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Four's Metaphysical Club: A Story Of Ideas In America?

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The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America is a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2001 book by Louis Menand, an American writer and notable academic, and won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for History. Considered by some to be a staple in the education of intellectual history, Louis Menand’ work is a carefully crafted artistic book that considers the intellectual history of notable men and the ideas they brought about. However, one must step-back and truly consider whether Menand’s is simply just a fun historical read or if it is worthy of academic praise. To begin, there are four men that are of great magnitude in Mr. Menand’s book: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. It is their stories, and the evolution …show more content…

The club was not well-known, popular, nor did it make some great immediate impression for America. In fact, Louis Menand notes that most of the members did not make any mention of this society in any of their writings, both public and private. To illustrate this point even further, Menand devotes little of his four hundred-plus pages to the club itself in his book; instead, the Metaphysical Club serves as the book’s focal point. For Menand, the purpose is not the club itself; but rather, the focus is the ideas behind the club and the four men behind such idea. These men, their ideas, that is the main …show more content…

After all, because this book is “a story of ideas”, Menand must constantly return to his writing’s central point. Louis Menand believes steadfastly that these four thinkers developed such a unique method of considering ideas, that this method fundamentally “changed the way Americans live”. He boldly claims that these four "were more responsible than any other group for moving American thought into the modern world" (x-xi). Most importantly, Menand argues that the while the four were not always in agreement, if the readers ignore the differences of the four men, they will see the purpose is "not a group of ideas, but a single idea." This idea is the concept and philosophy known as

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