The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. . - Book Notes - book review

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, April, 2002

Menand, Louis. 2001. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 546 pp. Index.

This is an intellectual history of ideas, and quite an accomplishment at that. It traces the lives and accomplishments of four thinkers: Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles S. Peirce, and John Dewey. Why these four? According to Menand, these four "were more responsible than any other group for moving American thought into the modern world. They not only had an unparalleled influence on other writers and thinkers; they had an enormous influence on American life" (Menand 2001: xi. Hereafter all references to this book will be by page number). They are the cofounders of an intellectual tradition in philosophy known as "American pragmatism."

The careers, adventures, and correspondence of these thinkers overlapped and intertwined over 100 years, and Menand makes much of these connections. This is an intellectual history of American social, political, and legal thought that makes an incredibly interesting use of the historical context within which each intellectual's thought evolved.

Menard's thesis is that his four principal subjects have something in common. They shared not a group of ideas but one "single idea" that was an "idea about ideas." They believed that "ideas are not 'out there' waiting to be discovered, but are tools--like forks, knives and microchips--that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves" (xi). And it was a bitter and cold world at that.

The story begins with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and his personal struggle as a student and, more sensationally, as a several-times wounded soldier during the Civil War. According to Menand, Holmes believed that "nobility of character consists in doing one's job with indifference to ends" (54). This attitude colored his judicial career in the 70 years of his life that followed the Civil War. "The key to Holmes's civil liberties opinions is the key to all his jurisprudence: it is that he thought only in terms of aggregate social forces; he had no concern for the individual. The spectacle of individuals falling victim to dominant political or economic tendencies, when these tendencies had been instantiated in duly enacted laws, gave him a kind of chilly satisfaction. It struck him as analogous to the death of soldiers in a battlefield victory, and justified on the same grounds--that for the group to move ahead, some people must inevitably fall by the wayside" (65-66). Still, Holmes's legacy was that of the grea t judicial defender of economic reform and of free speech. His judicial holdings were inspiration to the progressives and libertarians of his day; the list includes Louis Brandeis, Learned Hand, Walter Lippmann, and Herbert Croly (66). According to Menand, what motivated Holmes was an old-fashioned value-laden world in which commitment and obligation were paramount. As a Justice, Holmes's duty was to decide the constitutionality of laws and uphold them when their reach did not offend the constitution. It was another matter entirely as to whether the laws themselves were proper or desirable.

In order to appreciate William James, Menand first establishes the racial myths and prejudices that were common at Harvard University and other advanced scientific circles. The published writings of the naturalist Agassiz are special grist for Menand's mill. Agassiz was quite precise when he lectured that "the Negro represented the lowest stage of human being" and compared the adult "Negro" brain to that of a seven-month-old white baby (109). James heard these ideas at Harvard College on the eve of the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of the Species and the terrific academic debates that followed. From this, "the real lesson of On the Origin of Species for James--the lesson on which he based his own major work, The Principles of Psychology (1890)--was that natural selection has produced, in human beings, organisms gifted with the capacity to make choices incompatible with 'the survival of the fittest"' (146). James moved sharply and decisively away from the racism and dogmatic truths of his Harvard Colle ge science professors and into a more nuanced view of humans and their possibilities.

Next we enter the complex world of Charles Sanders Peirce. Charles Peirce was a student of Benjamin Peirce (his father), who was himself a disciple of the great mathematician Laplace (184). Laplace, along with Adolphe Quetelet, revolutionized the understanding of probability theory and demonstrated how it might be relevant for understanding human affairs. What appears to be random actually disguises a hidden order that can be teased out and demonstrated to exist independently of the individual events occurring in the real world.

Peirce took these ideas further and argued that "knowledge must therefore be social" and the human mind cannot "mirror" reality. No single person "sees" reality directly. There is nothing unchanging in reality to mirror. What is out there in the real world is variation, and statistical regularity is all that there is that is real and measurable. As Darwin has demonstrated with broad-sounding concepts like "species," concepts are at best useful categories to help solve problems at hand, but they embody no independent reality at all.