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American Literary History 16.1 (2004) 127-131



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Ideas on the March

George Cotkin

The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. By Louis Menand. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001

Edmund Wilson opened his monumental work, To the Finland Station (1940), with a wonderful vignette of Michelet, in a hurried passion, reading Vico. Out of Michelet's confrontation with Vico, Wilson writes, "a whole new philosophical-artistic world was born" (6). The idea of a new world emerging, a world sanctioned by the romantic and scientific power of history, defines Wilson's "study in the writing and acting of history." All roads in his study lead to Lenin and the Russian Revolution. While Wilson was not a partisan of Lenin, and certainly not an apologist for the Soviet Union, he composed his work with a sense of history unfolding and breathing hard upon his neck.

Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, a history of the rise of pragmatism in the post-Civil War US, is modeled upon Wilson's classic. The connection between Menand and Wilson's work is hardly fanciful. A reissue of To the Finland Station in 2003 features Menand's foreword, which can be read as a commentary on his own work, published over 50 years later. Menand appreciates Wilson's historical sweep, his willingness to take ideas seriously and to contextualize and link them to historical events. Nor does Wilson shy away from the great-men-in-history approach, peppered with leisurely forays into their personal histories. The key to Wilson's success, in Menand's analysis, was his willingness to combine fact and narration in an act of the imagination, to impose an order on his materials. While Wilson captured the passion of his subjects and their ideas, he managed to maintain a healthy skepticism. In both works, ideas are on the march, trampling through the vineyards where the grapes of history are stored.

The qualities that Menand praises in Wilson he takes as the markers for his own work. The Metaphysical Club reads like a dream, with snappy vignettes of major thinkers, informed yet accessible synopses of ideas, and attention to historical events. The imperative behind the work is to trace the relationship between an emerging complex of ideas, born out of the rubble of the Civil War and an emerging industrial civilization. The benchmarks of this new medley of concepts, captured under the name of pragmatism, as [End Page 127] developed by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, is a sense of contingency, rejection of absolutes, and the grounding of ideas in the flux of experience. The characters in The Metaphysical Club share a skepticism that makes them wary of dogma, complacency, and fashion. Hence, the figures of early pragmatism are lined up in a row to serve as precursors to Wilson and to Menand. Rather than confinement to the dustbin of historical amusement or curiosity, the pragmatists have, by implication, something to oier us presently.

Menand is a prolific cultural critic, often commenting on educational reform, literature, and the culture wars. His position is sometimes hard to pin down. As David Bromwich remarked in a cutting review of Menand's collection of essays, American Studies (2002), Menand is a singularly unusual critic, someone "who has made such a virtue out of not having strong reactions" (28). In response to analyses of his The Metaphysical Club in the Intellectual History Newsletter, Menand contended, "I am as postmodernist as anyone" ("Reply" 125). Surely, Menand is being a bit disingenuous here. The structure and concerns that animate every page of The Metaphysical Club parade themselves as a gutsy attempt to resurrect a mode of analysis largely eschewed in postmodern academe: a sweeping narrative (contra Lyotard) organized around a coterie of dead white males (contra most postmodernists), with relatively little intertextuality (contra the current state of literary studies). His style is one of indirect intervention, allowing his readers to draw conclusions about the value of pragmatism and its relation to our present conflicts. Menand never preaches in The Metaphysical Club; but that does not mean...

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