The Metaphysical Club

I just finished The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand, and really I enjoyed it. The book was a bestseller and won the Pulitzer prize a number of years ago, so I'm sure lots of people have already read it, but I wanted to discuss it anyway.

The book tells the story of four individuals (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Sanders Pierce, William James, and John Dewey), who were involved in the development of American pragmatism as a school of thought. Instead of simply discussing their individual contributions, the book gives four mini biographies and attempts to show how their respective situations--the time, place, and people they encountered in their lives--influenced the ideas they developed.

I would recommend this book for anyone who enjoys philosophical ideas, but finds actual philosophical text to be a little dry. The book is able to present these ideas in an accessible way by tying them to biographical accounts of their originators. As a result, a large portion of the book is a a vivid description of some really interesting characters in the post Civil War period--including brilliant thinkers, outright charlatans, and vicious racists.

One of the main takeaways is that it's important to evaluate an idea within its historical context. Pragmatism was, in many ways, a conservative response to the Civil War. The Civil War, and the failed Reconstruction project, were viewed as the tragic result of idealism over practical thinking. As a result, the generation who grew up during the Civil War needed a philosophy that encouraged reconciliation and tolerance. This resulted in pragmatism. Pragmatism was popular for a number of years, but faded during World War II and the Cold War, when the global struggle between democracy and totalitarian regimes required a different frame through which to view the world.

Over the past few years, I have become increasingly interested in economics and debates about economic policy on the blogosphere. When I first began exploring some of these debates, I was amazed at how unconvincing some of the "supply-side" theories of the great recession were. More specifically, people like John Taylor would advocate fiscal and monetary tightening, and justify this policy based on their experience during the 1970s. But as anyone with a basic knowledge of economic history knows, The 1970s were a period of high inflation and high interest rates, whereas now we have low inflation, and low interest rates. Whatever the merits of Taylor's macroeconomic stabilization ideas (and I don't believe there are many) they quite clearly couldn't be justified as appropriate now based on the experience of the late 1970s. I'm not a big fan of "supply-side economics", but its clear that the ideas were developed and became popular in the wake of some of the supply side problems of the 1970s. I suspect that some of the supply siders are in some ways blind to. or wish to downplay, the changed circumstances. They believe that their ideas (lower marginal tax rates, labor market reforms) are universal economic problem solvers, when in fact the time and place for the primacy of those ideas has passed, and we need to focus on boosting aggregate demand.

The development of ideas can't be divorced from their historical context. And when evaluating the applicability of ideas, the historical context of their development should be considered and compared to the current one.