Pragmatic to a fault?

The Metaphysical Club
A Story of Ideas in America
Louis Menand
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27, 546 pp.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once described the priest author of a Catholic children's book, whom he had never met, as a "puke in an apron." Philosopher Charles Peirce contrasted his own philosophical system with the "methods of despotism" employed by Pius IX. William James admitted that his beloved pragmatism would not appeal to "papal minds." John Dewey described Catholicism as a "reactionary world organization."

That Louis Menand organizes his "story of ideas in America" around these four thinkers might give Catholic readers pause. But it shouldn't. Or better, it should, but they should still read the book. The Metaphysical Club is that rare thing, an intensely pleasurable intellectual history offering insights (even laughs) on almost every page. 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. 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.

A startling number of characters make their appearance. A young Holmes, wounded at Antietam, expresses contempt for noncombatants voicing pious enthusiasm about noble causes. William James, trapped in a bizarre scientific mission to the Amazon, is struck by the importance of probability and relational thinking. John Dewey and Jane Addams, tromping through Chicago neighborhoods, ponder how best to remedy the plight of impoverished immigrants in this new industrial society. 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."

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. Nonetheless, specialists will occasionally shudder. Menand underplays antislavery sentiment in antebellum Boston, for example, in an effort to make Holmes more a rebel against his father's world. And Menand's biographical strategy, linking an individual thinker to things he or she experienced, saw, or did, has disadvantages. Ironically, this strategy can shove what college admission brochures call "the life of the mind" out of view. 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. Peirce found the work of the medieval Franciscan, Duns Scotus, absorbing but Menand does not explain why. 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. Peirce even (allegedly) devoted several hours a day as a young man to reading Kant. Out of sheer admiration for this numbing feat, we might expect a more detailed report of what it was that Peirce concluded.

A different sort of difficulty also lies beneath the glittering prose. Pragmatism for Menand is an "account of the way people think." 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. Only by using the methods of science--critical judgment, hypothesis testing--could citizens confront social problems. Common to all these figures was a distaste for musty invocations of natural law or God's will. 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."

Here, for Catholics, was the rub. No single group of intellectuals was more attached to ideas of universal reason and natural law in the early twentieth century than Catholics. 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. 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.") 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." 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."

The band of Catholic philosophers and theologians issuing (largely unread) challenges to James, Dewey, and Holmes were not an appealing group. Their cranky manifestoes, issued from redoubts in isolated seminaries and underfunded colleges, often substituted blanket condemnation for honest engagement. Reading The Metaphysical Club, in fact, sharpens one's sense that these Catholics were overmatched. 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.

Still, these Catholic polemicists did strike one very sensitive nerve. Are all values, after all, contingent? Is there anything that a state cannot do because such an action remains, to use a favorite Catholic term, intrinsically evil? Catholics were the most vocal (indeed, prescient) critics of Holmes's most notorious judicial opinion, Buck v. Bell (1927). Here Holmes authorized the commonwealth of Virginia to sterilize a woman, Carrie Buck, because of mental incompetence. "Three generations of imbeciles," Holmes famously declared, "are enough." (As it turned out, Buck's child did not develop any mental handicap.)

Menand regrets Buck v. Bell, in a paragraph, but later insists that eugenic ideas were "alien to everything James and Dewey wrote." Really? Recent historical work on this topic conclusively demonstrates the appeal of eugenics for progressive activists on both sides of the Atlantic. 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."

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. 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. (And eugenics, of a Nazi variety, demonstrated the dangers of some forms of "scientific" thinking about social problems.) 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. to lead the fight against racial segregation in the Jim Crow South. "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."

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

Whether this fascination is cause for congratulation is another matter. 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 claims to be writing "historical interpretation" and not "philosophical argument" but hints of advocacy do creep in. (Menand has, after all, edited a volume of pragmatic philosophical texts.) 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. 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.

In all probability, to use a term favored by the pragmatists, answering such questions requires another book. On the evidence of the The Metaphysical Club, we should be eager to read it.

John T. McGreevy teaches history at the University of Notre Dame. He is completing a study of Catholicism and American liberalism, from slavery to abortion.