Liberal Talk Radio

I finally finished The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand (hey, it only took me a year … what can I say).

I have to congratulate myself for making the effort to plow through this excellent tale of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., John Dewey, and other great thinkers of the late 19th century.

The epilogue alone was worth the whole effort. Pragmatism, in Menand’s view, was an initial effort by American thinkers to reject the primacy of absolutes — the ideological struggles that triggered the Civil War. Most importantly, Menand paints a portrait of this quintessentially American philosophy as a basis for LIBERALISM and PLURALISM without RELATIVISM, a doctrine that upholds individual rights while maintaining that those rights exist only in subordination to the progress of the group.

Isn’t that what we’re looking for?