The Metaphysical Club

...Here Holmes authorized the commonwealth of Virginia to sterilize a woman, Carrie Buck, because of mental incompetence...

...In all probability, to use a term favored by the pragmatists, answering such questions requires another book...

...The Catholic natural law revival, begun in Italy and Germany in the early nineteenth century, and pushed along by Pope Leo XIII's 1879 encyclical mandating the study of Thomism, Aeterni patris, reached high tide even as Menand's protagonists developed the idea of pragmatism...

...Recent historical work on this topic conclusively demonstrates the appeal of eugenics for progressive activists on both sides of the Atlantic...

...Are all values, after all, contingent...

...On the evidence of the The Metaphysical Club, we should be eager to read it...

...Whether this fascination is cause for congratulation is another matter...

...Menand has, after all, edited a volume of pragmatic philosophical texts...

...Unsurprisingly, the reputations of James, Dewey, and Holmes reached a temporary nadir between the late 1930s and the 1960s, when the collapse of democracy across Europe, and then the Soviet threat, suggested the need for a more absolute, less pragmatic, defense of human freedom...

...Commonweal 24 August 17,2001...

...Only by using the methods of science—critical judgment, hyCommonweal 22 August 17,2001 pothesis testing—could citizens confront social problems...

...Nor does Menand provide much analysis of why Peirce struggled to distinguish his own philosophical enterprise from the relativism he thought he saw in James...

...When one of the century's great liberals, Harold Laski, prepared a homage to Holmes in 1931, he did so in a volume that placed Buck v. Bell under the cheerful heading "On Legislative Freedom...

...William James admitted that his beloved pragmatism would not appeal to "papal minds...

...And Menand's biographical strategy, linking an individual thinker to things he or she experienced, saw, or did, has disadvantages...

...The Metaphysical Club is that rare thing, an intensely pleasurable intellectual history offering insights (even laughs) on almost every page...

...All this is exhilarating, as is Menand's conviction that a better understanding of these figures provides us with a better understanding of our own time...

...Intellectuals from around the world drafted the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, spurred by the same impulse that led Martin Luther King Jr...

...Ironically, this strategy can shove what college admission brochures call "the life of the mind" out of view...

...Menand claims to be writing "historical interpretation" and not "philosophical argument" but hints of advocacy do creep in...

...If we are wrong," King told the men and women assembled at Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, on a December evening in 1955, in a decidedly nonpragmatic phrasing, "then God Almighty is wrong...

...Nonetheless, specialists will occasionally shudder...

...Holmes described "jurists who believe in natural law" as "in that naive state of mind that accepts what has been familiar and accepted by them and their neighbors as something that must be accepted by all men everywhere...

...Out of sheer admiration for this numbing feat, we might expect a more detailed report of what it was that Peirce concluded...

...That Louis Menand organizes his "story of ideas in America" around these four thinkers might give Catholic readers pause...

...Philosopher Charles Peirce contrasted his own philosophical system with the "methods of despotism" employed by Pius IX...

...No single group of intellectuals was more attached to ideas of universal reason and natural law in the early twentieth century than Catholics...

...James's luminous prose, Dewey's brave melding of politics and philosophical inquiry, and Holmes's epigrammatic judicial opinions have few equivalents in American letters, then or now...

...He is completing a study of Catholicism and American liberalism, from slavery to abortion...

...But it shouldn't...

...The band of Catholic philosophers and theologians issuing (largely unread) challenges to James, Dewey, and Holmes were not an appealing group...

...Or better, it should, but they should still read the book...

...Pragmatism for Menand is an "account of the way people think...

...Still, these Catholic polemicists did Commonweal 23 August 11', 2001 strike one very sensitive nerve...

...John T. McGreevy teaches history at the University of Notre Dame...

...Readers of the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books have become accustomed to Menand's stylish and informative essays on everything from the Beatles to Saul Bellow, but this extended project is still a revelation...

...A different sort of difficulty also lies beneath the glittering prose...

...Three generations of imbeciles," Holmes famously declared, "are enough...

...Really...

...Menand underplays antislavery sentiment in antebellum Boston, for example, in an effort to make Holmes more a rebel against his father's world...

...As it turned out, Buck's child did not develop any mental handicap...

...Peirce even (allegedly) devoted several hours a day as a young man to reading Kant...

...Catholics were the most vocal (indeed, prescient) critics of Holmes's most notorious judicial opinion, Buck v. Bell (1927...

...Common to all these figures was a distaste for musty invocations of natural law or God's will...

...One wishes he had confronted more directly the meaning of Holmes, Dewey, and James for a world marked by diverse value systems, certainly, but also a world marked by interest in international human rights and Amnesty International...

...to lead the fight against racial segregation in the Jim Crow South...

...Menand's subject is nothing less than the thinkers and ideas responsible for "moving American thought into the modern world," beginning with the horrors of the Civil War and ending on the precipice of World War II...

...One wishes he had confronted the question of whether pragmatism's legacy helps us understand an American society still riven by debates about the meaning and definition of human life...

...John Dewey described Catholicism as a "reactionary world organization...

...James, Dewey, and Holmes became convinced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that appeals to any "truth" outside of human experience was a chimera, that ethics and values were inevitably contingent upon views held by particular men and women at particular moments...

...The fascination is evident enough—adulatory studies of Dewey, James, and Holmes constitute virtually all recent writing on modern American intellectual history, and Richard Rorty's invocations of Dewey have spawned yet another tributary to the pragmatist stream...

...Here, for Catholics, was the rub...

...William James, trapped in a bizarre scientific mission to the Amazon, is struck by the importance of probability and relational thinking...

...Their cranky manifestoes, issued from redoubts in isolated seminaries and underfunded colleges, often substituted blanket condemnation for honest engagement...

...Is there anything that a state cannot do because such an action remains, to use a favorite Catholic term, intrinsically evil...

...once described the priest author of a Catholic children's book, whom he had never met, as a "puke in an apron...

...Contrast the vision of Holmes, Dewey, and James with an opening assertion in the first English-language Catholic textbook published by an American Jesuit: "Truths that spring necessarily from the very nature of man and of human society, never change...

...A startling number of characters make their appearance...

...And this, along with a residual anti-Catholicism in Menand's post-Protestants, explains the habitual resort to Rome as the polar opposite of their pragmatic vision...

...No term aggravated Dewey more than "dogma...

...John Dewey and Jane Addams, tromping through Chicago neighborhoods, ponder how best to remedy the plight of impoverished immigrants in this new industrial society...

...Reading The Metaphysical Club, in fact, sharpens one's sense that these Catholics were overmatched...

...And eugenics, of a Nazi variety, demonstrated the dangers of some forms of "scientific" thinking about social problems...

...Menand's reticence on this point—he ends with an oblique reference to the "relevance" and "strangeness" of his subjects—is frustrating, and I suspect, disingenuous...

...Menand regrets Buck v. Bell, in a paragraph, but later insists that eugenic ideas were "alien to everything James and Dewey wrote...

...Menand persuasively attributes contemporary fascination with the pragmatists to the collapse of this moral urgency...

...Peirce found the work of the medieval Franciscan, Duns Scotus, absorbing but Menand does not explain why...

...The Metaphysical Club itself, a reading group including Holmes, Peirce, and James that met episodically in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, turns out (in all likelihood) to be the setting in which Peirce first outlined a recognizable "pragmatism...

...The financial and marital difficulties that marked Charles Peirce's days on this earth, for example, make for compelling (if grim) reading, but one wonders how to weigh them in comparison with the books Peirce himself read...

...The study of ethics, according to this Jesuit, is the identification of "fundamental principles from which all the more special rules of natural rectitude or morality are deduced...

...In the post-cold-war world," he writes, "where there are many competing value systems, not just two, skepticism about the finality of any particular set of beliefs has begun to seem to some people an important value again...

...A young Holmes, wounded at Antietam, expresses contempt for noncombatants voicing pious enthusiasm about noble causes...

...The important question is not whether James or Dewey themselves became eugenicists (they did not), but whether one could credibly challenge such programs armed with their collected works...