Louis Menand was a writer, best known for Discovering Modernism.
Quick Facts About Louis Menand
Born
January 21, 1952
Died
January 1, 1900
Profession
Writer
Notable works
Discovering Modernism
About Louis Menand
Louis Menand is an American critic, essayist, and professor who wrote the Pulitzer-winning book The Metaphysical Club (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th- and early 20th-century America.
![“[Addams’s] idea was that the conflict between Pullman and his workers was analogous to the conflict between King Lear and his daughter Cordelia in Shakespeare’s play: an old set of values, predicated on individualism and paternalism, had run up against a new set of values, predicated on mutuality…” quote by Louis Menand](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/1b4/louis-menand-8583_individualism_addams-s-idea-was-that-the-conflict-betw_2682941.jpg)
![“[Addams] found that the people she was trying to help had better ideas about how their lives might be improved than she and her colleagues did. She came to believe that any method of philanthropy or reform premised on top-down assumptions—the assumption, for instance, that the reformer’s tastes or…” quote by Louis Menand](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/cc5/louis-menand-8583_philanthropy_addams-found-that-the-people-she-was-try_2744348.png)
![“[Quatelet’s first claim to catch attention] was that since (as he believed he had shown) there is a ‘law’ governing the amount of crime in a society, moral responsibility for crime must lie with the society and not with the individual criminal. ‘It is society that prepares the crime and … the…” quote by Louis Menand](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/272/louis-menand-8583_crime_quatelet-s-first-claim-to-catch-attentio_2559213.png)
![“[Emerson] saw, in the beginning, no difference between abolitionism and the institutionalized religion he had rejected in the Divinity School address. They were both ways of discouraging people from thinking for themselves. "Each 'Cause,' as it is called," he wrote in 1842, explaining why the…” quote by Louis Menand](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/2ba/louis-menand-8583_abolitionism_emerson-saw-in-the-beginning-no-differen_2768863.jpg)
![“[Dewey’s ‘Reflex Arc’ paper] is the strategy he followed in approaching every problem: expose a tacit hierarchy in the terms in which people conventionally think about it. We think that a response follows a stimulus; Dewey taught that there is a stimulus only because there is already a response…” quote by Louis Menand](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/295/louis-menand-8583_education_dewey-s-reflex-arc-paper-is-the-strategy_3048912.jpg)
