Enemies of Certitude

The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, by Louis Menand (Farrar, Straus, 546 pp., $27)

THE Sixties generation of student radicals, deeply traumatized by the experience of a morally questionable— and, it seemed, unwinnable—war, upended their parents’ America and created a radically different one. In this new America, all ancient values would be relativized and the future thrown open to the most dramatic and dizzying experiments in freedom. The story sounds familiar, but in Louis Menand’s excellent new book, the Sixties in question are the 1860s, the war is the Civil War, and the revolution in values is the philosophical movement that came to be known as “pragmatism.”

About the Author

Michael Potemra

Michael Potemra was a literary editor for National Review.

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The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, by Louis Menand (Farrar, Straus, 546 pp., $27)

THE Sixties generation of student radicals, deeply traumatized by the experience of a morally questionable— and, it seemed, unwinnable—war, upended their parents’ America and created a radically different one. In this new America, all ancient values would be relativized and the future thrown open to the most dramatic and dizzying experiments in freedom. The story sounds familiar, but in Louis Menand’s excellent new book, the Sixties in question are the 1860s, the war is the Civil War, and the revolution in values is the philosophical movement that came to be known as “pragmatism.”