Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

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An exacting and imaginative exploration of 19th Century American intellectual history's post-Emersonian void, spanning from the end of the Civil War to the WWI, drawing portraits of Oliver Wendell Holes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Pierce, and John Dewey. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History, 2000. 546p. Pap.

From the Publisher

The National Bestseller: "Hugely ambitious, unmistakably brilliant." (Janet Maslin, The New York Times)
The Metaphysical Club was an informal group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, to talk about ideas. Its members included Oliver Wendell 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.
The "idea about ideas" is that ideas are not things "out there" somewhere waiting to be discovered, but are instruments people invent and use, such as knives and forks and microchips, to make their way in the world. They are not produced by individuals; they are produced by groups of individuals. They do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent -- like germs -- on their human carriers and environment. They are provisional responses to circumstances, and their survival depends not on their immutability, but on their adaptability.
The Metaphysical Club is written in this idea's spirit and is an utterly absorbing narrative of personality and social history -- as Alan Ryan wrote in The New York Review of Books, The Metaphysical Club is "something very like a history of the American mind at work."

Review

David A. Hollinger - American Scientist
"A gifted and well-practiced writer can tell an old story and make it seem new and exciting. Louis Menand is such a writer, and his version of the story of pragmatism is the most lively and integrated yet told. Menand's incisive and remarkably relaxed exposition of philosophical ideas and his skillfully executed biographical narratives render THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB an accessible and deeply engaging account of one of the most important intellectual movements in the history of the United States....It conveys much more of the intellectual history of the United States than do the many conventional books that devote one chapter to one thinker and another chapter to the next, and so on. Menand puts it all together. If you can read only one book about pragmatism and American culture, this is the book to read."

More about the book

Louis Menand's intellectual history discusses the ideas that emerged from the meetings of The Metaphysical Club, an informal group out of late-nineteenth-century Massachusetts, whose members included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce. The groups unrecorded discussions have indirectly changed the American way of thinking. A New York Times Editor's Choice for 2001.