Ideas do not emerge from a vacuum.  In order to understand the mind of an age, we must look at its intellectual history and come to terms with the significant ideas that shaped its thought, and produced its worldview.  Without this, ideas appear without context and meaning.

The American mind has been shaped by many intellectual forces throughout the past three centuries.  Christendom and Western Civilization have provided foundational principles of our national worldview, especially in the most formative stages of our nation.  Subsequently, intellectual twists and turns have continued to mold and shape the American mind. 

Given the ideological confusion of our present day, a close look at one of the most formative eras in our nation's intellectual history would be most helpful.  In a time of moral confusion, it will do us well to look at one of the historical movements that produced that confusion. 

In The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, Louis Menand offers key insights into the development of pragmatism in America.  Menand serves as Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  A former professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, Menand also taught at Princeton and Columbia.  He currently serves as a staff writer at The New Yorker, one of the trend-setting magazines of the contemporary American mind.

The "club" to which Menand refers was established by some of the most significant minds that helped bridge the American intellect as the nation shifted from the 19th into the 20th century.  As he makes clear, the background to this period of American history was the tragedy of the Civil War.  T he aftermath of the Civil War allowed a powerful generation of northern intellectuals to shape the American mind. 

The major figures considered in Menand's work include Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles S. Peirce, and John Dewey.  As he explains, "These people had highly distinctive personalities, and they did not always agree with each other, but their careers intersected at many points, and together they were more responsible than any other group for moving American thought into the modern world."