It's tempting to read this history of several score influential American thinkers, active from the Civil War to the New Deal and the Espionage Act, as allegories of current politics; certainly there's not much new in politics and the rhetoric is reused. It is not immediately useful to read it so. The ideas and interests were allied in ways they aren't now, as in the Dartmouth case, for example, p. 240 and following. The Epilogue is readable on its own, either as a summary or as a bridge from its period to the politics of the twentieth century.
The variable alliance of a principle is itself one of the large philosophical ideas fought over by the subjects of the book. I'm terrible at philosophy, so I probably still don't understand pragmatism, but what I got is that pragmatism is the belief that the principles on which we act are chosen more by their results than by our abstract beliefs. Or perhaps, that the principles we think we have aren't the ones we really have, and our real ones tend to be more practical.
The vivid example from early in The Metaphysical Club is of divided sentiment, but undivided loyalty, in our Civil War; one man in particular was long remembered by and his friends for being, by nature, a Cavalier, more sympathetic to the style and maybe the principles of the South than of the Federals; but he fought with his Boston friends and with courage that could not be surpassed by a martyr in a chosen cause. Holmes, according to Menand, derived his pragmatism partly to explain this.
Chewing this over, maybe the connection between this and the everday use of 'pragmatic' is that a pragmatic person, if faced with a dilemma, picks one horn to attack; someone of a more Hamlet temperament commits mutually confounding actions, or none. There's still much I don't get, though. Near the end, Menand sums it up as "we know we're right before we know why we're right" (p. 353), but how do we square that with our memories of sometimes being plump wrong?
appears, causing religious conversion instead of science-fiction, which is surely contingent on era: the father of and reported "some damnèd shape squatting invisible to me... raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life." (p.82). This is called a 'vastation', than which could have done no better. Other guest appearances: ' monads (p. 270); gravity as something that evolved by natural selection (p. 278), a concept that made less sense without the many-worlds hypothesis; vs. (p. 361), Dewey holding that ideas are instruments, like hands or forks, not anything pertaining to the Ideal.
As a historical group, the pragmatists seem to have been good at ameliorating problems but not at changing the underlying system. The Civil War had been enough of the latter. is in this crowd, with others from How Women Saved the City, and I don't know who fed more bodies or changed more laws while arguing that all the important change was done in personal beliefs. This non-radical-ness comes up most clearly in their weak reactions to the race problem. Holmes could fight for the Union but not for universal suffrage, and his intellectual descent was insufficient support for the Civil Rights movement. P. 441:
The great movement to secure civil liberties in the United States during the Cold War arose out ofa religious community, black Southern Baptists, and it was founded on the belief that every individual has an inalienable right to those freedoms by virtue of being human—precisely the individualism that Holmes and Dewey felt they needed to discredity
On the other hand, though Menand doesn't quite say so, the residual habits of the pragmatists may have kept the Cold War from going everywhere Hot. As I say, a good system for ameliorating problems.
There are two connected sub-themes I'm not even trying to summarize, one on the science of race (, ) and the other on the development of academic freedom and university structure in the US. The "educational organicism" (p. 248) reminded me tangentially of an excellent essay on education by ; each come to conclusions they share with other people but they build on contradictory axioms.
Find in a Library
So wrote clew in History (19th c.).