Book Review

Louis Menand has restored American intellectual history to an intelligent general audience. Not since the heyday of Richard Hofstadter has a study of modern American thought achieved such widespread recognition outside the academy. The Metaphysical Club is a remarkable feat.	1
Menand's success stems from a graceful style combined with an uncommon capacity to fold philosophical issues into compelling biographical narratives. For decades historians have asserted the "peculiarly American" quality of pragmatism; Menand locates its origins more precisely—in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, among a cluster of young intellectuals who called themselves the Metaphysical Club. One of the most brilliant was Chauncey Wright. He was also one of the few American intellectuals who resisted the impulse to equate evolution with progress and recognized the centrality of chance in Darwinian thought. Wright's embrace of uncertainty, his attitude of "mature debunking" toward established orthodoxies, made the Metaphysical Club hostile to metaphysics and inspired the young men who clustered around him.	2
Among the group, at one time or another, were Charles Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and William James. Only Holmes had been in combat during the Civil War, but all viewed the war (Menand argues) as the disastrous consequence of dogmatic certitudes. Disillusioned by war and influenced by Wright's version of Charles Darwin, the members of the Metaphysical Club no longer accepted ideas as universally valid truths but instead groped toward the notion that ideas were "tools—like forks and knives and microchips—that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves." This pragmatic view of truth began to govern much of modern American thought.	3
The Metaphysical Club is the formal center of the book, but the rise and spread of pragmatism is the central theme. John Dewey never made it into the club (he was thirteen in 1872), but he dominates the last third of the book. He carried pragmatism into the public arena, as the philosophy of managerial reform and the regulative state but also as the justification for free speech and multiracial tolerance. Dewey and his predecessors shaped the way we think now. Recoiling from "the violence hidden in abstractions," resisting a static, timeless notion of truth, pragmatic thinkers began to shift the public criteria of legitimacy from premises to procedures. Though Menand acknowledges the ideologically charged interregnum of the Cold War, he concludes that American public discourse has embodied pragmatic assumptions throughout much of the twentieth century.	4
Those are the larger outlines of Menand's argument. But the heart of the book is his illuminating constellation of biographical portraits. Perhaps the most memorable is that of Holmes. Menand transforms this aloof and arrogant figure into a sympathetic character. Though Holmes never abandoned his support for the abolitionist cause, he gradually disengaged from the smug provincial moralism of his father's circle in antebellum Boston, recognized that organized violence was just another form of oppression, and rebuked the Brahmin intellectuals who believed that "their idea of civilization is a justification for killing those who decline to share it." For the providentialist faith that one is an instrument of a higher power, Holmes had nothing but scorn. "I detest a man who knows what he knows," he said succinctly. His willingness to live (and die) with uncertainty underlay his legal principles of reasonableness and probability and his reluctance to override legislative decisions through judicial activism.	. . .