The Metaphysical Club
A Story of Ideas in America

Although this is a supposed quadruplicate biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior, Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, it’s really an unparalleled intellectual history of America from the Civil War up through the turn of the century. Thankfully it doesn’t try to be a comprehensive intel......more

How Ideas Matter In America Louis Menand's "The Metaphysical Club" is a rare book which manages to be both scholarly and popular. As a popular work, it offers an accessible exposition of complex ideas and thinkers. On a more scholarly level, the book succeeds because it awakens in the reader an appre......more

Modernity. I've heard it mentioned so many times but have never paused to think of what it means. In this book, Louis Menard gives a simple definition. Modernity is the break from the cyclical world where one generation succeeded another by taking on the same tasks, to one where each generation is f......more

Popular philosophical history doesn't get better than this - rigorous (a good hundred pages of footnotes meticulously back up every quote and incident) and not shy on depth, but still enormously readable. Menand combines fascinating personal anecdotes with the political and intellectual history of t......more