The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

Four people met in Cambridge, Massachusetts after the Civil War — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey — and their conversations produced pragmatism, the only genuinely American philosophy. Menand traces how the war's mass slaughter of young men who died for absolute beliefs produced a generation of thinkers who became allergic to certainty — who decided that ideas are tools, not truths, and that their value lies in what they do rather than what they are. That philosophy shaped American law, education, psychology, and science. Pulitzer Prize winner. The most important intellectual history of America ever written for a general audience — the book that shows where the assumptions running American institutions actually came from.