Rating: 
Summary: How Ideas Matter in America
Review: This is a rare book with ambitions to be scholarly and popular at the same time. On one level it is more successful as a popular exposition of complex ideas and thinkers. On another level, however, it succeeds both ways because it awakes in the reader an appreciation of the scope of intellectual life in the United States and a desire to understand and to perpetuate it.The key figures in the book are the great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the philosophers William James, Charles Pierce, and John Dewey. They were the basic American practicioners of, roughly speaking, a philosophy called pragmatism, which teaches that ideas are tools to be used to accomplish a purpose rather than abstractions which mirror to greater or lesser accuracy some independent reality. Menand examines each figure in light of his family life (Holmes, James, and Pierce all were products, in their different ways, of homes were ideas mattered; Dewey perhaps less so), temprament, reading, and educational and cultural background. He places a great deal of emphasis on the American Civil War as a basis, with his protagonists, for rejecting absolutistic views of principle and reality. An uncompromising commitment to absolutes led, for post Civil War thinkers, to the War and its carnage. This is an important historical claim and it works very well in the case of Oliver Wendell Holmes. I am not sure how convincing it is as an explanation of the thought of the other three figures. William James wrote an important essay "The Moral Equivalent of War" unmentioned in Menand's book, which talks about the apparent inability of modern life to find values to move the heart and spririt as the heart and spririt were moved in the passion of war. In other words, James, at least, was searching for values, and perhaps even for absolutes, rather than expressing a skepticism towards them. In addition to placing pragmatism in the context of the post Civil War era, Menand places great emphasis on the development of modern science, particularly Darwin's theory of evolution and statistical theory. These developments, for Menand, tended to discourage a view of the universe as fixed, rational, and purposeful. Knowledge became tied closely to theories of statistical generalization and theory of error, with an emphasis on what worked. Scientific theory in fact gets a larger place in the book than does the Civil War as a basis for the development of pragmatism and I think deservedly so. Menand stresses how intellectual development in the United States was tied to racial theories and to other theories such as spiritualism that we find markedly out of place today. This is not a new story, but it is well told and does show something important about how ideas we value can emanate from teachings we would reject or find strange. In addition to the four primary figures, Menand discusses a host of other philosophers and thinkers, predecessors, successors, and colleagues to Holmes, James, Pierce, and Dewey. The title of the book is based on an almost legendary "Metaphysical Club" that met all to briefly in the 1870's under the auspices of Chauncey Wright, the "Cambridge Socrates". Ideas and intellectual life flourish briefly and quietly, but they may illuminate people's lives for times to come. The book is chatty in tone with many disgressions on matters such as the Dartmouth College Supreme Court case, the Pullman Strike, Jane Addams and Hull House, and Louis Agassiz's expedition to Brazil. The digressions make it hard at times to keep to the thread of the narrative, but they do cast light on the era and on the development of thought in the United States. As suggested earlier, the book does not expound in detail the thought of its principal characters. For that the reader will need to turn to texts, and the book encourages him or her to do just that. Menand is not overly critical or analytical about the success of pragmatism. He points out that the later Civil Rights Movement in America could not have succeeded with pragmatism as a base but rather required a commitment to principle and absolutes found more in other writers. Pragmatism is a distinctive achievement of thinkers in the United States. This book teaches about it well and, perhaps not entirely consistent with the theory of pragmatism itself, promotes respect for the role of ideas in our country and for the value of the life of the mind.
Rating: 
Summary: The origins of pragmatism
Review: As an Australian interested in American history and ideas, this was an interesting book for me. Menand manages to blend the lives of four very different people to tell a story of the development of a school of thought called pragmatism. Some of his writing is exceptional with digressions into the fascinating social history of the United States following the civil war. The way he manages to combine topics diverse as spiritualism, mathematics, document forgery and race relations into a single narrative is startling.
The book opened up a fascinating period of intellectual ferment that gave rise to ideas that still influence the way the world thinks and acts.
Rating:
Summary: bad reviews by bad writers
Review: Ever notice how all the bad reviews are written by bad writers? You can sum up their criticisms as follows: I was too dumb to get this book. A testament to the ideologically driven American education system that fails to live up to the ideals of these magnanimous men. I sigh for our nation and what could have been.
Rating:
Summary: Pleasant and interesting... but partial and incomplete.
Review: I recommend the book to readers interested in history as well as in history of ideas.
As a non-specialist reader, I enjoyed "The Metaphysical Club" because it is not just history of a philosophical movement, but, from a wider point of view, an attempt of analysis of the intellectual history of Post Civil War USA. Besides it is well written, clear and highly entertaining.
Pragmatism tell us that ideas are "tools" we use to cope with the outside world and that the truth of a proposition is based on how well it correlates with experimental results and produces practical outcomes.
Menand is showing us how Pragmatism was born to cope with the brave new world born after the Civil war. And to do this he isn't writing a philosophical pamphlet about the new ideas and the ensuing debates ... but prefer to investigate exemplary lives of its representative members.
So in the first three parts we follow the lives of Olivier Wendell Holmes Jr, William James, Pierce, Wright, not usually in their private dimensions, but mostly in the public events that shaped their view of the world. Those chapters are definitely the most interesting of all the book since the author is able to present - also with the help of fascinating anecdotes - an organic vision of the historical period, with its debates (abolitionism, segregation, evolutionism...), its champions and the social humus ...
The last chapters about Dewey are far less interesting. Part Four (Dewey) is very different both in style and in argument. Sincerely I couldn't have understood only by these pages why Dewey was a such an important thinker, neither who were his intellectual opponents.
I have reserves as well on Part Five, the attempt to illustrate some significant terms in the debates (Freedom, Pluralism, Pragmatism), since again it cannot match style and effectiveness of the historical method pursued in the first parts and it result sometimes a bit too intellectual and celebrative.
If I can advance an other remark, I truly cannot understand why the author resolved to focus so much on the debate that develops inside the American colleges (all the actors are university professors or "specialists"): sure, Pragmatism was a Philosophical movement, but a "pragmatist" -intellectually relevant - approach was deep-rooted in the American intellectual attitudes well before the age of Holmes (I'm thinking especially of Franklin, but not just him) and not only in Massachusetts, where it develops also in reaction to the transcendentalist-romantic movement of early XIX century.
Rating:
Summary: Is Political Correctness a Metaphysical Game?
Review: The Metaphysical Club--founded about the time of the American Civil War, brought together some of the best minds of the 19th century. Some were foreign-born scholars, some became quite well-known intellectuals and academics in their own right. ALL had a tremendous impact on thinking "distinctly American" that formed the foundation of doctrines such as Manifest Destiny, and fear of the "Mexicanization" of America that continues today. This book is neither easy nor light reading, and will take some time for even the most ardent student of history generally to wade through. It has to be considered a basic text for anyone interested in intellectual history. It is without doubt an important work--especially for anyone who today wishes to understand what the rest of the world has thought of or thinks is "American Culture". Obviously, this is more complex than simplification of American expansionism as imperialism disguised as altruism. Nor is it the Culture of the Cowboy, the rugged individualist. However, at the same time that great Armies were further defining the "United States" on great battlefields, on American soil, so too were great Thinkers defining Americanism in precursors of "think tanks" where today the media would seek out people who "really" had something to say about our society. These were the precursors of the George Wills, the Pat Buchanans, the Sam Donaldsons of our era. While the names will be unfamiliar to some, and the personalities and characters even odd [sic] (even the great William James, M.D., who never practiced medicine, took a significant role)...you will become engaged with the intelligentsia of the United States that predated the Wilsonians of the early 20th century, or the Communists, Socialists, and fellow travelers of the middle 20th century....the Neo-Cons of our time. You'll wonder what has been lost, and how the era of Political Correctness could ever have devolved from this period of intense intellectual activity occurring at a time when even the causes of disease and infection were unknown, and theories of genetics were in their infancy. Yet "The Metaphysical Club" was a magnet for great thinking. A great read for the reader who likes a real challenge!
Rating:
Summary: Great (but that depends on how you look at 'great')
Review: A fairly fast-paced history that follows the trail of Pragmatism from its origin onward via biographical sketches of the men involved in forming it. As has already been noted in other reviews, this is a book that you could probably spend months and months sifting through due to the density of the subject matter. The author does an excellent job of shedding light on other subjects during the era, like slavery and the racial theories of prominent scientists. Let me assure you, if you look at the past through the views that most of us hold today, there were few men in any part of the country that didn't hold views on race to make you cringe. For example, as silly as it might seem now, the most serious scientists of their time were divided as to whether or not the white and black races evolved from one common ancestor or evolved entirely independent of one another...i.e., we were created differently from day one. It's this very thing that reveals the beauty of science as something that builds on itself via verifiable data and, once your ideas fail the test, they go directly and swiftly into the dustbin of history. Philosophical systems not being something that spring into someone's head fully formed, Menand does a great job tracing all of the twists and turns that ultimately lead to what we refer to as the philosophy of Pragmatism. This book was much broader in scope than I thought it would be and intensely interesting in many ways. You'll likely add bios of Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James & John Dewey to your wish-list after reading this.
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