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by: Louis Menand
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.9
EAN: 9780374199630
ISBN: 0374199639
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 384
Publication Date: May 30, 2001
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Sales Rank: 174210
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Editorial Review:
Amazon.com's Best of 2001:
If past is prologue, then The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand may suggest an intellectual course for the United States in the 21st century. At least Menand, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, thinks so. This enthralling study of Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey shows how these four men developed a philosophy of pragmatism following the Civil War, a period Menand likens to post-cold-war times. Together, 'they were more responsible than any other group for moving American thought into the modern world.'
Despite this potentially forbidding theme, The Metaphysical Club is not a dry tome for academics. Instead, it is a quadruple biography, a wonderfully told story of ideas that advances by turning these thinkers into characters and bringing them to life. Menand links them through the Metaphysical Club, a conversational club formed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872. It lasted but a few months, and references to it appear only in Peirce's writings (its real significance seems rather limited), though Holmes and James were both members. (Dewey was much younger than these three, and more an heir than a contemporary.) It is difficult to describe in a sentence or two what they accomplished, though Menand takes a stab at it: 'They helped put an end to the idea that the universe is an idea, that beyond the mundane business of making our way as best we can in a world shot through with contingency, there exists some order, invisible to us, whose logic we transgress at our peril.' Academic freedom and cultural pluralism are just two of their legacies, and they are linchpins of democracy in a nonideological age, says Menand.
A book like this is necessarily idiosyncratic, yet at the same time this one is sweeping. It presents an accessible survey of intellectual life from roughly the end of the Civil War to the start of the cold war. Dozens of figures receive fascinating thumbnail sketches, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Darwin to Jane Addams and Eugene Debs. The result is a grand portrait of an age that will appeal to anyone with even a modest interest in the history of philosophy and ideas. --John Miller
Product Description:
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.
Download Description:
A riveting, original book about the creation of modern American thought.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - A grand peek into the intellectual community of the 19th century
While the title of this book might grab your attention, it is it's subtitle, "a history of ideas in America," that really embodies the subject of the book. Louis Menand's "The Metaphysical Club" is a well researched and thoroughly engrossing history of America's vangard of intellectual activity from right before to right after the American Civil War.
Following the lives primarily of the James', Holmes', Louis Agassiz, the Pierces, and John Dewey, Menand explores the root of 19th century ... Read More
Rating:  - Beware of the Abridged Audio Edition
Louis Menand's "The Metaphysical Club" poses a somewhat interesting quandry: is it a biography of C.S. Peirce, William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Dewey? Is it a biography of the philosophy of Pragmatism? "The Metaphysical Club" can best be understood as an account of how the cluster of ideas that came to be called pragmatism was forged from the searing experiences of its progenitors' lives.
Menand, whose prior work includes Pragmatism: A Reader rightfully begins his inquiry into ... Read More
Rating: - Brilliant, ambitious, dense
The Metaphysical Club is a brilliant, ambitious book - the chronicle of pragmatism's rise as a governing philosophy in the decades following the Civil War. But for all its virtues, I'm surprised this book won the Pulitzer Prize. This is pretty dense stuff. Despite Louis Menand's engaging writing style, I had trouble keeping up with his exploration of emerging philosophies in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But I think I got the gist of it: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, John Dewey, Charles ... Read More
Rating:  - The Center Doesn't Hold
Hard to think why I did not like this book more. It covers a lot of interesting ground, is set in a period of American life that fascinates me and details the lives of some of the most influential social thinkers in American history.
But no central character really emerges as the central personality of the club. For me, the closest to such a character was William James. I suppose another reader would be more drawn to Oliver Wendell Holmes or Thomas Dewey.
In the end I think ... Read More
Rating:  - The Origins of Pragmatism
The Metaphysical Club refers to a philosophical society that met in Cambridge in the 1870's. This short-lived group of intellectuals gathered regularly to discuss the issues of the day: the aftermath of the Civil War, evolution, science, religion, abolition, race, to name a few. Louis Menand, professor at the City College of New York and writer for the New Yorker, has done extensive research of this group and has written a very lively account of their achievements. Menand is a practitioner of the pragmatism ... Read More
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