Head Masters: Phrenology, Secular Education, and Nineteenth-Century Social Thought Book

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 intellectual history, and it doesn't try to trot out every "important" thinker of the age and analyze them for relevance. It's mainly a circuitous and winding story of how that most American of philosophical systems, "pragmatism," with its suspicions of transcendent ideals and its awareness of multiple contexts, emerged gradually out of the mystical antebellum New England world of Emerson and Thoreau. It's seemingly disparate chapters, which focus on such people as naturalist Louis Agassiz and reformer Jame Addams, at first seem difficult to pin together, but gradually the reader realizes that this is a way to show how many individual threads were woven into pragmatic philosophy.

While other writers act like philosophers were only reading other philosophers, Louis Menand uses multiple biographies to show how real life and real events shaped abstract thought. For instance, William James saw the failure of Louis Agassiz's quest for an overarching natural explanation of the animal world, one that relied on God's placement of all animals in their current environments (a quest which led him, with James, to look for evidence of glaciers in Brazil), as confirmation of a world mainly governed by blind evolution and chance. Holmes's experience at the tragic Battle of Ball's Bluff in the Civil War soured him on all high ideals, and his "survival of the fittest" theory later influenced his theory of judicial restraint (by which he hoped to let interest groups battle it out in politics) and paradoxically made him a liberal hero. Charles Pierce's wrestling with astronomical observations as an employee of the US Coastal Survey led him to look at the fallibility of all human judgment and search for a probabilistic theory of thought. John Dewey's concern over the 1894 Pullman strike, and his connections to Jane Addams, made him search for a tolerant pluralism that would encompass all apparent conflict into an actual unity.

Interestingly, a large part of the book is a biography of that strange, in-bred world of 19th century Boston (of course centered around Harvard), where everybody seemed to be a cousin or son or wife of a famous thinker and writer, and where everybody was part of their own philosophical club. Menand shows that before one can talk about a philosophy, one needs to talk about the peculiar environment that philosophy emerged from. The pragmatists would of course have entirely agreed.

I can honestly say that I've never read a book like this anywhere, one that brings so much to the table and makes it all seem so interconnected. Menand is someone who actually knows how to mold a good story out of abstract ideas, and who makes all these ancient, intractable debates seem important and worthwhile.