Louis Menand

To argue the U.S. changed after its Civil War isn’t a particularly bold statement. Menand’s The Metaphysical Club is provocative in claiming that U.S. culture broadly shifted away from a belief in beliefs, precisely after experiencing the carnage when people disagree and are willing to die (and kill) for their conflicting views. In place of these old convictions, then, an outlook steered toward a less violent basis for U.S. society, eventually known as American Pragmatism. Menand show more highlights four intellectuals of particular influence: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr; William James; Charles Sanders Peirce; and John Dewey.

The chief joy of this book derives from the many, many vignettes Menand uses from U.S. history. “When I got started, I had no idea how many stories I would uncover that seemed to me to be important to the big story that I was trying to tell”. {*} These stories are good evidence, and in avoiding dry academic rigour they also bulk out his narrative. For example, in Chapter 12 when making the case that Dewey was significantly influenced by his time in Chicago, particularly his connections to Jane Addams and Hull-House, Menand first shares that Dewey arrived in Chicago from Ann Arbor during the Pullman Strike, and then backs up further: to understand the Pullman Strike, we also must know a bit of Eugene Debs and more broadly, the post-Civil War influence of the railroads. Such historical detour is typical of the book, makes for fascinating reading, and leaves the reader with a head stuffed with specific and unfamiliar anecdotes.

An accompanying frustration of the book, though, is losing sight of the central argument while following these “many stories”. Menand provided an overview of the “big story” in a 2001 lecture.

• While the U.S. Civil War was not much mentioned in the public writings of Holmes, James, or Peirce, it was in fact a key event in “making seem obsolete the values and beliefs of the intellectual culture of the era that preceded the war”. Parallel to what happened after the U.S.-Viet Nam War, a younger generation was motivated “to eschew certainty, to get rid of absolute convictions” – the older generation thought they knew what they were doing, yet look what they got us into.

• Pragmatism becomes a response to this general anxiety: “Get people to take their principles and beliefs down to a human level, and to treat them as contingent, fallible constructions, that might be good in some purposes and not so good in other purposes, but [which] we can use in an adaptive way to get what we want out of the world without resorting to violence.”

Menand first traces each of the four's several contributions to Pragmatism, and then identifies two broad areas of lasting cultural impact.

• HOLMES – As an officer in Civil War saw some of the bloodiest conflict; entered as an abolitionist, an idealist with moral convictions, and emerges from war disillusioned and with cynicism toward social convictions. “Certitude leads to violence.” [61] Law supports democracy’s role in avoiding violence when social order undergoes change; law contributes by ensuring various groups consistently have an opportunity to voice their various beliefs. Holmes “thought only in terms of aggregate social forces; he had no concern for the individual,” [65] but “believed that every social interest should have its chance. He believed in experiment. He knew what the alternative was.” [67] Yet no principle can fully explain law; “it decides the case first and determines the principle afterwards”. [338] The true basis for judges deciding law is experience, by which Holmes seems to mean culture: fitting the particulars to the broader context and deciding between competing principles, none of which is always paramount over the others.

• JAMES – Never fought in Civil War, wavered in his convictions though two brothers fought; joined Agassiz’s Brazil expedition for evidence supporting Cataclysm refutation of Darwinian evolution despite himself being Darwinian. Broadly convinced science and religion reconcilable and sought to establish basis for it. Truth is not empirical or objective, truth is created from our beliefs and habits (related to actions and their desirable outcomes). “What makes beliefs true is not logic but results” [220], mind and truth are not mirrors of reality. “The word ‘cause’ is … an altar to an unknown god.” [357] While certainty is impossible, James believed in free will. Individual agency is paramount, and one has a “duty” to follow through with one’s personal convictions.

• PEIRCE – Both Charles Sanders and his father Benjamin were white supremacists opposed to Union Civil War. Darwinian thought had undermined “certainty” of math and science, Peirce sought to restore that foundation within the bounds of Darwinian logic. Trial illustrated Peirces’ thinking when called as expert witnesses on question as to whether signature was forged: with anything (such as forged signatures) that cannot be measured directly with precision or accuracy, Peirces counseled statistical and probabilistic thinking as best means for dealing with uncertainty, i.e. scientific estimation. Peirce conceived semiotics with a similar logic, applicable to ideas and communication generally. Rejecting nominalism’s position that any generalization is an arbitrary name for a group of “one unique thing after another”, believed the nominalist error lies with locating belief in any individual applying the label. [228] Rather, closest to achievable truth is social belief, akin to statistical-probabilistic estimate.

• DEWEY - Dewey instrumental in taking Pragmatism public while at the University of Chicago. Initially influenced by Jane Addams and her clarity in seeing social antagonism as almost always “unreal” (misunderstandings rather than rooted in true conflict), he later “rendered back in vocabulary of logic” those ideas James had expressed in Principles of Psychology. Dewey’s outlook “exploded” epistemology as a false concern of philosophers: thinking and action are inherently the same process, “knowledge is an instrument or organ of successful action.” [361]

Menand concludes his intellectual history by looking at two areas in which Pragmatism persists in U.S. culture: a broad but loose support for cultural pluralism, and for the freedom of ideas. Pluralism grew out of ideas of James and Dewey, evident today in multiculturalism; freedom of ideas discernible in the esteem shown particularly when framed as academic freedom (Dewey) or freedom of expression (Holmes). Menand does not mention that while public and intellectual support in these areas remain broad, we regularly debate the definitions in play to the point of conflict. He does suggest culture recently returned to that belief in beliefs prefiguring the U.S. Civil War, leaving us once again susceptible to social violence in name of truth.

//

Critiques of The Metaphysical Club by academics seem rooted in dispute over Menand’s grasp of the finer points of Pragmatism (e.g., Wikipedia cites Susan Haack’s accusation of “vulgar Rortyism”). Such faults would seem to miss the point: Menand’s is an intellectual history, not a history of a philosophy or philosopher. There is room for corrections on particulars without having to reject altogether the “big story” Menand tells.

{*} Quotations here otherwise uncited are transcribed from a video recording of Menand’s June 2001 presentation in NYC, seemingly for a "book tour". show less

I bought this one because I use to read Louis Menand regularly in the New Yorker. In a way, Menand might be the consummate New Yorker writer. He's an essayist who writes for people who don't have the time to sit down and read, say, Martin Heidegger or Gilles Deluze cover-to-cover or to read every interview Richard Serra ever gave but who still want to know more about interesting thinkers, artists and writers. In addition, he does it in prose that's precise, efficient, wonderfully readable, show more and often slyly humorous. Menand, like many New Yorker writers, is a master of what you might call the high-middlebrow. That's not a criticism, mind you: Menand is certainly insightful about his subjects, but he also wants to be approachable. He has no intention of writing for a closed circle of fellow academics, and God bless him for that.

Menand is what you might call a big-picture guy. Most of the essays in "American Studies" try to place their subjects in context: where they stand in relation to their contemporaries, to the development of ideas, to the societies in which they lived. It's not surprising, then, that the passage of time is often his most useful tool. Menand's interested, first and foremost, in ideas -- not in history in and of itself -- but it's looking back that gives Menand the clarity that makes a lot of these essays really special. Menand doesn't argue for or against his subjects as much as he wants to figure out what they really meant in the grand scheme of things. I'm tempted to think that he comes close to hitting the mark on a number of occasions here.

The essays I found most memorable here were the ones on Maya Lin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and, funnily, enough, Rolling Stone magazine. For all his perspicacity, Menand's interests are nothing if not broad. His essay on T.S. Eliot is also noteworthy, as it tries to untangle the puzzle of the author's reputed antisemitism without resorting to hyperbole or reflexively falling back on the undeniable quality of Eliot's output. "Christopher Lasch's Quarrel with Liberalism" also impressed me. In it, Menand tries to give that famously grating polemicist with whom he obviously disagrees on, well, just about everything, a fair shake. That the essay succeeds is a testament to the author's intellectual abilities and versatile mind. That Menand made its subject seem genuinely interesting to me is a testament to his considerable gifts as a writer. Recommended. show less

I am happy to report that the 2002 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History has aged well. Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club remains a crackling insight into a formative era in American intellectual history.

The Civil War marked a vivid transition in the social and political arrangements in the United States. But what is less well recalled is the way the trauma of America’s most bloody war opened up a formative new era in American thought. From the vantage point of more than a hundred show more years, that story lies in some obscurity.

The Metaphysical Club brings this adventure to life through the lives and thinking of four individuals who came together just after the war. For a brief moment, early in their lives, they met regularly in Cambridge Mass to exchange views. As they elaborated their ideas in the subsequent decades, those formative interactions continued to resonate.

Three of these figures are still well known to many: the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, educationalist and philosopher John Dewey, and psychologist William James. The fourth, something of an intellectual inspiration to the three, was Charles Sanders Pierce. His name was a dim shadow to me, but he was an influential logician and philosopher ejected from the academy after the scurrilous revelation of cohabitation before a divorce was finalized . All four had fathers who were part of the era of American ideas swept away by the war. Including Pierce, whose Harvard mathematician father Benjamin was one of the first American scientists whose work was recognized internationally for its own merits.

The various threads of the story are intricate, and Menand transits the terrain with a sure and approachable hand. First the backdrop: objections to the empiricism of John Locke and his cohort, who believed all knowledge and meaning derive from experience; the probabilistic statistical mechanics ushered in by the work of LaPlace, Bolzmann and Maxwell, transplanted into the realm of philosophy; the revolutionary ideas of Darwin, and their deployment, for better or worse, into notions about the social world.

The protagonists of this telling elaborate a new set of ideas about ideas. Ideas matter in how they affect action in the world, not primarily as a way of describing ultimate reality. Ideas are important for their real world implications, for how they guide behavior. The quintessentially American philosophy of pragmatism was initiated by James and extended by Dewey. Their consequentialist attitude argues that ideas are provisional, and shift over time depending on what is needed and useful. Even in legal reasoning, Holmes eschews legal formalism, and regards rulings as emerging not from theory, but from what judges already believe.

In order to tell this story, Menand needs to recreate the historical texture of the post Civil War period. We are present in the early days of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Chicago. And we glimpse the career of social worker and reformer Jane Addams and Hull House, her mission for poor urban women. Addams’ clarity of purpose deeply influenced the ideas of pragmatist John Dewey. In the meantime, I had only a passing knowledge of nineteenth century anatomist and taxonomist Louis Agassiz, whose name appears prominently on the facade of the American Museum of Natural History. Only to learn herein of his deep involvement in scientific racism. During this period, university professors first win the opportunity to espouse opinions even when they differ from those of institutional presidents and trustees - a phenomenon only too jarring and immediate in the present moment. And who knew that one of the anti-German measures implemented during WWI was a ban on the music of Beethoven in Pittsburgh?

Menand has taken a complex chunk of US intellectual history, and traced out its roots and growth with clarity. I had the satisfying experience of connecting and illuminating threads from my early philosophy reading in a way that felt long overdue. This American set of ideas responded to the British empiricists and to Kant, and served as a bridge to Twentieth century thinkers like Quine and Rorty. All this was lost on me as university student decades ago. The Metaphysical Club had me asking myself why that was. I think I know the answer: the material is intricate; a lucid communicator, invaluable.

As influential as these ideas were at the time, they sat in relative eclipse for some half century or more after their time. Menand suggests a role for the Cold War in this: “The notion that the values of the free society for which the Cold War was waged were contingent, relative, fallible constructions, good for some purposes and not for others, was not a notion compatible with the moral imperatives of the age.” Whether the ideas that emerged from this small group of the nineteenth-century has relevance in the twenty-first is not yet clear. But this book reads like the uncovering of mysteries hiding in plain sight. We are fortunate to have a first-rate intellectual detective to lift the veil. show less

Summary: An intellectual and cultural history of the forces and figures whose creations contributed to the emergence of the United States as an intellectual and artistic leader in the years between 1945 and 1965.

The years between 1945 and 1965 were a time of transformation in the United States. The return of servicemen from the war fueled a boom in university education. An influx of intellectual and artistic refugees from Europe sparked a dynamic mix of ideas and artistic development. The show more boom in education and culture was accompanied by an economic and technological boom, fueling a widespread interest in music, art, books, museums and and the rapid growth of publishing and music and film industries. Something had happened in the country, where ideas mattered, and culture engaged, with an urgent and widespread interest.

The Free World is an account of the institutions, the people, and the cultural movements and moments of this period. The title is significant in two respects. One is an emphasis on the United States, fueled by Western Europe thinkers and artists, becoming a center of intellectual and artistic culture in a way it had never before. The second is the idea of freedom, that in a variety of ways was a theme running through the “slices” as Menand calls them of this history.

Menand’s approach to this sprawling intellectual and cultural history is to take slices, focusing on a particular aspect of that history and a particular network of key figures and their relationships. He begins with the advent of the Cold War, and the intellectual architect of America’s doctrine of Cold War, George Kennan, and the “Wise Men’ surrounding him, transitioning into a discussion of thinkers about power, anti-totalitarian George Orwell, and anti-communist James Burnham whose The Managerial Revolution foresaw the rise of the bureaucratic totalitarianism of mass culture.

Meanwhile, in occupied and post-war France, the existentialists (Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus) looked into the void, seeing nothing but absurdity, developing the philosophy of authenticity and radical personal choice and responsibility. Political and social theorists continued to wrestle with the connection between mass culture and totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt, influenced by Heidegger and the horrors of the Nazi camps wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism and sociologist David Riesman The Lonely Crowd on group conformity and how this would undermine personal autonomy, little realizing it also made room for alternative visions. Meanwhile, Claude Levi-Strauss, a pioneer in anthropology joined Roman Jakobson in developing Structuralism, a system for analyzing languages and cultural systems, eclipsing the concepts of freedom on which existentialism rested.

In the arts, a constellation of individuals led by Jackson Pollock and Clement Greenberg, along with other artists like Willem de Kooning, were trying to break out of the strictures of painting and art criticism (in the case of Greenberg). Menand chronicles the introduction of Pollock’s drip paintings and other similar works and the galleries and shows and the patronage of figures like Peggy Guggenheim that made this revolution possible. Meanwhile, the thinkers and writers were at work, a circle that included professor Lionel Trilling of The Liberal Imagination, poet Allen Ginsberg, and beat writer Jack Kerouac. Menand returns in a later “slice” to these figures and the further development of their work into the early post-modern deconstructive thought of Barthes and Derrida and the literature that followed.

Another arts movement, centered at Black Mountain College sought to implement a hands-on experimental approach, breaking with the strictures of theory in art, music, and dance under the influence of Josef Albers. Visual artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, composer John Cage, and dancer Merce Cunningham all were part of this circle. Menand does a masterful job describing the innovations of each of these figures. Meanwhile, rock ‘n’ roll was breaking onto the scene. Menand chronicles the unpremeditated recording of “That’s All Right, Mama” that launched the career of Elvis Presley and the intersecting growth of the record industry and disc jockeys who got them air time, often for pay, and the growth of television. He explains how all these factors created the environment for the surprising U.S. success of the Beatles. A later chapter on consumer sovereignty shows mass culture applied to advertising by McLuhan and the marketing of everything from pop art to cars with fins.

One of the most interesting chapters is the one on “Concepts of Liberty,” moving from the high philosophy of Isaiah Berlin in “Two Concepts of Liberty” exploring both negative and positive freedom (“freedom from” and “freedom to”) to the paperback revolution, and their covers and content and what constraints can be placed on this form of expression. This is followed by a discussion of the embrace of “freedom” as a key rallying cry in the Civil Rights movement.

In later chapters, Menand traces further developments in feminism and pop art and the central figures of Betty Friedan, Andy Warhol and Susan Sontag, the freedom literature of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, and the shift of cinematic artistry from Europe to America, advocated by critic Pauline Kael, who wanted films both smart and entertaining and how Bonnie and Clyde was a watershed film in this regard.

The last chapter comes full circle with George Kennan testifying in the Senate against American expansion of the Vietnam War in 1965, which he and the other Wise Men thought contrary to not only American interests but unnecessary for “containment” of communism in a country trying to free itself from colonialism. But the real story of “This is the End” was that the diversion of intellectual and cultural energy from the intellectual and cultural awakening of the previous twenty years.

Menand does us an incredible service in chronicling this intellectual and cultural history in “just” 727 pages. It could have actually taken far more, and with commendable concision he summarizes complex ideas and multi-faceted movements and the contributions of a variety of key people. The one thing I miss is the religious element of the country’s intellectual culture. Reinhold Niebuhr is mentioned in one line on a single page but was a formidable influence on Kennan and many others. Howard Thurman played a key role in shaping Martin Luther King, Jr. Paul Tillich and Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel did major intellectual work during this year, addressing the themes of freedom in this work.

Menand concludes his preface musing, “As I got older, I started to wonder just what freedom is, or what it can realistically mean. I wrote this book to help myself, and maybe you, figure that out.” He does not draw conclusions as he ends the work. He challenged me to think. Arendt, Riesman, and Berlin all have concerns about how mass culture, under the guise of expressive individualism can lead to tyranny. Yet by and large, the freedom of thinkers and culture-makers in this work, is the freedom of throwing off of constraints. And when we are indeed shackled physically or by unjust practices like colonialism, racism, or sexual discrimination, removing constraints is necessary to human flourishing. But the religious outlook would also recognize some constraints enable us to flourish both individuals and societies to flourish–constraints upon evil or unchecked and undisciplined affections, that in extreme form can lead to tyranny. But Menand is spot on in identifying freedom as an important theme for our cultural life, and one worthy of consideration. His intellectual and cultural history certainly points toward the sources of our contemporary ideas of freedom. But it seems to me an urgent matter to discern whether these ideas are the best for both individual and societal flourishing. show less