The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand
From the first review of it, The Metaphysical Club was a book that I knew would have a profound impact upon my thinking much as Morton White's Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism had upon me many decades ago. For followers of John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen, it is important to be able to understand their thinking in the broader context of the times in which their thinking emerged and the parallel currents of thought in law, science, and other areas that White and, now, Menand explore. The Metaphysical Club of the title was a group formed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after the Civil War and included such luminaries as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, and Charles Sanders Peirce among many others. Menand uses it skillfully in his narrative to introduce various of its members and the ideas that they espoused. Menand is an extraordinary writer, interweaving the ideas and personal and intellectual background of individual thinkers with a series of different topics from slavery to evolution to freedom of speech. Given the anti-science postmodernism that has come to dominate so many English departments, it is a treat to read a "Professor of English" who has a solid knowledge of the scientific issues involved in the emergence of the theory of evolution. One is never wanting for context for a particular theorist. For example, Dewey, though mentioned earlier, is introduced in a chapter titled "Burlington." We are treated to a brief biography of Dewey beginning with the infant death of an older brother, also named John Dewey, and proceeding to a thumbnail synopsis of his early career. When he returns to Burlington to study philosophy, we suddenly find the narrative back to Vermont in 1794 with the birth of the Transcendentalist James Marsh and then forward on through for the fifteen pages to the end of the chapter, where we again encounter Dewey as a student. The next chapter is titled "Baltimore" for Dewey's going on to Johns Hopkins to study, with the first twenty pages largely dealing with the founding of the university and its intellectual development. The transitions are not always seamless, but Menand's narrative is so fascinating that we delight in exploring these byways of thought. A lesser writer could have written the core narrative in less than half or even a third of the pages, but it would also have been much less of a book.