The Metaphysical Club of Menand’s title was a small, fairly short-lived conversation society organized by Chauncey Wright in 1872 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with members including Oliver Wendell Homes, Jr., William James, and Charles Pierce, among others. Menand represents this coterie as the seedbed of the American philosophical school of pragmatism, and uses it for a point of orientation in tracing the intellectual formation and accomplishments of pragmatists James, Pierce, and John Dewey. Along with Holmes, who despite his distaste for the label “pragmatism,” shared in much of the intellectual innovation of his erstwhile club colleagues, these men were “the first modern thinkers in the United States,” according to Menand’s account. (pp. xi, 432-3) This phase of American thinking germinated during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, flowered in the first decade of the twentieth, and persisted until the middle of the twentieth century—a span punctuated by the Civil War at one end and the Cold War at the other.

The Metaphysical Club offers an imposing tangle of vivid biographies, in order to repeatedly demonstrate how the “modern” perspectives of the pragmatists and their peers differed from their immediate predecessors: the “modernizing” generation of their parents and teachers. Intellectual biographies of the pragmatists’ fathers serve as points of comparison and contrast, rather than contributing causes of their sons’ careers. The Cambridge-based Saturday Club of Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Agassiz and their associates (including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.) helps to make this comparison concrete. The signal event that divided these two generations was the Civil War. And Menand suggests that a driving principle of their thought was “fear of violence,” a fear instilled by the Civil War and activated by economic and social conflict in the 1890s (p. 373).

Menand’s description of the intellectual mode of the pragmatists emphasizes their attention to liberty and tolerance, unity of thought and action, contextualism, and a refutation of natural essences. At the same time, he remarks the extent to which thinkers like Holmes and Dewey were actually quite alien to the standards usually at issue in characterizing “liberal” thought. They were hostile to individualism, scientific instrumentalism, and laissez-faire economics. Their typical tendency was to discuss complex phenomena as differentiated wholes, rather than combinations of reified elements. Menand also shows how the philosophical “pluralism” coined by William James was significantly different than its later mutation as cultural pluralism.

With his chosen cast of characters, Menand is able to explore the expression of the pragmatist viewpoint in the diverse fields of law, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, statistics, and education. At the same time, he provides an account of a key phase in the professionalization of the academy. He details the beginnings of graduate education in the US, the founding of several key universities, the establishment of AUUP and key juridical precedents for the intellectual freedom of academic professionals.

24 October 2001
The Metaphysical Club
Louis Menand

The American intellectual scene in the period between the Civil War and the First World War is the subject of this multiple biography. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Pierce, William James and James Dewey are the main protagonists. The book takes its name from the informal debating club that these individuals and others formed in 1872, when they were all young men in Boston, taking courses at Harvard. They are ultimately associated with the philosophical movement of pragmatism. Pragmatism was never a popular term with its authors, but refers to the idea that thoughts are working assumptions about the real world that persist because they favor accurate predictions that are evolutionarily advantageous. The author starts with the experiences of Holmes in the Civil War, and suggests that the pragmatist philosophy originates in revulsion against the fanatical belief of the abolitionists that spawned the slaughter. This thesis ultimately gets lost in a wealth of fascinating detail about intellectual life and the lives of these characters, and it is by no means proved. The story brings in a lot of details about the history of this period in America that I did not know, and I found it fascinating to read about the Pullman strike, Eugene Debs, the Sedition Act in the First World War (especially with the current debates about increasing police powers in the current security crisis), and the growth of academic freedom in universities. The author never quite sides with or against pragmatism, but does suggest that interest in these philosophers is re-surging, and links this to the end of the Cold War. He claims that the Cold War made it impossible to preserve the skepticism needed to believe in pragmatism. . ( )

It took me less time to read this than I would have expected. I actually began to think of it as an adventure story about philosophical inquiry. I was anxious to see what great ideas would be discovered next.

I think Menand likes John Dewey, the last of the four thinkers he concentrates on, the best. He's a bit dismissive of William James, and he seems to see Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. as overly pragmatic - maybe even cynical - about the law (although he makes it clear that Holmes' ideas extend well beyond the legal sphere). Charles Sanders Peirce comes of as an influential, but tragic figure. Someone whose life got in the way of his genius.

There's way more to this book than the biographies of the philosophers. In fact, if I have one criticism of the book, it's that I would have liked the biographical info to be more complete. However, Menand had to make choices, and this is a book about ideas - and man, are there a lot of them.

I came away from this book with a better understanding and respect for American philosophical inquiry. And I like Menand's view that these thinkers' thoughts reflect the American ideals in which they all believe; each in his own way. You could call it an intellectual roadmap that takes you from the Civil War to the Cold War, which is about how Menand expresses it in his epilogue. It is unsynopsizable, but one of its themes is pragmatism, in the philosophical sense. And pragmatism in the philosophical sense could only have come out of the American experience.

I'm reviewing this in March of 2009 and President Barack Obama has talked a lot in the first few weeks of his first term about being pragmatic about the problems facing America. The way Menand characterizes these philosophers' views of our democracy is that pragmatism is its natural result and worthy goal. We must listen to each other. We must hear each other. We don't have to agree; we don't have to like each other. We have to want to hear all the ideas that are part of our "melting pot." Being the greatest country in the world means recognizing that we need all the different voices in our choir, even the discordant ones. ( )

time to do a weblog/wikipedia. paragraph per personality, add links between relationships ( )

In my collection I have a fat 2-volume work called Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, first published in 1901. Louis Menand mentions this work in passing in his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Metaphysical Club (2001). A quick look at the list of contributors confirms that many of the people discussed in Menand’s book had a hand in the creation of the Dictionary: it is a snapshot of the intellectual climate in America at the turn of the century, and those contributors developed their ideas over the previous few decades.

The theme of The Metaphysical Club is the effect that the Civil War had on the thought of the Americans who lived through the experience and on those who came after. The lives and thought of Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles S. Pierce, John Dewey and others is examined. I found the earlier chapters on Holmes, James, and Louis Agassiz the most intriguing, although Agassiz’s mental processes come off as so antediluvian that it is hard to believe that anyone took them seriously, yet he was perhaps the most influential scientist working in America before the Civil War.

Charles Darwin’s ideas concerning evolution and natural selection hit the American shores in the mid-19th century and made a profound impact on the debates about race in social and intellectual circles. Combined with Darwin’s ideas, the horror of the Civil War blew away the naiveté that had previously characterized American thought. Originating in Boston and Cambridge, new currents of thought radiated out to touch every aspect of American intellectual life – theology, biology, psychology, education, the law.

The chapters on William James (a man legendary for his indecisiveness) amusingly illustrates how he would come to organize some of the ideas of Charles Pierce (who had been ostracized from society for lapses in his “sexual morality”) into the new philosophy of pragmatism. The Metaphysical Club is an exercise in “six degrees of separation”, as the work and lives of a variety of thinkers intersect and influence each other over a 100 year period. For many of these thinkers, the Civil War came to represent the danger of belief in abstractions, an understanding that specious, unfounded concepts (such as those relating to race) could lead to horrendous results. The book begins and ends with Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose jurisprudence combined his personal war experience with the ideas which evolved from a number of sources after the war.

In the end, there is a message for our time, the idea that ideas can thrive only in a society that sees its freedoms as more than abstractions:

"The constitutional law of free speech is the most important benefit to come out of the way of thinking that emerged in Cambridge and elsewhere in the decades after the Civil War. We do not…permit the free expression of ideas because some individual may have the right one. We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need. Thinking is a social activity. I tolerate your thought because it is a part of my thought – even when my thought defines itself in opposition to yours."

A brief examination does not give justice to the wealth of ideas and personalities represented in this book. One mourns the loss of an intellectual climate in which new ideas can flourish.