Menard’s (2002)The Metaphysical Club, provides an in-depth view of many of the ideas. Through a series of lenses, Menard sets the stage to explore the formation of ideas,including American pragmatism and pluralism. The book culminates in an in-depth look at the lives—and influences that shaped those lives—of Charles Pierce, James Williams, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Dewey.
In the book’s preface, Menard describes the similarities of these four individuals:
“They all believed that ideas are not ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered, but are tools—like forks and knives and microchips—that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. They believed that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals—that ideas are social. They believed that ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment. And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability. The belief that ideas should never become ideologies—either justifying the status quo, or dictating some transcendent imperative for renouncing it—was the essence of what they taught. In many ways this was a liberating attitude, and it accounts for the popularity Holmes, James, and Dewey (Peirce is a special case) enjoyed in their lifetimes, and for the effect they had on a whole generation of judges, teachers, journalists, philosophers, psychologists, social scientists, law professors, and even poets. They taught a kind of skepticism that helped people cope with life in a heterogeneous, industrialized, mass-market society, a society in which older human bonds of custom and community seemed to have become attenuated, and to have been replaced by more impersonal networks of obligation and authority. But skepticism is also one of the qualities that make societies like that work. It is what permits the continual state of upheaval that capitalism thrives on. Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey helped to free thought from thralldom to official ideologies, of the church or the state or even the academy. There is also, though, implicit in what they wrote, a recognition of the limits of what thought can do in the struggle to increase human happiness.” (Menard, 2002, preface).
