The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. Louis Menand. xii + 546 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. $27.
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.
What makes Menand's story "old" is not simply that the careers of his leading characters—John Dewey, William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Charles Peirce—are familiar. Menand's sense of what makes them important is more or less standard. These men differed from most American and European thinkers of their time by accepting a large measure of uncertainty in the foundations for moral and cognitive judgments, and by treating ideas not as mirrors of a stable reality but instead as flexible tools for engaging a truly contingent world. Menand's basic explanation for the emergence of this way of thinking, moreover, tracks a number of earlier studies. That the 1870s in New England should be the time and place in which these tendencies were the most vigorously pioneered owed much to the virtually simultaneous experience of the Civil War and the Darwinian revolution in an atmosphere of capitalist expansion and of an intensely Protestant moral and metaphysical idealism.
What most makes Menand's telling of this story "new" is his success in integrating the personal lives of Dewey, James, Holmes and Peirce, and in showing precisely the intellectual continuities that justify our remembering them as a group. The Metaphysical Club is an exercise in dialectical intellectual biography. Menand demonstrates that the thinking of each of his four central characters developed in relation to each other's ideas and personalities throughout their lifetimes, in relation to each other's teachers and students, and in relation to features of New England culture that all four experienced. Other books address the three philosophers but omit the jurist, Holmes, or deal with the worldly Dewey and Holmes and not with the more cloistered Peirce and James (or vice versa). Many studies take up any one or more of these four giants in relation to some larger cluster. But no one has done a better job than Menand in showing the social and psychological process of thinking on the part of this exceptionally influential quartet of closely related intellectuals.
Menand's title refers to a small discussion group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the early 1870s in which James, Holmes and Peirce were occasional participants, but the title threatens to obscure the breadth of Menand's research and analysis. Menand offers cogent and persuasive accounts of how a range of other thinkers inspired or were inspired by The Four. His discussion of the cultural pluralists Horace Kallen, Alain Locke and Randolph Bourne is nuanced, and he does a good, if brief, job with Jane Addams, Arthur Bentley, W. E. B. Du Bois and Franz Boas. Surprisingly, Menand pays almost no attention to Josiah Royce, the popular Harvard philosopher deeply influenced by Peirce, and in dialogue with whom James developed many of his most important ideas, especially those defended in his great book of 1907, Pragmatism.
Along the way, Menand provides a crisp and informative portrait of Louis Agassiz, the luminous anti-Darwinian who dominated the American scientific community during the middle decades of the 19th century. Agassiz epitomized the dogmatic certainty that the pragmatists eventually rejected. Convinced that species were fixed ideas in the mind of the Creator, and long a defender of the view that Negroes were a species distinct from, and decidedly inferior to, Caucasians, Agassiz was the darling of creationists and proslavery theorists. Hence he proved to be on the wrong side of the great scientific and moral issues of the era defined by the Civil War and the Darwinian revolution in natural history. Yet he was prominent along with the fathers of Peirce, James and Holmes in the social and intellectual elite of Boston-Cambridge, and it was natural that the young William James began his career as Agassiz's protégé. How James became increasingly repelled by Agassiz while on an expedition to Brazil under Agassiz's leadership is the substance of one of Menand's most engaging chapters.
What James, Peirce, Holmes and Dewey accomplished was to gain wider acceptance for what Menand regards as a distinctly modern "idea about ideas": that ideas themselves are socially produced devices—"like forks and knives and microchips"—for coping with experience, and thus are not primarily individually housed, internal constructions of some fixed, external reality. "The belief that ideas should never become ideologies—either justifying the status quo, or dictating some transcendent imperative for renouncing it—was the essence of what they taught," explains Menand. Agassiz and the extreme abolitionists had exemplified this old way of thinking, as Menand shows. Agassiz's deployment of scientific ideas to undermine the Lincoln administration's efforts to protect liberated slaves in 1863 serves Menand as an emblem for the attitude toward ideas that "a new kind of skepticism" renounced. The new outlook taught by James, Peirce, Holmes and Dewey could help people deal with "a heterogeneous, industrialized, mass-market society . . . in which older human bonds of custom and community seemed to have been attenuated, and to have been replaced by impersonal networks of obligation and authority." This attitude "permits the continual state of upheaval that capitalism thrives on," and could "free thought from thralldom to official ideologies of the church, or the state or even the academy."
This understanding of the contributions of the pragmatist intellectuals was widespread in the 1950s and 1960s, but Menand curiously argues that the Cold War put pragmatism into a remission that lasted until the end of the Cold War. It is true that the writings of the old pragmatists won renewed attention in the 1990s. But the explicitly antipragmatist argumentation Menand appears to have in mind was largely a phenomenon of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and it was directed against what was seen as the excessively pragmatic attitude of go-slow-on-civil-rights politicians and those intellectuals who supported the Vietnam War. Beyond politics, moreover, W. V. O. Quine, Thomas Kuhn and a number of other American thinkers of the Cold War years worked within the pragmatist tradition. Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Menand cites as an example of an antipragmatic sensibility, smuggled vast amounts of pragmatism into his Christ-affirming political theory and was close to Dewey on many crucial issues.
Much of what scholars of the 1950s said about pragmatism itself is remarkably similar to what Menand now affirms. They said it in a series of widely disseminated books missing from Menand's imposing bibliography. Morton White's Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism, first published in 1949 and reissued with important new material in 1957, did more than any other book to popularize the understanding that Dewey, Holmes and many of their contemporaries developed an instrumentalist view of ideas conducive to the same anti-ideological cast of mind that Menand now appreciates. Indeed, The Metaphysical Club is a brilliant updating and critical revision of what could fairly be called a "1950s American Studies approach" to pragmatism.
Central to this approach is an emphasis on the peculiarly American context for the generation of "modern" ideas about ideas. Yet the direction of more recent scholarship has been comparative and has uncovered striking parallels in the intellectual histories of Germany, France, England and the United States. The most formidable challenge to the traditional "American exceptionalist" interpretation of the emergence of "uncertainty" is James T. Kloppenberg's Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920, which argues that a host of different locales with the industrialized, post-Kantian West proved conducive to the generating of what Menand would call the "modern" way of thinking.
To be sure, Menand's telling of the story can be made largely compatible with Kloppenberg's. One can sharpen the various national versions of the movement to accept cognitive and moral uncertainty, emphasize the distinctness of the formulations generated by the Americans and specify the local contexts in which the varieties of uncertainty-acceptance flourished. One could then insist that Menand's emphasis on the eagerness of Holmes the army veteran and his contemporaries to avoid the intellectual dogmatism that leads to violence simply points us to one of many local contexts in which "modernity" could emerge. But Menand does not perform this analysis. He does not even acknowledge the existence of the major book that calls into question his Americo-centric, Civil War–intensive explanation for the emergence of the modern understanding of ideas.
Yet what Menand does, he does extremely well. The Metaphysical Club shows how four exceptionally creative lives were entangled with each other and with each other's specific reactions to abolitionism, war, capitalism, Kant, Hegel, Darwin and God. 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.