On the Complexity of "Ideas in America": Origins and Achievements of the Classical Age of Pragmatism

Abstract

Few historians would disagree with the claim that the events surrounding the Civil War marked a decisive break in American national development, and few would deny that a major component of that break was the elaboration and spread of new ideas and attitudes about matters of the most fundamental importance: law, nature, science, religion, politics, psychology, philosophy, and social organization itself. In Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, Louis Menand reexamines the roots of those intellectual changes, their evolution through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their long-term significance in American life and thought. The Civil War swept away the slave civilization of the South, but it swept away almost the whole intellectual culture of the North along with he writes. It took nearly half a century for the United States to develop a culture to replace it, to find a set of ideas, and a way of thinking that would help people cope with the conditions of modem life. Among its effects, that new culture and new way of thinking profoundly reshaped American views of law and the legal system. That long and complex struggle to find