The Metaphysical Club
 Louis Menand
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 2001 Farrar, Straus & Giroux
  ISBN: 0374199639

A Story of Ideas in America. From the Civil War to 1919 through the thoughts of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce & John Dewey who all belonged to an informal discussion group that met in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1872.

Before the Civil War the way Americans in northern states thought about themselves was in relation to their farms & towns, occasionally their states. After the Civil War the way we thought of ourselves was in flux for then the concept of a Union & a Nation began emerging. As Southerners were thinking themselves out of a slave civilization, people in the North were thinking themselves out of an agricultural frame of mind.

Out of the short time in which these men (& many more) met, one thing emerged -- an idea about ideas, about how & what Americans believed. This was explored & expanded over the years in the writings of Holmes, James, Peirce & Dewey et al, at various times corresponding & arguing.

I had thought The Metaphysical Club would have been way beyond my reach until I began to follow Louis Menand's lead & let the cavalcade of American history & its thinking people, their life & times at the end of the 19th Century, wash over me.

Why do Americans think the way we do? What from those icons from another century has filtered down into our everyday assumptions, expectations & desires? Perhaps because “America” or the United States of America was an organic entity, it was woven anew by minds who could & did think outside the worn envelope of the Old World.

When did we become an urban society in our minds as well as our lifestyles? How did we accomplish E Pluribus Unum?

We may all be scrambling to find out how the minds of the Taliban work -- I do encourage you all to also discover how our fields of beliefs came about:-
why we so readily accept volunteerism;
why we think of freedom the way we do;
why we are a nation of storekeepers;
why we think of our government & our politicians the way we do;
why we think the way we do;
why we allow ourselves a luxury so few people in this world are permitted -- & it has nothing to do with money, class or religion. It all depends upon the flexibility of your mind & your willingness to follow a thought out of its familiar fields & into the unexplored lands of our future.

The Metaphysical Club is also a biography of the movers & thinkers who, through letters, lectures, books & essays, clarified American thinking in that robust age when infusions of immigrants populated the eastern seaboard as longer-lived Americans headed West on the railroads.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was a social adept & an unsentimental gentleman with fierce ambitions. His The Common Law that originated as the Twelve Lowell Lectures, in 1880, spoken before a packed hall, became the basis for our legal system.

In the late 1800s, when American public schools were something of a novelty, John Dewey, who was named Chairman of the philosophy department at the struggling (Baptist) University of Chicago, eventually went on to start his own school & much of our educational system is still based on his formulas.

Louis Menand weaves a fascinating cloth of the life & times of that American era when the railroads fueled the economy & the rich got inordinately rich while the poor simply multiplied. Now what is the connection between John Dewey & George Pullman?

George Pullman, an entrepeneur with Utopian (even socialistic)ideas, revolutionized railroad cars & what did he have to do with the way Americans thought? For one, he didn't sell his luxury railroad cars, he leased them out complete with crews who took care of the cars from porters & conductors to the maintenance of both inside & outside & for that he exacted fifty cents from every fare. He also thought to provide his workers with “a morally salubrious environment.” He banned the use of alcohol, made adult education classes available as well as an athletic club & other such niceties. He did not forget his workers' children either -- getting them vaccinated against smallpox & providing schooling from kindergarten through eighth grade -- for free yet!

Then the stock market crashed in 1893 & a national economic depression hit the cities of America hard. In June Dewey was traveling to Chicago to take up his post at the University & arrived in the middle of a strike by the Pullman workers. That strike got Dewey thinking.

I hadn't given a thought to how a people think about such humungous intangibles as “the social organism” or beliefs. So, I opened up the door to The Metaphysical Club & tiptoed in to listen to our ancestors talk about the things we take for granted, as they faced the same social stresses we face today -- illiteracy; unemployment; workers' rights; social hygience; the place of government in our lives; care for the less fortunate; freedom of assembly & speech. So I read, like a fly on the wall, about how these people thought about ideas, following their trains & arriving at where they alit.

When I read “Victorian” thinkers I am usually stifled by their immense breadth of language. Perhaps I am too much a child of my times & cannot sit still long enough for those kinds of marathons about such vast ideas. I commend Professor Menand for making The Metaphysical Club reader-friendly, & an informative, semi-formal imbibing of a much-forgetten era in our history.

This Jane Doe learnt a lot & was impressed with The Metaphysical Club. I expect it will become required reading for university students for it is a superb way to learn about how our forefathers & foremothers thought about what it was to be a philanthropic, compassionate American!

Louis Menand is Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is Contributing Editor of The New York Review of Books & is a staff writer at The New Yorker.
(01/20/02)

Rebecca