Ideas on the March

Abstract

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