The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America | Louis Menand

The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America | Louis Menand | A grand peek into the intellectual community of the 19th century

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The Metaphysical C...

	The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America Louis Menand Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002 - 568 pages average customer review:based on 77 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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."

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Great view of how the past informs today's America

This book is an amazing tour through cultural, legal and philosophical ideas in America from the Civil War through the First World War. It does so in narrative and (mostly) chronological order, making it much more compelling than a textbook. The narrative form also helps expose the conditions that allowed certain ideas to flourish, rather than presenting a simplistic view of x followed by y followed by z. As a bonus, the reader gets to enjoy a well-painted picture of the elite intelligentsia and some window into daily life in America at large during these time periods.
My only complaint is that it occasionally wandered or backtracked and I was never sure whether newly introduced ideas and people would remain important or central as we moved forward.

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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 American philosophy and science, with touches of law, math, psychology, and every other subject one can think of, within the context of Civil War influence in a way that can be described only as masterful.

My only criticism is Menand's seeming devotion to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and John Dewey, whom I believe sometimes unnecessarily overshadow Willliam James and Charles Pierce.

Regardless, it is an entertaining and truly educational read.

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Some interesting content, but hard to follow

I bought this book looking for a description of the philosophy of the American pragmatists - William James in particular, but John Dewey as well. This book includes both those figures, as well as Oliver Wendell Holmes and others. The book goes into a lot of detail on the era in which they lived (which the author believes is necessary to understand their philosophies - fair enough) as well as considerable detail about their personal lives. Also relevant.

I liked a lot of the information contained in the book, and thought it was worth reading to get that information. What I didn't like was the organization of the book - the author introduces a new character, then goes off on multiple tangential histories. By the time he gets back to "the point", I was often lost and had forgotten where he started.

Overall I felt this book was worth reading, but I didn't get as much out of it as I think I could have if the structure had been a little more straightforward.

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