Book Review

Canada and the United States

In this brilliant foray into the sociology of knowledge, Louis Menand explores the roots and impact of pragmatism, America's chief contribution to modern philosophy. Four parts of three chapters each cover the four main figures: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Saunders Peirce, and John Dewey. A final retrospective and analytical part explores "pragmatisms, pluralisms, and freedoms" in the twentieth century.

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The Civil War, argues Menand, was the key shaping event. The war marked the transition to modern life, and it transformed Holmes, who joined as an idealist and emerged believing that war was hell and that uncompromising faith in the absolute justice of abolition had caused it. The war thus led Holmes to reject the holistic, "transcendental" intellectual style of prewar thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson in favor of skeptical inquiry and scientific investigation. But this created its own problems. How could one jettison theology and "oversoul" without falling into an uncomfortable kind of materalistic determinism? Moreover, without some sort of overarching theory, what did the law (for example) amount to? Holmes's answer was that the law was what judges, acting from precedent, argument, political bias, and a sense of justice and the public good, decided. Law was not an absolute to be discovered and applied. The law was rather contingent, socially constructed, the consequence of social influences that would be adapted to fit the tides of history. It was, in other words, what worked. The role of judges, then, was to protect the ability of social groups to contend for influence. Contingency, moreover, implied indeterminacy, thereby settling the second problem. Holmes was, in a word, a "pragmatist."

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