The Metaphysical Club

Abstract

Louis Menand has restored American intellectual history to an intelligent general audience. Not since the heyday of Richard Hofstadter has a study of modern American thought achieved such widespread recognition outside the academy. The Metaphysical Club is a remarkable feat. Menand's success stems from a graceful style combined with an uncommon capacity to fold philosophical issues into compelling biographical narratives. For decades historians have asserted the “peculiarly American” quality of pragmatism; Menand locates its origins more precisely—in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872, among a cluster of young intellectuals who called themselves the Metaphysical Club. One of the most brilliant was Chauncey Wright. He was also one of the few American intellectuals who resisted the impulse to equate evolution with progress and recognized the centrality of chance in Darwinian thought. Wright's embrace of uncertainty, his attitude of “mature debunking” toward established orthodoxies, made the Metaphysical Club hostile to metaphysics and inspired the young men who clustered around him.