way to some plane of thought that was comfortable with contingency, uncertainty, and relative truth while at the same time making bold, positive statements and seeming to provide very useful ammo for dealing with the problems of the world.
Louis Menand traces the lives of the pragmatists through 19th Century America, through the mass bloodshed of the Civil War and the callousness of the Gilded Age, but also through the hallowed chambers of Harvard and Johns Hopkins and the forests of Vermont that inspired a generation of writers and thinkers. Bonus points for revealing Charles Sanders Peirce to be pretty much the Eddie Van Halen of philosophy (cocaine, mistresses, champagne, the whole 9 yards). A fascinating piece of intellectual history.
Louis Menand traces the lives of the pragmatists through 19th Century America, through the mass bloodshed of the Civil War and the callousness of the Gilded Age, but also through the hallowed chambers of Harvard and Johns Hopkins and the forests of Vermont that inspired a generation of writers and thinkers. Bonus points for revealing Charles Sanders Peirce to be pretty much the Eddie Van Halen of philosophy (cocaine, mistresses, champagne, the whole 9 yards). A fascinating piece of intellectual history.
January 7, 2022
The title of this book The Metaphysical Club: A story of ideas in America is apt. The text provides biographies of the prominent men whose ideas and thought are discussed (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, John Dewey, and Charles Pierce). I had never heard of Charles Pierce, and after reading the books' biographical section on him, I understood why. I am sure many students of Philosophy and History are familiar with him.
The Metaphysical Club was a name coined by one of its members. The club only met a few times, but the parties involved and other academics traded ideas, insults, and thoughts through letters, newspaper and magazine opinion columns, and articles and books.
The period covered is mostly the mid and late 19th Century and a bit of the 20th Century. The philosopy of pragmaticism is one of the key topics as is the equality of the various races reflecting the concern of the increasing immigration from Europe and Asia and finally academic freedom.
The mistake I made in reading this book was in not reading it all the way through at once. By reading it in chunks, I missed the flow of ideas back and forth and often had to backtrack to get back in the flow. Still, it offers excellent insights into what the great minds of that time were thinking and how personal feelings about someone can dramatically effect their ability to obtain a tenure track position.
This book deserves reread
The Metaphysical Club was a name coined by one of its members. The club only met a few times, but the parties involved and other academics traded ideas, insults, and thoughts through letters, newspaper and magazine opinion columns, and articles and books.
The period covered is mostly the mid and late 19th Century and a bit of the 20th Century. The philosopy of pragmaticism is one of the key topics as is the equality of the various races reflecting the concern of the increasing immigration from Europe and Asia and finally academic freedom.
The mistake I made in reading this book was in not reading it all the way through at once. By reading it in chunks, I missed the flow of ideas back and forth and often had to backtrack to get back in the flow. Still, it offers excellent insights into what the great minds of that time were thinking and how personal feelings about someone can dramatically effect their ability to obtain a tenure track position.
This book deserves reread
February 9, 2010
The story Menand tells - and it is very much a story, one of the book's chief strengths - is a familiar one in modern history: the attempt to reconstruct an intellectual and cultural firmament in the wake of a cataclysm in which the previous one was destroyed. Similar attempts after the World Wars have been amply studied. Likely we will see similar explorations of European culture after the Cold War; the last chapters of Tony Judt's superlative "Postwar" preview some of the directions such inquiries may take.
The events Menand covers took place on another continent and in a different century. He focuses on how a group of thinkers which briefly coalesced in the early 1870s in the eponymous Metaphysical Club, strove to assemble out of the wreckage of the Civil War a set of ideas durable enough to guide the nation out of its torment yet loose enough to prevent it from ossifying into the kinds of dogmatism they believed had propelled the United States into Civil War. Thus, ironically, abolitionists are the early villains of the piece, their moral rectitude and righteousness being exactly what this new group of thinkers believed had to be avoided.
The protagonists are Oliver Wendell Holmes, C. S. Peirce, John Dewey, and William James. They are supported by a cast of dozens of other thinkers, writers, and characters, some important, some obscure. Each gets more or less a whole section to himself, as Menand explains the social and intellectual contexts out of which they emerged and those which they subsequently shaped. I don't want to write a detailed analysis of the book. Instead, I'd like to focus on some of its particular strengths, and one or two of its weaknesses.
Menand covers a prodigious amount of material and in a rather deceptive fashion. I say deceptive because he doesn't notify the reader that he is talking about this or that subject, or that he is going to do so. He simply does it. Among the topics he covers are: the controversies over Darwin and evolution; abolitionism and the Civil War; the advent of statistics and positivism and their incorporation into history writing; the origins and propagation of the philosophy of pragmatism; the bifurcation of psychology from the philosophy of mind; the Pullman strike; the formulation of the notion of academic freedom. These are just a few of the subjects he incorporates into his narrative, and he does so with considerable deftness.
Part of that deftness arises from Menand's self-restraint. He does not impose himself upon the reader. He has a clear authorial voice, but it does not announce itself except at the very beginning and end of the book. Otherwise, he allows the narrative to unfold of its own momentum. Menand speaks through the narrative, but it does not speak for him. There are no interjections about why this or that is important. There are no introductory passages, no pauses to summarize, no hand-holding. They are unnecessary, though. The prose is lucid and difficult, abstruse topics are presented cogently and in comprehensible, everyday terms. (Specialists perhaps might object that certain ideas are being stripped of their complexities and are not as straightforward as he makes them appear; I am not qualified to address the issue.) Citations are sufficient but not prolific; Menand surely did a lot more research than is indicated by his footnotes.
Another strength is that while there is overlap and backtracking, for the most part the narrative proceeds as did the lives of his protagonists, from beginning to end. Menand actually surveys a much larger period than expected. He starts with the Boston of such luminaries as Emerson and Oliver Holmes, Sr., and ends a century later in the 1920s. Narrative elements precede thematic ones. The ideas developed in time, and that is how Menand presents them.
What were these ideas? One that I don't think that he emphasizes enough is the notion that these thinkers were striving for a uniquely American solution to American problems. Throughout I was struck by a sense how American this was. European influences are still pronounced, but there is a maturity and confidence in the Metaphysical Club members regarding their situation and their ideas that was still nebulous even in the previous generation. It is no accident that the main period Menand treats witnessed a great boom in college and university foundations in America, and that this was the period when America got its first modern, research universities. American men were still going to Europe to get doctorates, but by the end of the nineteenth century that was a luxury, not the necessity it had been within living memory.
The chief idea of the book is pragmatism, the philosophical system which holds that the value of a belief or set of beliefs is found not in its correspondence to reality or its truth claims, but in its successful application to concrete situations. What matters is how an idea is able to help its adherent function in the world. If it works, it's useful; if it doesn't work, it is not. It does not matter if it is true or not. As Menand points out, Dewey and James came at pragmatism from opposite directions. But both were committed to finding a philosophy that would "fit" the world instead of one that would justify its proponents from making the world fit the philosophy. As Menand notes, "Pragmatism explains everything about ideas except why a person would be willing to die for one" (375).
A weakness in pragmatism, to be sure, but also the primary flaw of Menand's book. The flaw is not Menand's analysis of pragmatism; that is unobjectionable. The difficulty stems from Menand's location of pragmatism in American intellectual history. Introducing his subject, he writes that "the Civil War discredited the beliefs and assumptions of the era that preceded it." Along with slavery, the Civil War "swept away" the intellectual culture of the North. Hence the need for a replacement, the imperative to "find a set of ideas, and a way of thinking, that would help people cope with the conditions of modern life" (x).
This sets a trap from which Menand can't escape, although it's unclear he's aware of it. He never defines the "era" preceding the Civil War. He could mean that after 1800 or 1815 or 1820. He could mean that after 1828. Perhaps that after the Mexican War, although that is a short era. But it could also mean the one after 1776, which is how American historians often define the antebellum period. And the judgment that the beliefs and assumptions of the Revolution were discredited by the Civil War is dubious at best. One could argue that the Civil War was fought to affirm the validity of the beliefs and assumptions which brought the United States into being.
And here we run into Menand's other problem, his conception of "modern" America. Menand's characterization of modernity as defined by continuous change "not onward or upward, but forward, toward a future always in the making" (431) is the proper one. But by that standard modernity did not take hold of America after the Civil War, as he asserts: "The war alone did not make America modern, but the war marks the birth of modern America" (ix). No, by that standard, America was modern from its inception. The triumph of the future over the present and past was accomplished by the American Revolution. If, that is, it was not merely sanctifying the social, cultural, and intellectual forces which were already at work in the colonies in 1776, forces whose unleashing, in fact, was what had made them. But there is more to it than this. The pluralism championed by Dewey, Franz Boaz, Alain Locke, and others early in the twentieth century, Menand heralds as a modern solution to the American problem of growing ethnic and cultural diversity. That may be so for those matters, but again, pluralism itself was no new creation in America.
An earlier American pluralism (either justified or enabled by the Revolution) was that of the pursuit of the diverse goods of its citizens. The American Revolution was perhaps most revolutionary in its makers' rejection of the notion of a common good. There various goods, and society's purpose was to establish the conditions in which those goods could be pursued. It was emphatically not to prefer one vision of the good above all others and coerce the citizenry into adhering to it. In so choosing, the American Revolutionaries repudiated three (or twenty, depending on how one's counting) centuries of sociopolitical wisdom. Whatever beliefs of the antebellum period were discredited, that one assuredly was not.
Thus the chief flaw of Menand's interpretation. There are others, primarily that the last section of the book is considerably the weakest. The century turns, and the narrative's momentum flags. Partially this is due to the deaths of several of the protagonists, and partly to the fact that by the time the twentieth century rolls around, most of the hard work has been done.
Pragmatism thrived for a relatively short time, being soon eclipsed in American universities by yet another European import, the analytic school of Frege and Russell. But pragmatism persisted, and has enjoyed something of a revival lately. As well it might, being the one authentic philosophy it has contributed to the great Western philosophical tradition. No doubt its progenitors would have said it revived because circumstances were propitious for it to do so; once more, it fit. But surely it also revived because while intellectual heritages may be forgotten, they may also be remembered. Menand has remembered a critical portion of this American heritage in his American story.
The events Menand covers took place on another continent and in a different century. He focuses on how a group of thinkers which briefly coalesced in the early 1870s in the eponymous Metaphysical Club, strove to assemble out of the wreckage of the Civil War a set of ideas durable enough to guide the nation out of its torment yet loose enough to prevent it from ossifying into the kinds of dogmatism they believed had propelled the United States into Civil War. Thus, ironically, abolitionists are the early villains of the piece, their moral rectitude and righteousness being exactly what this new group of thinkers believed had to be avoided.
The protagonists are Oliver Wendell Holmes, C. S. Peirce, John Dewey, and William James. They are supported by a cast of dozens of other thinkers, writers, and characters, some important, some obscure. Each gets more or less a whole section to himself, as Menand explains the social and intellectual contexts out of which they emerged and those which they subsequently shaped. I don't want to write a detailed analysis of the book. Instead, I'd like to focus on some of its particular strengths, and one or two of its weaknesses.
Menand covers a prodigious amount of material and in a rather deceptive fashion. I say deceptive because he doesn't notify the reader that he is talking about this or that subject, or that he is going to do so. He simply does it. Among the topics he covers are: the controversies over Darwin and evolution; abolitionism and the Civil War; the advent of statistics and positivism and their incorporation into history writing; the origins and propagation of the philosophy of pragmatism; the bifurcation of psychology from the philosophy of mind; the Pullman strike; the formulation of the notion of academic freedom. These are just a few of the subjects he incorporates into his narrative, and he does so with considerable deftness.
Part of that deftness arises from Menand's self-restraint. He does not impose himself upon the reader. He has a clear authorial voice, but it does not announce itself except at the very beginning and end of the book. Otherwise, he allows the narrative to unfold of its own momentum. Menand speaks through the narrative, but it does not speak for him. There are no interjections about why this or that is important. There are no introductory passages, no pauses to summarize, no hand-holding. They are unnecessary, though. The prose is lucid and difficult, abstruse topics are presented cogently and in comprehensible, everyday terms. (Specialists perhaps might object that certain ideas are being stripped of their complexities and are not as straightforward as he makes them appear; I am not qualified to address the issue.) Citations are sufficient but not prolific; Menand surely did a lot more research than is indicated by his footnotes.
Another strength is that while there is overlap and backtracking, for the most part the narrative proceeds as did the lives of his protagonists, from beginning to end. Menand actually surveys a much larger period than expected. He starts with the Boston of such luminaries as Emerson and Oliver Holmes, Sr., and ends a century later in the 1920s. Narrative elements precede thematic ones. The ideas developed in time, and that is how Menand presents them.
What were these ideas? One that I don't think that he emphasizes enough is the notion that these thinkers were striving for a uniquely American solution to American problems. Throughout I was struck by a sense how American this was. European influences are still pronounced, but there is a maturity and confidence in the Metaphysical Club members regarding their situation and their ideas that was still nebulous even in the previous generation. It is no accident that the main period Menand treats witnessed a great boom in college and university foundations in America, and that this was the period when America got its first modern, research universities. American men were still going to Europe to get doctorates, but by the end of the nineteenth century that was a luxury, not the necessity it had been within living memory.
The chief idea of the book is pragmatism, the philosophical system which holds that the value of a belief or set of beliefs is found not in its correspondence to reality or its truth claims, but in its successful application to concrete situations. What matters is how an idea is able to help its adherent function in the world. If it works, it's useful; if it doesn't work, it is not. It does not matter if it is true or not. As Menand points out, Dewey and James came at pragmatism from opposite directions. But both were committed to finding a philosophy that would "fit" the world instead of one that would justify its proponents from making the world fit the philosophy. As Menand notes, "Pragmatism explains everything about ideas except why a person would be willing to die for one" (375).
A weakness in pragmatism, to be sure, but also the primary flaw of Menand's book. The flaw is not Menand's analysis of pragmatism; that is unobjectionable. The difficulty stems from Menand's location of pragmatism in American intellectual history. Introducing his subject, he writes that "the Civil War discredited the beliefs and assumptions of the era that preceded it." Along with slavery, the Civil War "swept away" the intellectual culture of the North. Hence the need for a replacement, the imperative to "find a set of ideas, and a way of thinking, that would help people cope with the conditions of modern life" (x).
This sets a trap from which Menand can't escape, although it's unclear he's aware of it. He never defines the "era" preceding the Civil War. He could mean that after 1800 or 1815 or 1820. He could mean that after 1828. Perhaps that after the Mexican War, although that is a short era. But it could also mean the one after 1776, which is how American historians often define the antebellum period. And the judgment that the beliefs and assumptions of the Revolution were discredited by the Civil War is dubious at best. One could argue that the Civil War was fought to affirm the validity of the beliefs and assumptions which brought the United States into being.
And here we run into Menand's other problem, his conception of "modern" America. Menand's characterization of modernity as defined by continuous change "not onward or upward, but forward, toward a future always in the making" (431) is the proper one. But by that standard modernity did not take hold of America after the Civil War, as he asserts: "The war alone did not make America modern, but the war marks the birth of modern America" (ix). No, by that standard, America was modern from its inception. The triumph of the future over the present and past was accomplished by the American Revolution. If, that is, it was not merely sanctifying the social, cultural, and intellectual forces which were already at work in the colonies in 1776, forces whose unleashing, in fact, was what had made them. But there is more to it than this. The pluralism championed by Dewey, Franz Boaz, Alain Locke, and others early in the twentieth century, Menand heralds as a modern solution to the American problem of growing ethnic and cultural diversity. That may be so for those matters, but again, pluralism itself was no new creation in America.
An earlier American pluralism (either justified or enabled by the Revolution) was that of the pursuit of the diverse goods of its citizens. The American Revolution was perhaps most revolutionary in its makers' rejection of the notion of a common good. There various goods, and society's purpose was to establish the conditions in which those goods could be pursued. It was emphatically not to prefer one vision of the good above all others and coerce the citizenry into adhering to it. In so choosing, the American Revolutionaries repudiated three (or twenty, depending on how one's counting) centuries of sociopolitical wisdom. Whatever beliefs of the antebellum period were discredited, that one assuredly was not.
Thus the chief flaw of Menand's interpretation. There are others, primarily that the last section of the book is considerably the weakest. The century turns, and the narrative's momentum flags. Partially this is due to the deaths of several of the protagonists, and partly to the fact that by the time the twentieth century rolls around, most of the hard work has been done.
Pragmatism thrived for a relatively short time, being soon eclipsed in American universities by yet another European import, the analytic school of Frege and Russell. But pragmatism persisted, and has enjoyed something of a revival lately. As well it might, being the one authentic philosophy it has contributed to the great Western philosophical tradition. No doubt its progenitors would have said it revived because circumstances were propitious for it to do so; once more, it fit. But surely it also revived because while intellectual heritages may be forgotten, they may also be remembered. Menand has remembered a critical portion of this American heritage in his American story.
June 9, 2015
Massively disappointing. The result is much smaller than the subject. What purports to be a synthesis of the intellectual ideas percolating change throughout American culture between the Civil War and World War I is instead a rambling collection of random facts without a thesis or a logical argument to prove it.
Menand pulls in seemingly random tangential people and circumstances, writing without discipline or direction. The disappointment is the greater because of the importance of the subject--those 80 years produced the greatest explosion of intellectual and cultural change in American history, a sea shift from wilderness to civilization, simplicity to cynicism, spirituality to secularism. Who were the thinkers and what were the circumstances that provided the raw materials for this explosion?
As near as I can tell, since he never clearly states it as such, his premise is:
"We know an outcome is right not because it was derived from immutable principles, but because it was reached by following the correct procedures. Science became modern when it was conceived not as an empirical confirmation of truths derived from an independent source, divine revelation, but as simply whatever followed from the pursuit of scientific methods of inquiry. If those methods were scientific, the result must be science."
Which I think is getting close to the point, but Menand never ties together the "Why' of it, which is the interesting and important part. Henry Adams, a contemporary of the time whom Menand virtually ignores, got much closer to the core in his much more pithy essay on the virgin and the dynamo. Adams equates the electric generator (dynamo) as the modern dynamic driver of civilization to the worship of the Virgin Mary that powered the civilization of the Middle-Ages cathedral.
Menard is no Henry Adams.
Menand pulls in seemingly random tangential people and circumstances, writing without discipline or direction. The disappointment is the greater because of the importance of the subject--those 80 years produced the greatest explosion of intellectual and cultural change in American history, a sea shift from wilderness to civilization, simplicity to cynicism, spirituality to secularism. Who were the thinkers and what were the circumstances that provided the raw materials for this explosion?
As near as I can tell, since he never clearly states it as such, his premise is:
"We know an outcome is right not because it was derived from immutable principles, but because it was reached by following the correct procedures. Science became modern when it was conceived not as an empirical confirmation of truths derived from an independent source, divine revelation, but as simply whatever followed from the pursuit of scientific methods of inquiry. If those methods were scientific, the result must be science."
Which I think is getting close to the point, but Menand never ties together the "Why' of it, which is the interesting and important part. Henry Adams, a contemporary of the time whom Menand virtually ignores, got much closer to the core in his much more pithy essay on the virgin and the dynamo. Adams equates the electric generator (dynamo) as the modern dynamic driver of civilization to the worship of the Virgin Mary that powered the civilization of the Middle-Ages cathedral.
Menard is no Henry Adams.
Read
August 22, 2021I once described Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" as "pure candy from start to finish," and this reminds me of this book. Both are about Deep Ideas that you're already kind of familiar with, bouncing from one of them to another to another quickly enough that it's impossible to learn too much new, but told with such panache that I blazed through it during an otherwise busy week. I suppose this sounds like a neg - that I am comparing the incontrovertibly high-status Louis Menand to, like, Malcolm Gladwell or something - and if so, so be it; but I really enjoyed it, and suspect you would, too.
May 8, 2013
This is probably the last book I bought at the now defunct Cornerstone Books in Salem, MA and that probably means nothing to you if you're just here trying to determine whether or not to read this one. Stick with me. I'm getting there. I bought it just before the birth of my daughter and began reading it in the hospital when she was born. She turns three next month. Does this suggest that I didn't thoroughly enjoy this book? Hardly. It's simply not a book that can be digested in small bite size chunks. It is a stunning piece of academic work, thought provoking and thorough. It needs to be savored. You try savoring a book full of heady thoughts with a young child (and then a second) on the loose. What I found most interesting about this book though was the way that some of the other books I've picked up along the way have added to my understanding and appreciation of it along the way. I wouldn't have taken so much from it had a I finished it in the weeks after my daughter's birth even if I did have all my faculties at that time (I didn't). Certainly the last few chapters have been greatly aided by some of the side reading I've been doing lately.
So what does this book cover? It examines how Americans think and why we think that way. That's too simplified of course. It makes it sound like pop history and this is not. (It is rather, a five star book I would recommend only to those who come to it eagerly). It builds slowly to the point taking care to delve into the relationships and influences of the men who shaped our thinking in the period between the Civil War and the Cold War. Only at the very end does it pull everything together in a way that had me turning pages quickly, absorbed enough to ignore the singing of Dora the Explorer in the background. Clearly I need to read it again, right through, start to finish over a period of less than three years. For now though I'm satisfied to have finally completed it and to have enjoyed it so much.
So what does this book cover? It examines how Americans think and why we think that way. That's too simplified of course. It makes it sound like pop history and this is not. (It is rather, a five star book I would recommend only to those who come to it eagerly). It builds slowly to the point taking care to delve into the relationships and influences of the men who shaped our thinking in the period between the Civil War and the Cold War. Only at the very end does it pull everything together in a way that had me turning pages quickly, absorbed enough to ignore the singing of Dora the Explorer in the background. Clearly I need to read it again, right through, start to finish over a period of less than three years. For now though I'm satisfied to have finally completed it and to have enjoyed it so much.
June 2, 2012
This is a (successful) attempt at a reconstruction of a several synchronic slices of American thought, mostly following the Civil War. Menand focuses on four thinkers he thinks most influenced modern American gestalt before the Cold War. They include the three most familiar names in American "Pragmatism," Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, along with Oliver Wendell Holmes. Menand also considers briefly why their thought has arisen again as relevant in the twenty-first century.
Though it doesn't hurt to be interested in philosophy to read this book, because it is written as history, with many inter-connected stories weaving in and out of descriptions of thinkers' lectures, books, and articles, anyone who is interested in the backgrounds and causes of "culture" will likely enjoy this book. It is probably also true that since a key feature of pragmatism is contingency, it could be said that Menand's approach is pragmatic. He tells the stories of these men, as well as their families, friends, and other people in their lives. How did Holmes's experience in the Civil War lead to his part in forming modern conceptions of freedom of expression? How did Dewey's conversations with Jane Addams affect his enormous influence on American education? Menand suggests that you can't understand these philosophers' expressions of their ideas without the context of the generation of those thoughts.
Some of the chapters in this book read like a novel, with pages quickly turned in order to see how he or she responded to what she or he just did. Others require slowing down and a little re-reading. Menand holds these parts together and offers a great book that is well-worth the time to read it.
Though it doesn't hurt to be interested in philosophy to read this book, because it is written as history, with many inter-connected stories weaving in and out of descriptions of thinkers' lectures, books, and articles, anyone who is interested in the backgrounds and causes of "culture" will likely enjoy this book. It is probably also true that since a key feature of pragmatism is contingency, it could be said that Menand's approach is pragmatic. He tells the stories of these men, as well as their families, friends, and other people in their lives. How did Holmes's experience in the Civil War lead to his part in forming modern conceptions of freedom of expression? How did Dewey's conversations with Jane Addams affect his enormous influence on American education? Menand suggests that you can't understand these philosophers' expressions of their ideas without the context of the generation of those thoughts.
Some of the chapters in this book read like a novel, with pages quickly turned in order to see how he or she responded to what she or he just did. Others require slowing down and a little re-reading. Menand holds these parts together and offers a great book that is well-worth the time to read it.
September 15, 2013
The title of this book is misleading. There's really not a lot about the actual Metaphysical Club. Records were not kept of their meetings. The subtitle was better: A Story of Ideas in America. But I would add "at the Turn of the Twentieth Century." It was an absolutely terrific read for those of you who aren't ashamed of having a brain.
Some of the racial comments were quite disturbing. Here's one by Giddon and let that suffice: "the most superior types of Monkeys are found to be indigenous exactly where we encounter races of the most inferior types of Men." No more disgusting quotes like that are necessary. Giddon also pointed out that no monkeys are in Europe.
The philosopher Herbert Spencer's great mistake in regard to evolution was his seeing "continuity." He felt there was progress. No such thing exists. Evolution is random. It has no brain behind it. People today still try to put a god there.
The author does a great job of explaining the importance of statistics and probability in coming to conclusions. No longer was accuracy needed, just a lot of information to make intelligent conclusions.
I enjoyed it so much, I made a list of pages to reread in the future.
Some of the racial comments were quite disturbing. Here's one by Giddon and let that suffice: "the most superior types of Monkeys are found to be indigenous exactly where we encounter races of the most inferior types of Men." No more disgusting quotes like that are necessary. Giddon also pointed out that no monkeys are in Europe.
The philosopher Herbert Spencer's great mistake in regard to evolution was his seeing "continuity." He felt there was progress. No such thing exists. Evolution is random. It has no brain behind it. People today still try to put a god there.
The author does a great job of explaining the importance of statistics and probability in coming to conclusions. No longer was accuracy needed, just a lot of information to make intelligent conclusions.
I enjoyed it so much, I made a list of pages to reread in the future.
August 26, 2021
This is an elegantly written history of American philosophical ideas, how the ideas conflicted, merged, and evolved among the personages studied in this history. This book is filled with a lot of details about the individuals and their ideas. The author does a good job showing how these men where influenced by their families, associates, each other, the culture, the racism, the politics, the economics, and the science of their times, such as Darwinism.
While the writing is graceful, I frequently found large sections where it was slow going. On the other hand, there were sections, such the author's coverage of the racial pseudoscience and the Pullman strike, where the writing soared and I flew fully engaged.
The high points of this history come in the last three chapters and the epilogue. It鈥檚 here where the reader sees the meaningfulness of the ideas and beliefs explored in this book. In the epilogue, the author nicely sums up how these 19th Century ideas may be relevant to our current period, or may not be.
While the writing is graceful, I frequently found large sections where it was slow going. On the other hand, there were sections, such the author's coverage of the racial pseudoscience and the Pullman strike, where the writing soared and I flew fully engaged.
The high points of this history come in the last three chapters and the epilogue. It鈥檚 here where the reader sees the meaningfulness of the ideas and beliefs explored in this book. In the epilogue, the author nicely sums up how these 19th Century ideas may be relevant to our current period, or may not be.
July 7, 2008
I found this book to be a fascinating and enlightening study of how certain ideas came to be prevalent in American society. The author examines the lives of four individuals whose ideas represent many of the underlying tenets of American thought: Oliver Wendall Holmes, William James, Charles S. Pierce and John Dewey. Beginning with the watershed event of the Civil War, the author shows how America changed in its institutions, its economics, its social makup, its approach to addressing and solving the problems of a modern society. He compares these individuals and their thoughts and actions in the post-war era of the late 19th century with those of the post-war period of the 20th, the brink of another wave of change. Some of the ideas these men held are at odds with facts we may know today; but the principles, the manner of thinking about problems which they fostered are recognizable today. This is a scholarly and a highly readable work which I strongly recommend.
September 21, 2017
Really enjoyed this informative, illuminating, and well-written history of Pragmatism. A handy introduction for lay readers to the quintessential American philosophy (surely that's consumerism. [Ed.]).
May 25, 2020
A dense and fascinating history of the often-overlooked period of American history between the Civil War and World War I through the lens of ideas. Menand essentially wrote a philosophical history of America at the dawn of the 20th century, and you can see why it won the Pulitzer Prize: It鈥檚 detailed and thorough, bringing together numerous threads, including science, philosophy, theology, politics and race.
The flip side of that thoroughness is length; the book is long, and I wasn鈥檛 always sure it needed to be as long as it was. Menand almost couldn鈥檛 seem to resist following every thread away from the core of his point, ultimately writing biographies not only of the four men who were his ostensible focus, but also of numerous other contemporaries. Did we need mini essays on Pullman or Debs or famous estate trials? Maybe? But maybe we didn鈥檛 need as much detail as Menand provides. The result is that it鈥檚 a little harder to follow the thread Menand actually wants us to follow 鈥� the development of ideas away from the natural theology and determinism of the Civil War generation to the evolutionary collectivism of the Progressive Era.
Nevertheless, all of it is super interesting. Menand writes very well, and that he can pull any coherence at all out of the numerous competing influences of a rapidly changing era like the one that moved America from a mostly rural slavery-enthralled nation to an industrial superpower (nominally) committed to freedom and democracy worldwide is remarkable. If you have any interest in the subjects I mentioned above 鈥� especially philosophy, science or political ideology 鈥� you will find this well worth reading.
The flip side of that thoroughness is length; the book is long, and I wasn鈥檛 always sure it needed to be as long as it was. Menand almost couldn鈥檛 seem to resist following every thread away from the core of his point, ultimately writing biographies not only of the four men who were his ostensible focus, but also of numerous other contemporaries. Did we need mini essays on Pullman or Debs or famous estate trials? Maybe? But maybe we didn鈥檛 need as much detail as Menand provides. The result is that it鈥檚 a little harder to follow the thread Menand actually wants us to follow 鈥� the development of ideas away from the natural theology and determinism of the Civil War generation to the evolutionary collectivism of the Progressive Era.
Nevertheless, all of it is super interesting. Menand writes very well, and that he can pull any coherence at all out of the numerous competing influences of a rapidly changing era like the one that moved America from a mostly rural slavery-enthralled nation to an industrial superpower (nominally) committed to freedom and democracy worldwide is remarkable. If you have any interest in the subjects I mentioned above 鈥� especially philosophy, science or political ideology 鈥� you will find this well worth reading.
December 6, 2013
In 1776, a congress of savvy landowners in Philadelphia announced to the world (particularly to King George) that they held self-evident truths.
One hundred years later, a few misfit geniuses in Boston confessed that they could hold no truths at all. In fact, they could barely hold each other's attention.
But both groups changed the world. The first, of course, created the United States of America. The second created the modern mind.
The story of how the idea of truth could evolve from self-evident certainty to indeterminate irrelevancy is the plot of Louis Menand's fascinating history called "The Metaphysical Club." His title comes from an unpublished manuscript written by Charles Peirce, referring to "a knot of us young men in Old Cambridge" who met for about eight months in 1872.
Peirce was a gifted (and almost incomprehensible) scientist and logician, whose life eventually descended into poverty and humiliation. But in the flush year of 1872, he and his friends congregated to discuss a new method of thought later known as "pragmatism." Among that group were Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Civil War hero who would go on to serve on the Supreme Court for 30 years, and William James, the future founder of American psychology.
This triumvirate forms the cast of Menand's eloquent biography of American thought. Along with John Dewey, who revolutionized education, these men proposed that "ideas are not 'out there' waiting to be discovered, but are tools - like forks and knives and microchips - that people devise to cope with the world." Menand continues, "They believed that ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment. And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability."
Explaining the meaning, significance, and development of that belief is the story of "The Metaphysical Club," a story of almost ludicrous breadth and depth, winding around handwriting analysis, birds, racism, railroads, universities, and God. The threat of philosophical textbookism hovers in the margins, but Menand's determination to "see ideas as always soaked through by the personal and social situations in which we find them" fends off that danger with sometimes dazzling effect.
He begins with the Civil War, a battle between differing ideals that tore the nation apart. Young Holmes marched to battle radiating Boston's radical liberalism. But suffering from a near-fatal wound at Ball's Bluff, his faith in absolutes drained away with his blood. He spent the many remaining decades of his life considering, articulating, and finally establishing in American constitutional law his new suspicion of all "truth" claims. That attitude may sound dark and cynical, but it led Holmes to create the modern concept of free speech, a tolerance he hoped would prevent the violence inspired by certainty and allow ideas to struggle for survival in the social marketplace.
His friend William James didn't fight in the Civil War, but by a different path (actually, many different paths) he arrived at the similar conclusion that "certainty was moral death." His sister once described him as "a blob of mercury." He complained even about the constraints of standardized spelling. He infuriated his medical colleagues at Harvard by defending spiritual healers.
The triumph of "The Metaphysical Club" is the author's dramatic demonstration of the parallel between developments in science and philosophy. For instance, his examination of the way astronomers began using new concepts of probability to develop more accurate star measurements seems at first an arcane detour. But at just the right moment, this exploration snaps into relevance with his discussion of a new philosophy for arriving at moral judgments. Connections like this produce a kind of rare intellectual delight that erupts throughout "The Metaphysical Club."
Menand notes that Peirce "rarely glimpsed a path down which he was not tempted to wander," and the same could be said about this book, a study that bristles with curiosity and curiosities. Menand is as excited to explain the theory of "causeless cause" as he is to gossip about an affair one of his subjects had with a teenage girl. But he catches the rhythms of 19th-century America with striking clarity, swinging from complex explanations to epigraphic summaries. The doors of "The Metaphysical Club" look intimidating, but don't be put off. It's engaging, wise, and touched with wit - a chance to follow an inspector around the foundations of American thought and understand this house of mirrors we've inherited.
One hundred years later, a few misfit geniuses in Boston confessed that they could hold no truths at all. In fact, they could barely hold each other's attention.
But both groups changed the world. The first, of course, created the United States of America. The second created the modern mind.
The story of how the idea of truth could evolve from self-evident certainty to indeterminate irrelevancy is the plot of Louis Menand's fascinating history called "The Metaphysical Club." His title comes from an unpublished manuscript written by Charles Peirce, referring to "a knot of us young men in Old Cambridge" who met for about eight months in 1872.
Peirce was a gifted (and almost incomprehensible) scientist and logician, whose life eventually descended into poverty and humiliation. But in the flush year of 1872, he and his friends congregated to discuss a new method of thought later known as "pragmatism." Among that group were Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Civil War hero who would go on to serve on the Supreme Court for 30 years, and William James, the future founder of American psychology.
This triumvirate forms the cast of Menand's eloquent biography of American thought. Along with John Dewey, who revolutionized education, these men proposed that "ideas are not 'out there' waiting to be discovered, but are tools - like forks and knives and microchips - that people devise to cope with the world." Menand continues, "They believed that ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment. And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability."
Explaining the meaning, significance, and development of that belief is the story of "The Metaphysical Club," a story of almost ludicrous breadth and depth, winding around handwriting analysis, birds, racism, railroads, universities, and God. The threat of philosophical textbookism hovers in the margins, but Menand's determination to "see ideas as always soaked through by the personal and social situations in which we find them" fends off that danger with sometimes dazzling effect.
He begins with the Civil War, a battle between differing ideals that tore the nation apart. Young Holmes marched to battle radiating Boston's radical liberalism. But suffering from a near-fatal wound at Ball's Bluff, his faith in absolutes drained away with his blood. He spent the many remaining decades of his life considering, articulating, and finally establishing in American constitutional law his new suspicion of all "truth" claims. That attitude may sound dark and cynical, but it led Holmes to create the modern concept of free speech, a tolerance he hoped would prevent the violence inspired by certainty and allow ideas to struggle for survival in the social marketplace.
His friend William James didn't fight in the Civil War, but by a different path (actually, many different paths) he arrived at the similar conclusion that "certainty was moral death." His sister once described him as "a blob of mercury." He complained even about the constraints of standardized spelling. He infuriated his medical colleagues at Harvard by defending spiritual healers.
The triumph of "The Metaphysical Club" is the author's dramatic demonstration of the parallel between developments in science and philosophy. For instance, his examination of the way astronomers began using new concepts of probability to develop more accurate star measurements seems at first an arcane detour. But at just the right moment, this exploration snaps into relevance with his discussion of a new philosophy for arriving at moral judgments. Connections like this produce a kind of rare intellectual delight that erupts throughout "The Metaphysical Club."
Menand notes that Peirce "rarely glimpsed a path down which he was not tempted to wander," and the same could be said about this book, a study that bristles with curiosity and curiosities. Menand is as excited to explain the theory of "causeless cause" as he is to gossip about an affair one of his subjects had with a teenage girl. But he catches the rhythms of 19th-century America with striking clarity, swinging from complex explanations to epigraphic summaries. The doors of "The Metaphysical Club" look intimidating, but don't be put off. It's engaging, wise, and touched with wit - a chance to follow an inspector around the foundations of American thought and understand this house of mirrors we've inherited.
June 13, 2020
A mental workout, and one I enjoyed.
I haven't read much philosophy seriously and dipping my toes into some epistemology and other tough stuff for the first time in a long while was challenging, though Menand is a good guide.
What was fun (and thought-provoking) about the book was the way Menand strung it all together. You're marching from Oliver Wendell Holmes to William James to Charles Sanders Peirce to John Dewey with them all spiraling together but with time for detours for Alain Locke and Darwin and Herbert Spencer and crackpot racist biology and the birth of statistics and eugenics and a heavy dose of the Civil War and the Spanish-American War and Hull House and Eugene Debs and World War I and academic freedom and the birth of Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Clark, and other universities...and yet it all somehow still flows. You feel the disorientation, the dislocation of American society at around the time of the Civil War and thereafter and the way in which the four principal thinkers and the many people surrounding them tried to wrestle with modernity and industrialism and questions about God and all the age-old questions of philosophy.
I'm currently reading a book about Lincoln and his relationship to slavery/race, so it also struck me how suffused the book is with thinking about race -- very American, I suppose, but it's fascinating how many otherwise intelligent people went off in extremely curious directions in order to preserve notions of white supremacy, and how central the whole project of white supremacy was to our country's intellectual culture. (I guess I'm also thinking of some of the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates that I've been reading on his blog.)
I wish I'd read this book in a class or at least with a book club, but I'm glad I read it. I learned a lot of history and saw some new ways of looking at the world -- and have some idea what Pragmatism might mean, though not as much as I'd hope after reading the whole book -- though I don't know how deeply the ideas of the book (and of Holmes, Peirce, James, and Dewey) have sunk in to me.
I haven't read much philosophy seriously and dipping my toes into some epistemology and other tough stuff for the first time in a long while was challenging, though Menand is a good guide.
What was fun (and thought-provoking) about the book was the way Menand strung it all together. You're marching from Oliver Wendell Holmes to William James to Charles Sanders Peirce to John Dewey with them all spiraling together but with time for detours for Alain Locke and Darwin and Herbert Spencer and crackpot racist biology and the birth of statistics and eugenics and a heavy dose of the Civil War and the Spanish-American War and Hull House and Eugene Debs and World War I and academic freedom and the birth of Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Clark, and other universities...and yet it all somehow still flows. You feel the disorientation, the dislocation of American society at around the time of the Civil War and thereafter and the way in which the four principal thinkers and the many people surrounding them tried to wrestle with modernity and industrialism and questions about God and all the age-old questions of philosophy.
I'm currently reading a book about Lincoln and his relationship to slavery/race, so it also struck me how suffused the book is with thinking about race -- very American, I suppose, but it's fascinating how many otherwise intelligent people went off in extremely curious directions in order to preserve notions of white supremacy, and how central the whole project of white supremacy was to our country's intellectual culture. (I guess I'm also thinking of some of the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates that I've been reading on his blog.)
I wish I'd read this book in a class or at least with a book club, but I'm glad I read it. I learned a lot of history and saw some new ways of looking at the world -- and have some idea what Pragmatism might mean, though not as much as I'd hope after reading the whole book -- though I don't know how deeply the ideas of the book (and of Holmes, Peirce, James, and Dewey) have sunk in to me.
July 29, 2019
Although I don't agree with all of the principles of pragmatism (nor, indeed, did the various pragmatists discussed in this volume agree with each other about everything), this book is an outstanding work of historical scholarship, delineating with sometimes excruciating detail the twists and turns of the lives and thoughts of such pragmatists as William James, John Dewey, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. as well as the era in which they lived. At times, the book is depressing; at other times it is exhilarating. Whatever else may be said about them, it is certainly the case that these giants of American intellectual history had outstanding minds whose thought deserves consideration. Their most important contribution, in my view, is captured in the following excerpt from pages 371-72 of Menand's book:
Pragmatism鈥檚 appeal in these circumstances is not hard to understand. Everything James and Dewey wrote as pragmatists boils down to a single claim: people are the agents of their own destinies. They dispelled the fatalism that haunts almost every nineteenth-century system of thought鈥攖he mechanical or materialist determinism of writers like Laplace, Malthus, Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, and Marx, and the providential or absolutist determinism of writers like Hegel, Agassiz, Morris, and the Peirces. James and Dewey described a universe still in progress, a place where no conclusion is foregone and every problem is amenable to the exercise of what Dewey called 鈥渋ntelligent action.鈥� They spoke to a generation of academics, journalists, jurists, and policy makers eager to find scientific solutions to social problems, and happy to be given good reasons to ignore the claims of finished cosmologies.
January 20, 2011
Personally, I have a hard time getting excited about John Dewey. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr is more compelling, and the first section of Menand鈥檚 book - dealing with Holmes鈥檚 experience of the Civil War - was thrilling and powerfully reflective. It鈥檚 the figures of William James and Charles Pierce, however, that really made this book for me. I only wish it had spent more time with them. I didn't know Pierce before. Reading about James, however pleasurably, is topped (I think) by reading James himself. I鈥檝e not read much beyond Varieties of Religious Experience and clearly I鈥檓 going to have to remedy that. Immediately after setting down Menand鈥檚 book I opened up a library copy of Pragmatism.
The Metaphysical Club is more than a book about these four men, however. Hosts of others make their appearance (Darwin, Agassiz, Emerson, Debs, Boas, Jane Addams, etc.) and Menand鈥檚 depth and comfort in the history of the era is appreciable. I learned (and re-learned) a lot. Menand himself is a writer (as a friend put it) of 鈥渃lean prose,鈥� which is high praise in my book. Sometimes he鈥檚 even better than that. Prior to picking up The Metaphysical Club I鈥檇 only really known him as a writer of prefaces and sometimes contributor to The New Yorker. I understand there鈥檚 room for a critique of Menand鈥檚 approach, for what we leaves out (John Jay Chapman?), etc. But I鈥檇 say this was a deserved Pulitzer.
The Metaphysical Club is more than a book about these four men, however. Hosts of others make their appearance (Darwin, Agassiz, Emerson, Debs, Boas, Jane Addams, etc.) and Menand鈥檚 depth and comfort in the history of the era is appreciable. I learned (and re-learned) a lot. Menand himself is a writer (as a friend put it) of 鈥渃lean prose,鈥� which is high praise in my book. Sometimes he鈥檚 even better than that. Prior to picking up The Metaphysical Club I鈥檇 only really known him as a writer of prefaces and sometimes contributor to The New Yorker. I understand there鈥檚 room for a critique of Menand鈥檚 approach, for what we leaves out (John Jay Chapman?), etc. But I鈥檇 say this was a deserved Pulitzer.
October 19, 2019
It took a long time for me to finish this book. You can learn a lot from it, but it is deceptive as it not only covers the thoughts of a few famous Americans from the Civil War times to the end of WWI, but talks about dozens of individuals the their background, education, jobs, and ideas and then attempts to tie them in with the ideas of others. Major emphasis of the ideas is racial superiority and immigration. Also covers freedom of speech (academic), the ability to express yourself without losing your position. Book could have been shorter and accomplish it's intent. Would read a bit and then grow tired and set it down.
Read
November 11, 2020亘丕禺鬲氐丕乇貙 兀賳氐丨 丕賱匕賷賳 賷鬲賯賳賵賳 丕賱廿賳噩賱賷夭賷丞 兀賳 賷賯乇兀賵丕 賴匕丕 丕賱賰鬲丕亘 丕賱賲賴賲 賮賷 賱睾鬲賴 丕賱兀氐賱賷丞貙 賮賴匕賴 丕賱鬲乇噩賲丞 賰丕乇孬賷丞 亘丕賲鬲賷丕夭
December 22, 2013
This is a highly recommended work of intellectual history with major insights into the construction of the American mind. Menand's approach can be easily summarised. He takes the lives of four significant American intellectuals - William James, Charles Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Dewey - and weaves a history around them, their associates and historical events.
The purpose is to elucidate the pragmatic turn of mind that emerged as a central element in American political and intellectual life after the horrors of the Civil War. It reached its high point in the first half of the next century. He presents pragmatism in its various forms as a reaction to the absolutism and certainty that had led to war.
He closes by hinting (though not going much further) that the ways of seeing represented by these men have been replaced by more absolutist attitudes in more recent decades.
This book has so much breadth and depth to it that it is hard to suggest anything more than that it should be read. There is no easy summary of its contents. This is fitting. Pragmatic thinking is a response to the human complexity that became increasingly obvious in industrial society.
This required a turning away from simplicities offered by Christian Fundamentalists, Kantians, Hegelians and other believers in the Absolute. Pierce, for example, remained someone with a sense of the absolute but his role is much like that of Kierkegaard's in the equivalent European existentialist revolt against intellectual grand design.
Both men were trying to understand how the world might be interpreted in the light of experience while retaining God. Peirce's philosophy of signs and wonders and Kierkegaard's leap of faith created pragmatic tools for others who required no deity - not what either man intended.
Pragmatism may even be the reason why Marxism could never take hold in the American elite. The central aspect of pragmatism is its lack of ideology - ideas and concepts are just tools. Tolerance of the struggle for mastery over ideas was to be the hall mark of Americanism expressed as democracy.
Pragmatism happens to be the philosophy of action (alongside existentialism as philosophy of being) that I find most amenable so I have a bias here.
Nevertheless, it would be hard to find a more basically decent human being than William James, one of the key figures in Menand's analysis. It is rare to read a book nowadays where a major figure comes out better than you expected - usually, 'great men' (a silly concept) come out human-all-too-human in the worst sense.
Here, James comes out human-all-too-human in the best sense - inquiring, tolerant, decent, humane and providing space for possibility at every opportunity when it comes to us humans. This is a progressive man, not in the sense of the interfering matriarchical busybody who wants us to be 'better' but as someone who sees life as a process of improvement and development from within.
James also re-opened the door for religion not as an imposed morality instigated from above but as a life choice that could be respected even if it was 'wrong'.
What also comes across in the book is just how interconnected the American intellectual class was in the nineteenth century. Make no mistake - American democracy was constructed by elites. Although this changes as the century progresses, the story is almost entirely one of a network of individuals who all knew each other and had family connections in New England.
These are people who grow up and go to war together and deal together with problems raised by the piety, real or assumed, of their parents' generation through argument and struggle. These are not radicals at all. Quite the contrary. They are reacting to a political radicalism about principle that had resulted in violence. Menand is persuasive on this.
These are also highly intelligent people struggling with the processes of transition within a relatively undeveloped proto-industrial economy.
In traditional capitalist New England, merchant families maintained order and morality through an appeal to a puritan God. After the Civil War, a rival conservative culture based on agrarian values was crushed but modernity did not allow the New Englanders much time to bask in their absolute values of righteousness and good order.
Industrial society became continent-wide and complex, leading to tensions between bourgeois paternalism and labour rights. This was compounded by the 'pull' of migrants from overseas looking for a better life and the complex interweaving of science and race with the politics of interest.
Pragmatic thought was the right philosophy for the times. It recognised the sheer scale of the problem of differing interests and the uselessness of resolutions of difference by force and violence.
It is interesting perhaps that 'absolutism' (in the form of the aggressive export of democratic values in the declaration of war of 1917) emerged from the circle of a Southern Democrat. This declaration of war was also associated with an aggressive use of the law to supppress dissent. Many of the New England 'liberals' (William James was conscious of his debt to JS Mill) opposed the war.
Dewey, the youngest, who straddled the liberal/progressive divide, was one of the war mongers but later regretted his position. This became a breach between the true pragmatists and the militant progressives and is underestimated as a longstanding tension between two responses to American democracy.
The liberal pragmatist's prime concern is in making democracy work well in and for itself to avoid disorder and violence. The progressive, like the socialist, wants to make it work for a prior idea or interest.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, for example, was interested in process to ensure the law worked well in a pragmatic way. Personally quite conservative, this might often result in liberal or progressive results. Sometimes this meant that he was supportive of the more tyrannical statist changes and sometimes resistant of them.
The total effect of this pragmatic philosophy of letting judges make the law out of the law was a constant liberal adjustment to changed conditions despite his own conservatism. Menand makes his case well that the construction of American liberal democracy owes a great deal to the confluence of views and adaptation to new realities of this relatively small group of intellectuals.
Perhaps in some ways pragmatism went too far, opening the door to a new phase that was to prove more problematic but this would still accord with pragmatic philosophy. Although I happen to think there is a flaw in this approach, the pragmatist would tend to see process as value-free eventually leading to the best outcome - a counterpart to the market.
In fact, the argument for a struggle of interests within democracy eventually degenerated into the identity politics we see today. Although Menand does not deal with the later period, he gives insights. Ethnic and religious individuals began to see no future in being American alone but in becoming competing blocks within American democracy as ethnic or faith-based Americans.
The pragmatists cannot be held responsible for this development because pragmatism presupposes a common core culture within which other socio-economic interests struggle but the philosophy enabled it to happen. They were not to know that the struggle between socio-economic interests would come to involve the revival of race and of ethnicity, and then of gender and sexual orientation, as organising principles.
A democracy designed to manage the clash of labour and capital in the wake of the traumatic Pullman Strike eventually became a vehicle for culture wars between vast coalitions of identity groups. By the twenty-first century, these were constructing themselves in opposition to each other in a blind process of call and response. Voters would vote on tribal attribute rather than individual interest.
Perhaps the most degenerate phase will be when a woman president is elected not because she is the best person but because liberal women will vote en masse for one of their own.
The State also became powerful in itself as arbiter between labour and capital and so was enabled to become, in stages, 'imperial'. It had learned to undertake war internally between 1860 and 1865 and then practised these dark arts against Indian tribes and the little brown brothers in Cuba and the Philippines.
The new rampant State ceased to be liberal without ceasing to be democratic when it entered the European War with a specific brief to spread values which had by then ceased to be 'pragmatic'. Menand does not deal with this late phase but we can. Pragmatism was displaced by a new democratic absolutism - American democracy not as organic creation but as exportable total system against 'tyranny'.
In the twentieth century, not just in 1917 but in stages throughout the century, America became an illiberal democracy (in the sense that a British person or New Englander would have understood 'liberal'). The new 'liberalism' that has emerged is, like its counterpart conservatism, definitely not a pragmatism but closer to the transcendental belief system of pre 1860 New England radicals.
If conservatism has not lost God. American liberalism (or progressivism) has a vision of what is absolutely right that is not wholly without merit. Sometimes 'real' liberalism fails to deliver. Menand rightly points out that it took an absolutist who believed in God (Martin Luther King) to trigger the changes required to move forward in dealing with racial discrimination.
However, cultural struggle in America today, a stand-off between cultural conservatives and liberals, means partial disconnection from basic socio-economic struggles and this not quite so 'pragmatic'. American democracy is not all that it often claims to be. The current struggle, expressed in terms of Democrats and Republicans, certainly works within certain rules set by the Constitution.
However, the US is not the common culture on which pragmatists had relied for their philosophy of tolerance and pluralism to work, the function of a meritocratic elite which crushed its main rival in war. The America of the twenty-first century is different in fundamental ways from the world of the pragmatists while, in practical terms, within a complicated legal framework, Americans remain pragmatic.
However, making democracy work as process (the aim of political pragmatists) has been replaced by a determination to treat the state, judiciary and legislature as instrumental in a different way. The Constitution is robust but the cultural wars within the US and the imperial adventuring outside seem to have reached a pitch of intensity where the Constitution simply no longer has all the answers required.
Since 2003, the US has engaged in a series of wars that have been fruitless and expensive, culminating in a bloodless defeat in Syria, without any sense of the nation being united any more than in 1917. Similarly, the state's surveillance operations seem to have been undertaken by an executive that is out of control, without legislative scrutiny or opportunity for judicial review.
Neither of these issues appear to engage the mass of Americans who seem to live under the radar screen of any politics that is not pre-set by their cultural identity. The economic losers (once the interest group of concern to pragmatists) are now wholly without a voice, not even the voice that Menand noted existed a hundred years earlier simply by dint of them existing.
Something is up with America. Some crisis that has not yet expressed itself. This book is an invaluable guide in trying to think through what that crisis might be and how it might have come to be. Perhaps, by thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of pragmatic thinking, it might also help Americans think about what might be done to overcome that crisis as it unfolds over the coming years.
The purpose is to elucidate the pragmatic turn of mind that emerged as a central element in American political and intellectual life after the horrors of the Civil War. It reached its high point in the first half of the next century. He presents pragmatism in its various forms as a reaction to the absolutism and certainty that had led to war.
He closes by hinting (though not going much further) that the ways of seeing represented by these men have been replaced by more absolutist attitudes in more recent decades.
This book has so much breadth and depth to it that it is hard to suggest anything more than that it should be read. There is no easy summary of its contents. This is fitting. Pragmatic thinking is a response to the human complexity that became increasingly obvious in industrial society.
This required a turning away from simplicities offered by Christian Fundamentalists, Kantians, Hegelians and other believers in the Absolute. Pierce, for example, remained someone with a sense of the absolute but his role is much like that of Kierkegaard's in the equivalent European existentialist revolt against intellectual grand design.
Both men were trying to understand how the world might be interpreted in the light of experience while retaining God. Peirce's philosophy of signs and wonders and Kierkegaard's leap of faith created pragmatic tools for others who required no deity - not what either man intended.
Pragmatism may even be the reason why Marxism could never take hold in the American elite. The central aspect of pragmatism is its lack of ideology - ideas and concepts are just tools. Tolerance of the struggle for mastery over ideas was to be the hall mark of Americanism expressed as democracy.
Pragmatism happens to be the philosophy of action (alongside existentialism as philosophy of being) that I find most amenable so I have a bias here.
Nevertheless, it would be hard to find a more basically decent human being than William James, one of the key figures in Menand's analysis. It is rare to read a book nowadays where a major figure comes out better than you expected - usually, 'great men' (a silly concept) come out human-all-too-human in the worst sense.
Here, James comes out human-all-too-human in the best sense - inquiring, tolerant, decent, humane and providing space for possibility at every opportunity when it comes to us humans. This is a progressive man, not in the sense of the interfering matriarchical busybody who wants us to be 'better' but as someone who sees life as a process of improvement and development from within.
James also re-opened the door for religion not as an imposed morality instigated from above but as a life choice that could be respected even if it was 'wrong'.
What also comes across in the book is just how interconnected the American intellectual class was in the nineteenth century. Make no mistake - American democracy was constructed by elites. Although this changes as the century progresses, the story is almost entirely one of a network of individuals who all knew each other and had family connections in New England.
These are people who grow up and go to war together and deal together with problems raised by the piety, real or assumed, of their parents' generation through argument and struggle. These are not radicals at all. Quite the contrary. They are reacting to a political radicalism about principle that had resulted in violence. Menand is persuasive on this.
These are also highly intelligent people struggling with the processes of transition within a relatively undeveloped proto-industrial economy.
In traditional capitalist New England, merchant families maintained order and morality through an appeal to a puritan God. After the Civil War, a rival conservative culture based on agrarian values was crushed but modernity did not allow the New Englanders much time to bask in their absolute values of righteousness and good order.
Industrial society became continent-wide and complex, leading to tensions between bourgeois paternalism and labour rights. This was compounded by the 'pull' of migrants from overseas looking for a better life and the complex interweaving of science and race with the politics of interest.
Pragmatic thought was the right philosophy for the times. It recognised the sheer scale of the problem of differing interests and the uselessness of resolutions of difference by force and violence.
It is interesting perhaps that 'absolutism' (in the form of the aggressive export of democratic values in the declaration of war of 1917) emerged from the circle of a Southern Democrat. This declaration of war was also associated with an aggressive use of the law to supppress dissent. Many of the New England 'liberals' (William James was conscious of his debt to JS Mill) opposed the war.
Dewey, the youngest, who straddled the liberal/progressive divide, was one of the war mongers but later regretted his position. This became a breach between the true pragmatists and the militant progressives and is underestimated as a longstanding tension between two responses to American democracy.
The liberal pragmatist's prime concern is in making democracy work well in and for itself to avoid disorder and violence. The progressive, like the socialist, wants to make it work for a prior idea or interest.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, for example, was interested in process to ensure the law worked well in a pragmatic way. Personally quite conservative, this might often result in liberal or progressive results. Sometimes this meant that he was supportive of the more tyrannical statist changes and sometimes resistant of them.
The total effect of this pragmatic philosophy of letting judges make the law out of the law was a constant liberal adjustment to changed conditions despite his own conservatism. Menand makes his case well that the construction of American liberal democracy owes a great deal to the confluence of views and adaptation to new realities of this relatively small group of intellectuals.
Perhaps in some ways pragmatism went too far, opening the door to a new phase that was to prove more problematic but this would still accord with pragmatic philosophy. Although I happen to think there is a flaw in this approach, the pragmatist would tend to see process as value-free eventually leading to the best outcome - a counterpart to the market.
In fact, the argument for a struggle of interests within democracy eventually degenerated into the identity politics we see today. Although Menand does not deal with the later period, he gives insights. Ethnic and religious individuals began to see no future in being American alone but in becoming competing blocks within American democracy as ethnic or faith-based Americans.
The pragmatists cannot be held responsible for this development because pragmatism presupposes a common core culture within which other socio-economic interests struggle but the philosophy enabled it to happen. They were not to know that the struggle between socio-economic interests would come to involve the revival of race and of ethnicity, and then of gender and sexual orientation, as organising principles.
A democracy designed to manage the clash of labour and capital in the wake of the traumatic Pullman Strike eventually became a vehicle for culture wars between vast coalitions of identity groups. By the twenty-first century, these were constructing themselves in opposition to each other in a blind process of call and response. Voters would vote on tribal attribute rather than individual interest.
Perhaps the most degenerate phase will be when a woman president is elected not because she is the best person but because liberal women will vote en masse for one of their own.
The State also became powerful in itself as arbiter between labour and capital and so was enabled to become, in stages, 'imperial'. It had learned to undertake war internally between 1860 and 1865 and then practised these dark arts against Indian tribes and the little brown brothers in Cuba and the Philippines.
The new rampant State ceased to be liberal without ceasing to be democratic when it entered the European War with a specific brief to spread values which had by then ceased to be 'pragmatic'. Menand does not deal with this late phase but we can. Pragmatism was displaced by a new democratic absolutism - American democracy not as organic creation but as exportable total system against 'tyranny'.
In the twentieth century, not just in 1917 but in stages throughout the century, America became an illiberal democracy (in the sense that a British person or New Englander would have understood 'liberal'). The new 'liberalism' that has emerged is, like its counterpart conservatism, definitely not a pragmatism but closer to the transcendental belief system of pre 1860 New England radicals.
If conservatism has not lost God. American liberalism (or progressivism) has a vision of what is absolutely right that is not wholly without merit. Sometimes 'real' liberalism fails to deliver. Menand rightly points out that it took an absolutist who believed in God (Martin Luther King) to trigger the changes required to move forward in dealing with racial discrimination.
However, cultural struggle in America today, a stand-off between cultural conservatives and liberals, means partial disconnection from basic socio-economic struggles and this not quite so 'pragmatic'. American democracy is not all that it often claims to be. The current struggle, expressed in terms of Democrats and Republicans, certainly works within certain rules set by the Constitution.
However, the US is not the common culture on which pragmatists had relied for their philosophy of tolerance and pluralism to work, the function of a meritocratic elite which crushed its main rival in war. The America of the twenty-first century is different in fundamental ways from the world of the pragmatists while, in practical terms, within a complicated legal framework, Americans remain pragmatic.
However, making democracy work as process (the aim of political pragmatists) has been replaced by a determination to treat the state, judiciary and legislature as instrumental in a different way. The Constitution is robust but the cultural wars within the US and the imperial adventuring outside seem to have reached a pitch of intensity where the Constitution simply no longer has all the answers required.
Since 2003, the US has engaged in a series of wars that have been fruitless and expensive, culminating in a bloodless defeat in Syria, without any sense of the nation being united any more than in 1917. Similarly, the state's surveillance operations seem to have been undertaken by an executive that is out of control, without legislative scrutiny or opportunity for judicial review.
Neither of these issues appear to engage the mass of Americans who seem to live under the radar screen of any politics that is not pre-set by their cultural identity. The economic losers (once the interest group of concern to pragmatists) are now wholly without a voice, not even the voice that Menand noted existed a hundred years earlier simply by dint of them existing.
Something is up with America. Some crisis that has not yet expressed itself. This book is an invaluable guide in trying to think through what that crisis might be and how it might have come to be. Perhaps, by thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of pragmatic thinking, it might also help Americans think about what might be done to overcome that crisis as it unfolds over the coming years.
September 23, 2021
The Metaphysical Club traces American philosophic and political thought through the 50 years between the Civil War and the Great War. Louis Menand does so by following the lives, influences, and work of 4 prominent thinkers of the era. The philosopher John Dewey was influential in educational reform. William James combined psychology with philosophy and was closely aligned with Charles Sanders Peirce who's considered the 1st advocate of the school of pragmatism considering human thought and language the primary judge of reality. Oliver Wendell Holmes was a jurist and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court whose insistence on experience rather than logic in legal thinking enhanced civil liberties and helped steer American constitutional democracy.
The Metaphysical Club isn't 4 distinct stories about these men but is presented in one continuous narrative flow which includes their lives and work as they interact and swirl around each other like the currents of a busy stream. It's not exclusively about them, either, but includes other important figures who touched the development of their ideas. Eugene V. Debs the socialist is here, and so is Jane Addams and Ralph Waldo Emerson. They were all scholars and heavy, serious thinkers. Menand carefully describes the design of their thinking so that it's fairly easy to follow and always interesting. The most common characteristic of their varied work, Menand says, is tolerance. All they did displays this element of regard for the society their ideas served. He contrasts it with the Cold War which was fought mostly with principles while disregarding human obligation. And when Menand strikes the bell of tolerance near the end of his book, a reader can't help but contrast the late 19th century with our own.
The Metaphysical Club isn't 4 distinct stories about these men but is presented in one continuous narrative flow which includes their lives and work as they interact and swirl around each other like the currents of a busy stream. It's not exclusively about them, either, but includes other important figures who touched the development of their ideas. Eugene V. Debs the socialist is here, and so is Jane Addams and Ralph Waldo Emerson. They were all scholars and heavy, serious thinkers. Menand carefully describes the design of their thinking so that it's fairly easy to follow and always interesting. The most common characteristic of their varied work, Menand says, is tolerance. All they did displays this element of regard for the society their ideas served. He contrasts it with the Cold War which was fought mostly with principles while disregarding human obligation. And when Menand strikes the bell of tolerance near the end of his book, a reader can't help but contrast the late 19th century with our own.
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