The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America - Hardcover

Menand, Louis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374199639 ISBN 13: 9780374199630

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001

Synopsis

Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for History

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

The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Well Holmes, Jr., future associate justice of the United States Supreme Court; William James, the father of modern American psychology; and Charles Sanders Peirce, logician, scientist, and the founder of semiotics. The Club was probably in existence for about nine months. No records were kept. The one thing we know that came out of it was an idea -- an idea about ideas. This book is the story of that idea. Holmes, James, and Peirce all believed that ideas are not things "out there" waiting to be discovered but are tools people invent -- like knives and forks and microchips -- to make their way in the world. They thought that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals -- that ideas are social. They do not develop according to some inner logic of their own but are entirely depent -- like germs -- on their human carriers and environment. And they thought that the survival of any idea deps not on its immutability but on its adaptability. The Metaphysical Club is written in the spirit of this idea about ideas. It is not a history of philosophy but an absorbing narrative about personalities and social history, a story about America. It begins with the Civil War and s in 1919 with Justice Holmes's dissenting opinion in the case of U.S. v. Abrams-the basis for the constitutional law of free speech. The first four sections of the book focus on Holmes, James, Peirce, and their intellectual heir, John Dewey. The last section discusses some of the fundamental twentieth-century ideas they are associated with. This is a book about a way of thinking that changed American life.

About this title

About the Author

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

Reviews

Between Reconstruction and WW II, U.S. law, politics, education and intellectual life gradually incorporated some big ideas. One involved the value of free speech, not as a natural right but as a social good. Another showed how what we think and believe may flow from what we desire and do, rather than vice versa. Another rejected absolutes in favor of experiments and experience, insisting (in Menand's words) "that there is no one way that things must be." Together these ideas and their progeny are called pragmatism, a home-grown method for splitting differences that launched the American Century, and that has been generating a lot of academic and punditocratic interest again recently, as it first produced the doctrine of "cultural pluralism." Menand, a New Yorker staff writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York, brilliantly pieces together a broad-ranging cultural history of pragmatism, the times in which it emerged and diverged, and the intellectual curiosity that drove it on.Extraordinarily ambitious and compulsively readable, Menand's elegant big book shows how pragmatism's various ideas came together mainly through the work, talk and life experience of four men--Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes; William James, the Harvard-based philosopher, psychologist and all-around famous thinker (who popularized the word "pragmatism"); Charles Sanders Peirce, a brilliant, philandering, spendthrift philosopher (from whom James took the word); and John Dewey, for decades America's foremost public intellectual. Holmes, James and Peirce (with their Harvard friend Chauncey Wright) formed, in 1872, a discussion group called the Metaphysical Club. The chapters these men inspire, which cover Holmes's Civil War duty and Dewey's tenure at the University of Chicago and more, move fluidly and cogently between works and personalities, between the currents of thought and their fruits in action. Readers of Menand's New Yorker and New York Review of Books pieces and of his incisive study of T.S. Eliot, Discovering Modernism, will recognize his deft syntheses of difficult ideas and disparate motivations. Menand interweaves Civil War battles; New England abolitionism; Darwin and his arrogant opponents; the Pullman strike of 1894; the Harlem Renaissance; G.W.F. Hegel; the Rockefellers; Eugene Debs; W.E.B. du Bois; the rise of the academic fields now called anthropology, philosophy, psychology, sociology and social work; and the history of (among other institutions) Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and the University of Vermont. The wealth of anecdotes, local exegeses and political asides will leave readers astonished. And the passionately maintained disinterest of the carefully constructed sentences and chapters comes amazingly close to that critical holy grail: transparency. Over its narrative arc and the arc of its subjects' lives, the book slowly and surely makes the ideas of another era available and usable to our own. (May 23)Forecast: Menand has edited the essay collections Pragmatism and The Future of Academic Freedom, and proposed higher education reforms in the New York Times Magazine. This book will be taken very seriously by pundits and will be extremely well-reviewed--which should translate into sales. Look for Menand on Charlie Rose-like programs in the coming months, and for a PW interview.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Menand (English, CUNY) acknowledges at the outset the ephemeral nature of the informal discussion group known as "the metaphysical club," stating that it "was probably in existence for only nine months, and no records were kept." Yet he sees in the work of its principals Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce a momentous change in the conditions of modern life, brought about in large part because of their thought and work. The three men met informally in Cambridge, MA, in 1872, and out of these meetings a new philosophy was born a uniquely American way of looking at the world, known as pragmatism. To tell this fascinating story, Menand produces a seamless narrative line that moves from the Civil War to the Supreme Court case in 1919 that became the basis for the constitutional doctrine of free speech. Along the way, the reader is introduced to myriad pertinent players and events that bring the era and the thinking vividly to life. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries.
- Leon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Mgt. Lib., Washington, DC
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In a serious but accessible book, Menand, a CUNY professor and New Yorker staff writer, provides a panorama of American post-Civil War thought, encompassing the period from 1865 to 1919 and focusing on the lives and thinking of "four giants": William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and John Dewey. Menand contends that the Civil War swept away old ideas, and, in its wake, the nation spent the next half-century putting into place a new set of principles--nurtured by the four giants--that served the nation into its new modern age. The "club" of the title, with the four giants as its core, actually only existed for about nine months in 1872, but its members influenced the culture for decades to come--James, as the founder of modern American psychology; Peirce, as the founder of semiotics; Dewey, for bringing professionalism to the university as president of the AAUP; and Holmes, through his expansions of the concept of free speech. Menand's scope is massive, and he is clearly up to the task. Allen Weakland
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374199639
• ISBN 13: 9780374199630
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384