The Metaphysical Club : a story of ideas in America

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 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 show more 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

After the trauma of the civil war the focus of American philosophy began to shift away from the notion of "perfectability" (individual or universe) as well as the idea that evolution, under the guiding hand of a divine entity, strives toward a goal. The shift was toward "pragmatism", that is, using philosophy to improve lives in the here and now. Three men, William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Dewey, and one woman, a social worker, Jane Addams emerged as leaders of a new way of thinking and acting--acting being the essential ingredient here. Each in their own way began to see humans as being, always, part of a greater whole, acting but also acted upon by the people around them, fluid, ever-changing, predictable only when the show more whole is considered. However, their ideas did not emerge out of nowhere, they were all three acquainted with or at least aware of one another, although Dewey and Addams were one generation removed, children during the war, as opposed to Holmes and James who lived through it, Holmes as a soldier injured three times and changed forever. Curiously one of the foremost influences was of "Vermont Transcendentalism" founded by George Marsh which contains the seed of the idea of the individual human as being inseparable from a community context. (His goal was to securely fasten religious belief to philosophy.) John Dewey, a Burlingtonian by birth, and student at UVM of which Marsh was president for decades, received this teaching early and took it with him. Many other threads went into what eventually emerged, from Jane Addams's view of conflict and resolution, to the discoveries of statistical analysis but it is where ideas of pluralism, of strength in diversity and many that (most of us) hold dear emerged. Holmes as a lawyer and judge, James as a scholar of the human mind each contributed in unique ways--and don't think they all agreed with one another. And that is, in a powerful way, the point that Menand makes. These thinkers understood something that we still struggle with, that a democracy to work, has to take in the ideas of everyone within--so that no matter how much you might disagree with someone else's views it is the clash, discussion, and compromise that will place the majority of the people in the best possible situation. There is so much content in here, from the legacy of slavery to the founding of unions that I could write a book about this book, but I will spare you. One takeaway is that the Civil War was a watershed of watersheds, a traumatic event from which this country has not yet moved on. The takeaways are that whatever your ideas about 'how things should best be' don't happen in a vacuum--you fabricate these ideas out of your experiences and contexts, e.g. your social units of family, friends, associates.

One last comment before I sock you with quotes: one thing that struck me sideways is that Bernie Sanders emerged from this Burlington context and all of the serious Vermont politicians from Leahy to Kunin to Dean to Sanders are fully aware of and devoted to the idea of the intertwining and inseparable responsibilities of the community and the individual to one another that forms the basis of the successful democratic form of governing.

On Holmes: "The war did more than make him lose those beliefs. He lost his belief in beliefs." (e.g. beliefs change with changed contexts and needs.)
"The lesson Holmes took from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence."

Charles Peirce (contemporary mathematician and philosopher). "... perception is fallible, knowing cannot be a matter of an individual mind "mirroring" reality. Each mind reflects differently at different moments--and in any case reality doesn't stand still long enough to be accurately mirrored. Peirce's conclusion was that knowledge must therefore be social."

"Addams said she believed that antagonism was always unnecessary. It never arose from real, objective differences she told Dewey, 'but from a person's mixing his own personal reactions--the extra emphasis he gave the truth, the enjoyment he took in doing a thing because it was unpalatable to others, or the feeling that one must show his own colors.' "The antagonism of institutions was always unreal: it was simply due to the injection of the personal attitude & reaction; & then instead of adding to the recognition of meaning, it delayed and distorted it."

"Dewey taught that there is no such thing as an individual without society. We think we know in order to do,. Dewey taught that doing is why there is knowing,"

James, summarizing pragmatism: " . . . the soul and meaning of thought . . . can never be made to direct itself toward anything but the production of belief . . . .When our thought about an object has found its rest in belief, then our action on the subject can firmly and safely begin. Beliefs, in short, are really rules for action . . . .

On pluralism: "People come at life from different places, they understand the world in different ways, they strive for different ends. This is a fact that has proved amazingly hard to live with, and the reason is that as associated beings, we naturally seek to find our tastes, values and hopes reflected in other people."

"Coercion is natural; freedom is artificial. Freedoms are socially engineered spaces where parties engaged in specified pursuits enjoy protection from parties who would otherwise naturally seek to interfere in those pursuits. One person's freedom is therefore always another person's restriction . . . ."

Finally -- "Democratic participation isn't the means to an end . . . it is the end. The purpose of the experiment is to keep the experiment going."

***** show less

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 show more 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. show less

It took me a long time to finish this book. I picked it up in the remainders bin probably a dozen years ago, and put it in the pile of books to get to "someday".

When someday finally came in April I wondered why I had picked this book up to begin with. It is A LOT. When people talk about weighty books, this is the model. Part biography, part history, part philosophy. It's fascinating in pieces, and I found it best to read it a bit at a time, with intermissions.

There are plenty of reviews here that will give you a good overview of what the author is up to with this book. I'll just say that I'm not sure he fully conveyed his stated thesis, but I enjoyed the ride.

Spring is here, bright and sunny, so of course it's time to curl up in a dark corner and read a thick tome about deep thinkers in 19th century New England. "The Metaphysical Club" essentially traces the history of American ideas from the Civil War through the early 20th century. Major figures like Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James and John Dewey mingle here with semi-forgotten folk such as Chauncey Wright and Louis Agassiz. They were all working and thinking in the shadow of the war -- and of Charles Darwin, whose ideas they struggled in different ways to either reject or assimilate into their philosophies. I found this book fascinating -- it chronicles the birth of a pragmatic, anti-dogmatic worldview I take for granted.

I am not too good on American history; this book did a very nice job of filling in lots of gaps. There is always a lot of talk around about why people fought the Civil War. Well, why did the South fire on Fort Sumter? Anyway, Menand does a very nice job describing how antislavery folks in the North mostly wanted to split with the South, while Unionists were not so opposed to slavery.

The whole book is very much a pragmatist look at pragmatism - seeing pragmatism as a response to the situation after the Civil War. There is mention of how people took the ideas of Holmes, Peirce, James, and Dewey, and maybe their followers didn't live up to the potential of the ideas... but Menand doesn't really show us that. The story pretty much ends show more along with the lives of the principals. It's a complete book as it stands... but I guess just a few more hints of how to follow the trail might have been nice.

My few brief forays into the writings of C. S. Peirce have left me befuddled. Menand's book at least reassured me that maybe the fault is not entirely mine. I was hoping that this book might give me an entry point into the threefold nature of a sign... OK, that a dictionary involves a kind of infinite regress, that's helpful. But I still didn't quite manage to count to three. No problem really - it wouldn't be fair to expect that level of completeness and precision from Menand.

The core focus here is pragmatism, which is a sort of Darwinian view of how ideas evolve. Which reminds me, Menand gives a nice history of the reception of Darwin's ideas, and how these related to ideas about race, which clearly then connect to ideas about slavery... and immigration. Egads I must say... the political climate of our day sadly seems to be going back to hmmm like 1915 or something. That movie The Birth of a Nation was it?

There's a level of crispness that I didn't quite find in reading this book. Probably the shortcoming is in my own superficial reading and thinking? But Menand describes modern society as being always in motion - always moving forward, if not upward. Hmmm. What does "forward" mean? Is there any kind of consistent direction?

I suspect that we just bounce around in some space of possibilities, sometime orbiting in some basin of attraction, then flipping into a rapid spiral to some point of relative stability, before tipping over into yet another pattern. For sure we are always headed into the future, to the extent anyway that time really does have a direction. But the space of possibilities itself seems filled with trajectories that cross and tangle every which way. We just might drop back into some feudal scene. Modernity doesn't last forever. show less

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 show more 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. show less