Customer Reviews

The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1880's

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Commager's thesis here is pretty simple: The American character is animated by pragmatic concerns rather than by abstract thoughts. Commager reckons that the Civil War and the economic disasters of the 1890s provided the kindling for a blaze of intellectual, national self-examination in the following decades. Abstract theories were out. Pragmatic solutions were in. This thesis sound familiar? His style is "New History" all the way. Not so many dates and numbers and summaries of important events, but lots of narrative discussion of intellectuals, their ideas, and the inter-relation of those ideas. In that way, this book resembles Lovejoy's THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING, in style if not in substance.

Though most of the characters Commager discusses here have generally been relegated to the academic dustbin--replaced by trendy postmodernism and deconstruction--they deserve our renewed attention for their contribution to American intellectual maturity. This is really the first generation of Americans, according to the author, which accepted the challenge to write an assessment of the American charater and condition from within, rather than simply relying on the interpretations of somewhat biased foreigners (i.e. Crevecouer, de Tocqueville and Bryce). Commager wants to capture the image of America through American eyes rather than through the filter of European culture cringe so apparent in the works of ante-bellum historians like Adams and Parkman.

Read it to know what Americans thought of themselves after the trauma of the Civil War and the economic crisis of 1893. And, by all means, read Menand's THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB as well.

There are, in general, two types of American history that one can be fascinated by. The physical (wars, homesteading, etc,) and the intellectual (creation of law, American philosophy, etc.) The second type of history is decidedly the lesser studied of the two. There have been few good books on America's intellectual tradition(s). Commager's is one.

Commager's 'thesis' is that pragmatism or variants thereof (not always explicitly so) is our nations motto. DeTocqueville, shortly after the founding, commented on American emphasis on practicality over the more European abstractions. Commager elequently backs up his thesis and gives us 450 pages of reading pleasure in the process.

The book is selective in that it tends to focus on the scientific and poltical reactions to social darwinism (which caught on like wildfire in the states, second only to the backlash it inspired). If I had to guess the thinker Commager most admires in his book, it would be Lester Ward, who developed devestating arguments against social darwinism, heightening the importance of environment to evolutionary thought. Commager is even more selective when, while rightly championing these developments, he doesn't talk much about its more extreme and ridiculous incantation in todays cultural relativism. So many subjects, so few trees!

Anyhow, if you are interested in exploring pragmatism, the rise of evolutionary environmentalism or American radicalism in politics (which is deeply connected to the previous two) then this is a great book.

The most dificult challenge is to understand what's going on, while it's going on (is George W. really President?). This book is a piece of work and well worth the effort. Make sure you have a good encyclopedia handy, time enough to stop and lookup the references, and the energy to stick with it. If so you will gain a wonderful perspective on who we are, how we got here, and the fundamental aspect of change in America. Go for it!

Commager is considered an eminent historian of America. This was the first full length book that I have ever read by him and I expected much more than I received. The subtitle suggests that it is Commager's view of the philosophy of the American people from 1880 until the time of its printing nearly 60 years ago. I was expecting to read profound and thought provoking ideas that would bend my own impressions about what we Americans are intellectually made up of.

Instead of that, Commager provided a very ivory tower view of our philosophy. His style was particularly annoying in that he dropped names of writers, jurists and artists routinely while comparing their products to an individual he is expounding on. Then he drops it. Should the reader be intimately knowledgeable of the hundreds of people he casually mentions the book may have been more valuable. As it is however, Commager simply mentions some sort of kinship between the thoughts of several individuals and fails to shore up any connection with an explanation. Often this would propel the reader to do some investigation of their own but it was far too numerous and simply not interesting enough to spend the time doing it.

Commager wrote this book prior to the common usage of the term Post Modernism. He certainly employed that style in writing this book. This included the use of terminology that required an explanation that was not given; a misuse of scientific principles (Newtonian political decisions for example) and attempts to make Darwinian evolution a philosophy. Commager also spent a chapter lauding Dadaists in his chapter on the "Cult of the Irrational".

Commager came highly recommended to me and I was looking forward to something far more useful than this near nonsense.