Louis Menand

It’s the birthday of American critic, scholar, and essayist Louis Menand (1952) (books by this author), best known for his nonfiction book The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (2001) which examines the development of the philosophy of pragmatism by William James, John Dewey, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The book received the Pulitzer Prize for History (2002).

Menand often writes quirky, challenging pieces for The New Yorker and The New Republic. On writing he said, “I just try, like any writer, to be entertaining and interesting. I want people to get some pleasure and to learn something. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s about T.S. Eliot or about Tom Clancy.”

Louis Menand’s books include American Studies (2002) and The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (2010). He teaches at Harvard University. WA

• “James believed that scientific inquiry, like any other form of inquiry, is an activity inspired and informed by our tastes, values, and hopes. But this does not, in his view, confer any special authority on the conclusions it reaches. On the contrary: it obligates us to regard those conclusions as provisional and partial, since it was for provisional and partial reasons that we undertook to find them.”
• “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.”
• “Everyone is simply riding the wave chance has put them on. Some people know how to surf; some people drown.”
• “…in a universe in which events are uncertain and perception is fallible, knowing cannot be a matter of an individual mind ‘mirroring’ reality. Each mind reflects differently—even the same mind reflects differently at different moments—and in any case reality doesn’t stand still long enough to be accurately mirrored … knowledge must therefore be social.”
• “We permit free expression because we need the resources of the whole group to get us the ideas we need.”
• “Of course civilizations are aggressive, Holmes says, but when they take up arms in order to impose their conception of civility on others, they sacrifice their moral advantage. Organized violence, at bottom, is just another form of oppression.”
• “Scientific and religious beliefs are important to people; but they are (usually) neither foundational premises, backing one outcome in advance against all others, nor ex post facto rationalizations, disguising personal preferences in the language of impersonal authority. They are only tools for decision making, one of the pieces people try to bundle together with other pieces, like moral teachings and selfish interests and specific information, when they need to reach a decision.”            ― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club g'r