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Common Knowledge 9.2 (2003) 346



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Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 560 pp.

This exceedingly well-written and wide-ranging book uncannily (or cannily) matches its substance to its style. A cross among the genres of biography, history, cultural studies, intellectual description, high gossip, and anecdote, Menand's book reenacts America's varied personal, historical, and intellectual strands as, all of them, sources and scenes of American pragmatism. What emerges is finally a social history of ideas, and most centrally of the pragmatist idea that ideas are social. The book thus traces webs of relation that gave rise to the theories of webs of relation that are central to pragmatism itself. The result is a map of crossing lines and motions, interacting and volatile, of the claims, interchanges, proposals, and imaginings that at once registered and shaped American cultural life and the most American of all philosophies.

 



—Shira Wolosky

Shira Wolosky is professor of English and American studies at the Hebrew University and a fellow of the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. She is the author of Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War, Language Mysticism, and The Art of Poetry . Her volume on nineteenth-century poetry in the Cambridge History of American Literature is forthcoming.

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