The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

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.

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!

The Civil War marks the birth modern the modern United States. Freed from decades of debate over the slavery questions, the country unleashed the forces of industrialization and expansion.
In the realm of ideas, the civil war also discredited the country's intellectual climate. It took nearly 50 years for Americans to develop a philosophy that would help them cope with it. Louis Menand's study of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey shows how these four men developed a philosophy of pragmatism following the Civil War.
Together these four thinkers, each of them giants in their chosen field, founded in 1874 an informal discussion group in Cambridge, MA called The Metaphysical Club. Although they met for only nine months, the ideas they discussed became the foundation of the ideas and values that changed the way Americans were to think and live for the next 50 years.
This book is an effort to write about those ideas through the personal and social situations of the four individuals who conceived them.

In The Metaphysical Club, author Louis Menand traces the lives of four intellectual giants whose philosophies transformed American antebellum sensibilities and birthed a new mode of construing truth, value, and ethics. Three of these--William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, all young men during the Civil War--witnessed the ravaging consequences of decisions (i.e., waging war) that followed deductively from a priori principles (i.e., the right of regional autonomy or the rectitude of abolitionism). Collectively, these three, along with a younger John Dewey, chased a new vision of truth--not an abiding order of the universe uncovered by science or religion, but rather a social construction that is legitimized first by its utility. This is American pragmatism: The insight that ideas are not only justified by their practical effects, but are in fact are made real by their consequences.

The Metaphysical Club corrects shallow or mistaken impressions of central figures in American thought.

* John Dewey, commonly regarded as the great American education theorist and torchbearer of progressive education, was above all a philosopher. An enthusiast of the philosophical systematizer, Hegel, Dewey took the universe to be organically connected--everything was related to all, and categories that emphasized distinctions often fail to appreciate this organic connectivity. Dewey criticized the division of knowledge (including philosophical knowledge) and action. And so, progressive education sprung not so much from Dewey's passion for advancing pedagogy, but more so as a test of the philosophical position that all knowledge is interconnected, and that ideas and actions are obverse sides of one coin. The famed "Dewey" laboratory school at the University of Chicago was above all a laboratory for testing a philosophy--though one that offered its students a truer experience than was typical of American education.

* William James, great American psychologist, was the first to formulate pragmatism as a theory. Trained originally as a medical doctor and then as a philosopher, James laid the cornerstone of American psychology with the 1890 publication of his monumental textbook, Principles of Psychology. James's intellectual trajectory ricocheted also to spiritualism and semiotics. His polymathic resume was as much a product of his indecisiveness as it was of universal fascination for every subject that touched on the meaning of human existence. To James, experience was the basis of all knowledge, but James saw experience as broader than mental events directly prompted by sensory stimuli (as the philosophical empiricists emphasized). Rather, experience included all mental events, whether prompted by the senses or otherwise derived from genetic potential, mystical introspection, psychotropic drugs, or some other source.

* Oliver Wendell Holmes, born of a Boston Brahmin family, witnessed firsthand the devastation of the Civil War. Inspired initially to join the armies of the North by conviction of the rightness of its cause, he came to regard the slaughter of young men as absurdly disconnected from its justifying principles. Later, as a lawyer and judge, and ultimately as Supreme Court Justice, Holmes maintained a stance that justice and morality must be understood, and indeed are defined by, the social consequences of particular judgments. Often mistaken by progressives as a torchbearer for their cause, Holmes had no philosophical qualms about placing individual rights beneath considerations of the common good. Holmes' pragmatism was social and contextual, and so placed in doubt assumptions of the inalienable rights of individuals.

* Charles Sanders Peirce, largely forgotten in the American intellectual landscape, was a brilliant scientist, mathematician, logician, philosopher, and founder of the discipline of American semiotics. Semiotic theory holds that all meaning in the universe is conveyed through signs--that is, signifiers that trigger signification. Words are signs in that their arbitrary sound sequences ("dog") can produce a cascade of meaning (four-legged animal, tail, fur, barks). Peirce recognized that language is but one variety of sign--others include gestures, symbols, icons, natural objects, animal tracks, and human artifacts. Civilization, nature, and indeed the entire universe, is replete with signs. Though brilliant as evidenced by such insights, Peirce was also combative and arrogant, and he easily offended the powerful men who could promote him. He never held a tenured position at a university and was, at times in his long life, a fugitive from the law, homeless, and starving. But his intellectual legacy is profound, anchoring not only semiotic theory, but also an emerging vision of knowledge that holds tremendous potential for illuminating the history of philosophy and the cognitive sciences, as well as new visions of the meaning of education.

In The Metaphysical Club, Menand weaves the biographies of these four cornerstones of American pragmatism, and shows how their lives intersected. It shows how these four influenced, and were influenced by, other luminaries: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louis Agassiz, Charles Darwin, Daniel Webster, and Franz Boas. Above all, the spotlighted quartet knew each other and influenced one another deeply. James and Peirce were lifelong friends; James was one of the few who could tolerate the irascible Peirce as well as keep pace with him intellectually. Later in life, James rescued Peirce from penury by sponsoring a paid lecture series at Harvard. James, Peirce, and Holmes knew each other in Cambridge, Massachusetts--Holmes' and Peirce's fathers were Harvard faculty members. Briefly, they established a weekly discussion forum--the Metaphysical Club--at a Cambridge house where free-ranging discussions shaped emerging definitions of reality, truth, morality, and justice that are varieties of pragmatism. The Metaphysical Club was briefly revived at Johns Hopkins when Peirce held a lectureship and John Dewey was a graduate student. Dewey and James later corresponded, traded manuscripts, and shared mutual admiration for the other's intellectual insights.

Menand's Metaphysical Club shows that the intellectual paths of the luminaries of pragmatism pursued a common problem that was philosophical in essence, but that also deeply touched mathematics, jurisprudence, ontology, religion, epistemology, and human evolution. It also guided, even defined, modes of thought that underlay the emergence of modern scholarship.

Education As the Cultivation of Intelligence (Volume in the Educational Psychology Series)
Learning and Cognition: The Design of the Mind

The Metaphysical Club, while hefty in size, is an amazing piece of scholarship and writing. Menand's book, while nonfiction, reads much like a novel--characters interact as if it were a TV drama--in order to tell the story of the development of the distinctly modern, distinctly American idea of pragmatism. Throughout the book, the key players--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey--are richly highlighted by their always eccentric, sometimes hilarious contemporaries. Anyone interested in how American pragmatism developed would surely enjoy Menand's excellently-researched and written text.

I loved this book but kept falling asleep while reading. Maybe I needed to reread passages in the light of day instead of the middle of the night. Menand does a great job with the big ideas but I found that staying with his explanations difficult. This is not a reflection on his writing as much as my limitations. One of the amazing things about the book is how important the ideas these men were thinking/writing/talking about were and how little I was exposed to these ideas in High School or College. I think I'm probably not alone.

Tom Robbins has never written as bizarre and fascinating story as the real tale that Menand weaves in this book. The characters and ideas are described in a way that truly capture the energy and change that was taking place after the Civil War and at the turn of the century. You will learn to enjoy the sense that you are both lost in the complex society surrounding Harvard and yet following Menand perfectly as he brings you to his remarkable and profound conclusion. His discussion of abolition at the beginnning is thought provoking and is clarified as a central part of his thesis in Part Four. Part Four is a powerhouse. What is best about this book, and searching this site is evidence of this effect, is that it acts as a stimulus for further reading. Not every book makes a reader hungry to find the original sources cited, but if you look at the other authors that people have bought during a search of William James or John Dewey, Louis Menand's name is there. There can be no doubt that "Club" readers wanted to do some follow-up reading. It was refreshing to me to see that this book had a similar affect on other readers. While my interest as a teacher in John Dewey had led me to a cursory study of Dewey, and my interest in John Stuart Mill and an NPR essay about Willam James had started me in his direction; after reading The Metaphysical Club, I feel compelled to read major works of both. Before reading this book, clear your reading list, because The Metaphysical Club is just a beginning.

In retrospect, not sure how I managed to avoid reading this book for so long. Menand's New Yorker articles consistently hit the spot, and The Metaphysical Club won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for history. The book sketches the rise of pragmatism in the United States in the last third of the Nineteenth Century. Menand argues that the Civil War "swept away almost the whole intellectual culture of the North" and that pragmatism emerged to fill that vacuum.

Menand presents the origin of pragmatism as a verbal fugue. He introduces four consonant but distinct voices: the psychologist William James, the philosophers John Dewey and Charles Peirce, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who served on the US Supreme Court for three decades. Menand summarizes pragmatism as "a single idea--an idea about ideas. They [the thinkers he profiles] all believed that ideas are not 'out there' waiting to be discovered, but tools--like forks and knives and microchips--that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves" (xi). Menand weaves in a range of additional voices, some of whom, like Louis Agassiz and Josiah Nott, provide counterpoint. Written by a less skilled author, the multi-voiced design would have likely devolved to a cacophony, but in Menand's skilled hands, the interplay among diverse voices produces a satisfying synthesis.

There is much to like in this book. First, the topic is important. Menand notes that "the defining characteristic of modern life is social change--not onward or upward, but forward, and toward a future always in the making" (431). Pragmatism is an important response to the challenges of proceeding forward into the fog of the future, and one that has been road-tested in real world applications, including primary school education in Dewey's "laboratory school" at the University of Chicago and Holmes' judicial decisions. A richer understanding of the origins, variations, and limitations of pragmatism can help people use ideas more effectively, even when they cannot predict what the future holds.

Menand's multi-voice composition provides a nuanced understanding of pragmatism rather than a simplistic tag-line. Distinct views of what pragmatism means co-exist in Menand's fugal design, playing off one another and related ideas such as pluralism. Menand keeps the door open to provocative observations from supporting characters, whose insights might be edited out as digressions in a more linear book. Menand includes, for example, a passage from The Logic of Chance, in which the English logician John Venn articulated the limits of statistics, just as his contemporaries were proclaiming the triumph of statistics in taming uncertainty. In his discussionn of l'homme moyen and social darwinism, for example, Menand covers wrong turns and intellectual dead ends, that inevitably accompany the birth of an important ideas.

In "Bad Comma," Menand defines "the ultimate test of good writing: it is more painful to stop reading...than it is to keep going." Menand passes his test with high distinction. Like most New Yorker authors, his sentences have hard edges. Maintaining clear prose is difficult when describing a concrete activity like boxing or gardening, but really thorny when the subject matter includes the obscurantist German philosophers and transcendentalists from Vermont. Menand pulls it off. Immanuel Kant, for example, concludes "that the mind must not be a totally blank slate. It must come accessorized with certain "categories," like causality, that organize experience for us" (263).

As much as I liked this book, I have a stylistic quibble and a serious conceptual reservation. Following a book like The Metaphysical Club, like listening to a fugue, requires the reader to keep multiple themes in mind simultaneously. A few minor characters, including Hetty Robinson, and George Pullman, taxed the memory without contributing to our understanding of pragmatism. By cutting these stories, Menand might have tightened the fugue without sacrificing insight.

The deeper problem is this. Pragmatism aspires to link ideas and action. "We don't act because we have ideas;" Menand summarizes, "we have ideas because we must act" (364). But pragmatism contains a fatal flaw that cripples its usefulness as a guide action in the real world. Pramatic philosophers emphasized the dangers of unwavering devotion to an idea, but ignored the practical benefits that arise from a strong commitment to an ideal. For a philosophy that values an idea's utility above all else, the pragmatists' omission is a deal killer.(A fuller discussion of the pragmatism's fatal flaw is beyond the scope of a short review [...]

There are many books that have been written about American history, but there has never been such a book which combines such intellectualism and is yet still a pager turner as The Metaphysical Club (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), Louis Menand. In this book the intellectual life of America post-civil war is described by Menand with exquisite pose. The book is broken into sections in which the ideas of the four main characters, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey, are told and explained. Menand involves the reader in every aspect of the characters mind set, and tells that the ideas of these aforementioned men is the very reason that we act and think in the way we do today.

Oliver Wendell Homes left school at a young age to fight in the civil war. The war impacted him greatly leaving life long scars. From this came his thinking, during the war he questioned and after the wars end he began theorizing. After completing schooling Homes become a justice of the US Supreme Court. As a justice he became one of the best legal thinkers of the time. He was very stubborn with his ideas and rarely compromised this lead to violence.

Charles Peirce a mathematical genius hugely impacted philosophical history. Working for the government in his spare time he would theorize and argue about ideas of nature and other bailiffs of the time. He questioned everything and believed nothing that was told to him, he would not even trust his eye or even the theory of gravity. He believed that nothing should be taken as fact until there is no room for statistical error; he also believed that humans had very limited perception.

William James is introduced into the book as an admirer of Charles Peirce, which also brings the introduction of Pragmatism. Pragmatism was born in America at about this time (1800s) it is a belief system that is supposed to run between absolute belief systems, meaning that Pragmatists believe that theories of beliefs that will no aid or affect mankind are not important. William James is often named as the father of Pragmatism. For, he created many Pragmatic ideas and theories.

John Dewey who was also a pragmatist, while at the university of Chicago Dewey makes his most important contribution. He believed that children should learn by doing, and he thought that a more hands on approach to learning would help kids learn better. By doing so it would provide the children with real world examples to what they are learning. This is still used today, and was later to be discovered as one of a person's main ways of learning.

As the book closely follows the beliefs of these four men it also shows the ideas of the time of the society of the time. Menand shows how racism, slavery, and abolitionism played a large roll in pre- during and post- Civil war time. He also explores other great thinkers such as Darwin and his importance to philosophy. Throughout the book it is filled with primary sources, ranging from quotes to exert of writing that thinkers of the time had wrote. When reading this book you will get the feeling that the author fully knows and understands the topic, and has a wealth of knowledge about this time, far more than would be needed to tell this story. You will also understand the thinking of the time and its impact of us today. It is in this book that you will discover the lives of four geniuses with ideas very much the same.

Within the first minutes of reading you will become amazing at the way Menand's magnificent writing flows, which is the third best part of the book, second to the frequent digression that at times can be confusing but are ever amusing and exhilarating, and third to the topic, which will engage you to continue reading. Amongst hundreds of other history books The Metaphysical Club is by far the most original, well written, and fun to read books you will find. The stories of the four men portrayed in the book are those of true geniuses. It is intellectually exciting and will greatly expand your knowledge.

Menand brings together a true history of ideas, showing how shared national experience molds philosophy, law and culture. This is not a book to be scanned or quickly devoured by newcomers to the history of this era; I found it hard work at first. With a grasp of the great picture and the movements of intellectual history, however, Menand's brilliance illuminates a deepened appreciation of the origins of the 20th century.

The breadth, depth, critical analysis covering history, sociology, ideology is unparalled. For an English professor do this is beyond words. I am looking forward to reading many more of Menand's books.

Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club is a lucidly written account of the lives and ideas of four of America's seminal intellectuals--William James, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Pierce, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. To many of us, these are names only, but Menand brings each one to life with a rare ability to tie biography to thought.
All four were members of a small, short-lived club at Harvard in the 1870s, and all shared ideas about the peculiarity of America's intellectual tradition in light of current European philosophy. Menand shows that each in his own way contributed to the formation of a unique way of thinking later to be called "pragmitism." This quasi-philosophy seemed to addresss the American situation (the frontier, the bi-racial society, action oriented individualism, etc.) more directly than borrowed European schemas (Hegel, Locke and Laplace are discussed, among others). For those with a desire to see philosophical ideas in a fresh, vibrant light, this book is a "must-read." That a scholarly work should rank so highly among the intelligent public is a tribute to its brilliant author.

Reading this during my first semester as a Political Science Ph.D. student turned out to be pretty fortuitous. My interests, both academic and casual, had led to me being somewhat familiar with a lot of the people and concepts in this book; Menand does a masterful job of stitching together a philosophical history of the United States from roughly the Civil War through the turn of the century. Fairly regularly did I find myself discovering new facts or relationships, and my understanding of the cultivation of characteristically American ideas is now considerably deeper.

Louis Menand's "The Metaphysical Club" poses a somewhat interesting quandry: is it a biography of C.S. Peirce, William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Dewey? Is it a biography of the philosophy of Pragmatism? "The Metaphysical Club" can best be understood as an account of how the cluster of ideas that came to be called pragmatism was forged from the searing experiences of its progenitors' lives.

Menand, whose prior work includes Pragmatism: A Reader rightfully begins his inquiry into the "birth" of pragmatism with Ralph Waldo Emerson. The driving force behind transcendentalism, Emerson can also be thought of as a progenitor of pragmatism. Menand does well to depict not only the intellectual connections between Emerson, Perice, James, Holmes and Dewey but also the personal connections between them. I do object though to the use of "The Metaphysical Club" as the fulcrum of this connection as it gives this "club" (which existed for about 3 months and of which Emerson and Dewey were not members) undue significance. Menand provides also linkages between the personal lives of the progenitors and the evolutions of their ideas as a way of depicting that ideas are not forged in a vacuum.

The unabridged edition would get 4 stars from me with the major drawback being the undue significance Menand places on "The Metaphysical Club."

The abridged audio edition on the other hand is a confused disconnected mess. I found myself cringing mightily when the narrator, Henry Leyva, repeatedly mispronounced the name of C.S. Peirce - repeatedly mispronouncing it as "Pierce." If "The Metaphysical Club" were a mere work of fiction, perhaps this mistake could be shrugged off, but in a purported work of intellectual history, it is inexcusable. The text itself fluctuates between fluidity and disorganized and a reader without a great deal of background in pragmatism would find himself utterly lost in the inelegant transitions the abridged edition makes.

Though I would recommend "The Metaphysical Club," I cannot, in good conscience recommend the abridged audio edition.

Something that takes you into what is possible and the work involved that builds what becomes familiar to us. Their is a lot to learn from and grow with. Ideals are flowing in the river and ocean of life and sometimes we allow them to grow at times we destroy them. but being positive with the chance and ability to build one self into something better. Something that is not just powerful but engaging in moving beyond where you are at the moment.
Family
Community
Culture
Country
I've conquered country, crown, and throne
Why can't I cross this river?
Open your heart and hands, my son
Or you'll never make it over the river

A great look into the philosophical concepts emerging from the mid-to-late 19th century and early 20th century. For anyone studying American History, Philosophy, or just looking for a great read, The Metaphysical Club provides a vivid image of American life through clear-cut prose not found in too many books today. Highly recommended.

Louis Menand is a rare author. He brings the reader a story of ideas that arose out of and because of the Civil War. And he does so, explaining and interpreting in his own manner which is unique and exciting. He combines these ideas which are based aroung philosophy and psychology, and he gives us his own subjective interpretation. A must buy for an inquisitve person that wants to know the things we think and do today are because of what arose following the Civil War in the past. Thank you for your time and God Bless America.

Excellent idea and excellent writing. However the author is determined not to waste his research by making us read a lot of trivial details such as James' involvement in Hattie's trial.
I kept trying to soldier on and tie things together, but gave up half way through. I am thinking of trying the audio abridgement.

This book, initially so promising, was ultimately extremely annoying. The essence of these philosophers' thought is suffocated by biographical mishmash and annoying side trips. As I turned the pages, I hoped that Menand would manage to tie all of his many loose strings together, or at least to explain with some clarity what his subjects had in common. No such luck. Three-quarters of the way through I abandoned hope. Pity the poor editor whose job it was to make a book of Menand's meanderings. I am totally mystified why this book garnered such nice reviews.

Pulitzer prize in History? You've got to be kidding me. This is one of the most fatuous, irrelevant, and bloated history books I've ever read. It's as if Menand wrote this in one of those Mesmerist states, as if he were hypnotized in his library, or smoking the hookah, and dipping here and there into the intellectual history of the period, and unselectively writing down a bunch of unrelated to his thesis bunch of "stuff." I think his brief Preface makes better sense than the whole bloated book. And good God what a bunch of Brahman blowhards, practically this whole group come of as patrician pedants of one sort of another. Egads, what a depressing period of American intellectual history, at least as Menand portrays it.
I quit the book, it was too irksome, disorganized, taking you off on long meanders to nowhere waiting for him to get to the point and after a while I didn't care if he ever got there. This is one of those books you burn, it's a piece of historical junk and anyone with half a brain will use it to start a fire.

I enjoyed learning how this period of philosophy developed especially the influences of its key figures. Keeping all the players and their views straight was sometimes challenging but worth the read.

Philosophy is dense stuff as it is, so understandably a book about one can demand thorough reading to grasp what the author is conveying. Yet The Metaphysical Club seemed to fall short of meeting its goal: to link contemporary American thought to the writings and philosophies of Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey. Menand clearly states this as a goal, but his work resembles a written montage of facts and events that often digress from the intended flow of the book. In other words, tracing contemporary thought to that of the above philosophers becomes a difficult task, with the reader being forced to assimilate a gamut of historical facts and apply it to an argument that is frequently lost.

Menand does make one exception with his discussion of pragmatism, but for the most part his book becomes historical literature--characterized by frequent digression into seemingly irrelevant facts--rather than "a story of ideas". He would have done well to be more assertive in telling that story and illustrating how contemporary thought can be traced to pre- and post-Civil War ideas. If you measure this book for its historical contribution, then it passes; if you grade it for how well it achieves the above goal, then it doesn't. A worthy pick-up, but be prepared to struggle to find out just what Menand's conclusions really are.

A terribly boring book. No story-telling worth noting, just the facts. I'm sure academics loved it but I found it tedious to read. Draw me into the story and I will loyally follow. This book failed in that simple mission.

I guess this won the Pulitzer for the most comprehensive theory. There is too much unnecessary information in this book. This was like reading the transcript of your grandfather's latest 19 hour talking spree on the civil war and the post civil war era. ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzz!!! If you like to know about every nook n' cranny about the a few few characters from the civil war and the post civil war era mixed with a thick layer of philosophy then this is your book. But don't take my word for it. This was a required reading for a Master's class.

This book is perhaps deep and thoughtful but it is unnecessarily obtuse and droning. The author loses sight of his goals on almost every page nesting stories within stories within stories like someone cackling on and on.
It is inconcise dribbling on about information that it was clear the author dug up and was so excited about he just had to include it even though it was irrelevant. Combine that with an unnecessarily high-brow vocabulary and you have hard to understand and slow drum beating prose.
While there is information in this book that is fascinating it is lost inside a poor writing style.

One star is strange because the book is an enlightening one. However one sentence, p. 375, makes you wonder if the author understands what he himself narrates, a story that begins under the spell of the Civil war: "Pragmatism explains everything about ideas except why a person would be willing to die for one". A case of divided brain? Or maybe of belief that writing an history of ideas does not necessitate reading those who produced those ideas? Read "The will to believe", Mr Menand !

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!