The Metaphysical Club

"It’s a beautifully crafted group biography about the birth of the first American school of philosophy – pragmatism. Pragmatism is an idea about ideas. The gist is to assess theories based on their efficacy. Menand describes ideas as being like microchips or screwdrivers, tools that help us achieve results. That concept sprung from this generation. So, the four figures it tells this birth story through are Oliver Wendell Holmes, who became the legal embodiment of pragmatism, William James, who is the philosopher of pragmatism, Charles Pierce, who was James’s mentor, and John Dewey, who made James’s ideas more coherent and more part of popular conversation. Pragmatism is the view that theories and policies should be evaluated based on how well they work. This became extremely important to the ethos of liberalism. Pragmatism coalesced when there was an abundant sense that we needed to break free from old thinking, and that we needed government by experts, who would experiment to produce policies that worked better to meet the challenges of the new century. This book tells how the Civil War remade politics, and the long dark shadow that it cast over the country. The Civil War shattered old certitudes. You couldn’t go around making dogmatic arguments after having witnessed all the carnage that was caused by a clash of dogmas. Oliver Wendell Holmes fought in the war and came out of it profoundly embittered. William James didn’t fight but had a brother who was shattered by the experience. And Harvard, the institution where they worked, was remade by the war, into the first great university where professors were supposed to produce ideas, not just instruct students. So pragmatism was born out of the horrors of the Civil War and really is part of the liberal fabric. I think liberalism, like pragmatism, is at once an ideology and an anti-ideology. It has a set of concerns and priorities, but it also prides itself on its sense of experimentation and efficacy. This sense was renewed during that last decade when liberals defined themselves against the Bush administration, which they saw as ploughing ahead with whatever big idea they had, damn the consequences. There’s a book by a famous intellectual historian, James Kloppenberg, making the case that Obama is an heir to this tradition. But while he is a realist and may possess a tendency towards compromise, I think it’s a stretch to tie him too closely to William James."