Menand brings rare common sense and graceful, witty prose to his richly nuanced reading of American intellectual history ... On occasion, when The Metaphysical Club travels into the pure genealogy of thought, readers unfamiliar with these matters may feel a bit lost. But when the lives animate the ideas, everything works ... Even Holmes might enjoy seeing their ideas so carefully and imaginatively explored.
A story of almost ludicrous breadth and depth, winding around handwriting analysis, birds, racism, railroads, universities, and God. The threat of philosophical textbookism hovers in the margins, but Menand's determination to 'see ideas as always soaked through by the personal and social situations in which we find them' fends off that danger with sometimes dazzling effect ... The triumph of The Metaphysical Club is the author's dramatic demonstration of the parallel between developments in science and philosophy ... He catches the rhythms of 19th-century America with striking clarity, swinging from complex explanations to epigraphic summaries. The doors of The Metaphysical Club look intimidating, but don't be put off. It's engaging, wise, and touched with wit - a chance to follow an inspector around the foundations of American thought and understand this house of mirrors we've inherited.
By presenting ideas as deeply embedded in circumstance—'soaked through by the personal and social situations in which we find them'—and not in splendid intellectual isolation, Menand has attempted to write a history of pragmatism on its own terms ... This dramatization of human culture helps account for The Metaphysical Club's popular appeal: its biographical portraits make for terrific reading, and its success as popular history is already assured ... Menand has trouble explaining how and why these different thinkers converged on a set of tightly related ideas ... Moreover, by so thoroughly localizing pragmatism in specific personalities and biographies, Menand diminishes his ability to explain it as a set of ideas with broad historical and contemporary significance ... Menand repeatedly strains historical and philosophical interpretation in the service of personalized animation ... The most satisfying moments in The Metaphysical Club occur when the emotional arc of one of the characters meets the articulation of an idea...Even during such moments, however, the general reader is pulled back and forth between edification and enlightenment ... Not only do broad, historical explanations become more difficult to sustain as Menand descends to the idiosyncratic details of private life, but his focus on those details does not aid evaluation of pragmatism as a philosophical outlook ... So it is that Menand's book flatters a present sensibility that offers little place for big ideas or independent moral judgment, but reserves many seats for dramatic personalities.
Menand's book is part biography, part intellectual history and part demonstration of the interplay of ideas, personalities and cultural context. The author conveys all of this with a sure hand, guiding the reader through what may be unfamiliar territory. In addition, he shows how discussions long ago continue to influence our society today ... Sheer pleasure.
Menand is that rare bird, the academic who also writes for a wider audience ... Menand takes detours into things like the rise of the probability theory and statistics and how those disciplines fed the pragmatist notion of truth being tentative and approximate. The book proceeds chronologically but tends to sprawl forward rather than pursue a narrow path. And while Menand's explanations are always lucid, The Metaphysical Club cannot be called a casual read ... At 546 pages, The Metaphysical Club is a challenging book, expansive and not readily summarized, combining anecdote and biographical detail with analysis of fairly complex philosophical ideas. Those for whom American intellectual history from the Civil War to World War I is fuzzy will find this book serves impressively to bring the period more sharply into focus.
The clarity and energy of his writing never fail. Nor is the reader ever left wondering about the relevance of Menand's side trips into theory and anecdote ... As good as Menand's portraits of the major figures are, the reader may find that some of the lesser characters in Menand's history linger even more in the mind ... The Metaphysical Club sets a new standard for anyone who would write, or read, the human story of a progress of ideas.
In his sharp and expansive appreciation of pragmatism’s formative quartet (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey), Menand brings their intermingled lives into colorful focus ... Each takes center stage in one of the story’s first four sections, forming a sequence of eclectic biographies that accumulate a narrative tension as lives and ideas cohere or clash ... A singular achievement of intellectual history as well as a weighty entertainment.
Menand, a New Yorker staff writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York, brilliantly pieces together a broad-ranging cultural history of pragmatism ... Extraordinarily ambitious and compulsively readable, Menand's elegant big book shows how pragmatism's various ideas came together mainly through the work, talk and life experience of four men ... The wealth of anecdotes, local exegeses and political asides will leave readers astonished ... Over its narrative arc and the arc of its subjects' lives, the book slowly and surely makes the ideas of another era available and usable to our own.
