The Metaphysical Club: A Story of ideas in America by Louis Menand, Farrar,
Strauss and Giroux, $27, ISBN 0374199639
WHAT are ideas for? The response to this great question forged by four
remarkable Americans—that they are contingent guides to action, not
beacons on the path to truth—was the most prominent strain in American
thought from the Civil War to the Cold War.
In his unusually ambitious book, Louis Menand shows how this position, known
as pragmatism, was the joint creation of the pioneer psychologist William James,
logician Charles Sanders Pierce, jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes and philosopher
John Dewey.…
