Menand sees a great rupture in northern intellectual culture that takes place just as the forces of modernity take hold of a previously agrarian nation. It took nearly half a century for the United States to develop a culture to replace it, to find a set of ideas, and a way of thinking, that would help people cope with the conditions of modern life.” Menand writes: “The Civil War swept away the slave civilization of the South, but it swept away almost the whole intellectual culture of the North along with it. Underlying the stories that Menand interweaves about these men and their contemporaries is a larger claim about America and modernity. Menand chooses to tell this story by way of a collective biography of four thinkers: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.
Loosely understood, Menand’s story is about the evolution of an American philosophical tradition called pragmatism. Moreover, the subjects of this book all tended in a rather anti-metaphysical direction. While a small group of people met episodically in Cambridge, perhaps even bearing the label “The Metaphysical Club,” we know little about their meetings and this book is not about that club. However revealing the subtitle, the book’s title is misleading. This book is a pragmatic history of pragmatism, not a reckless and criterion-less postmodern story. But while Professor Menand avoids asserting the kind of authority that comes from claims to a comprehensive history, he nonetheless accepts the canons of historical truth-telling that govern the discipline. And the ideas that form the subject of his study hardly constitute a reified “mind.” The language of a story is useful here, as the author recognizes that one might tell many kinds of stories about the same subject relative to one’s questions, one’s interests, one’s perspective. The subtitle suggests a humility presumably lost on a previous generation of writers, those who half a century ago could write about “ the American mind” or “ the conservative mind.” Menand writes “ a story,” not “ the history,” of his subject. Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club is a history of ideas, or as he characterizes it in the subtitle, A Story of Ideas in America.
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