Like a scholar in tweeds crashing a beach party, a book about four 19th-century American intellectuals has landed on the best-seller lists alongside Sue Grafton, The Great American Sex Diet and the sayings of Yogi Berra.

        The Metaphysical Club (Farrar Straus & Giroux, $27) documents the lives and influence of William James, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. They helped define the American philosophy known as pragmatism, which places cooperation over ideology.

        Written by Louis Menand, the 560-page book quickly sold out its first printing of 25,000 and is well into its second run. Strong reviews from The New York Times and others and two author appearances on National Public Radio have helped the book reach the top five on Amazon.com and show up on the best-seller lists of The Washington Post and The Boston Globe.

        Publishers and writers worry that no one appreciates literature anymore, yet books such as Mr. Menand's, Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, and Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence suggest otherwise. Whether people actually read these works or just wanted others to think so is another question, but enough customers bought them to make them best sellers.

        “People are a lot smarter than publishers give them credit for. They will buy good books,” says Stephanie Oda, publisher of the industry newsletter “Subtext.”

        Mr. Menand, a staff writer for The New Yorker who began working on the book a decade ago, had little trouble persuading Farrar, Straus & Giroux to take it on. Jonathan Galassi, publisher of FSG, says that he found Mr. Menand's idea fascinating and that after reading the book he thought it was accessible and had commercial potential.

        “I don't know if I would have said that when he first proposed it,” Mr. Galassi says.

        The term pragmatism was made popular by William James, brother of Henry James. Pragmatists believe everybody is entitled to his or her own idea of truth, and that we learn best from experience and exchange of opinions. In short, pragmatism is the philosophy of getting things done.

        “The American mind-set is practical, it's not theoretical,” Mr. Menand says.

        While the spirit of pragmatism dates back at least to Benjamin Franklin, Mr. Menand writes that it became especially influential in the second half of the 20th century.

        The Civil War had convinced a lot of Americans (among them Holmes, who was wounded in battle) that uncompromising beliefs lead to destruction. Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection undermined the idea that history is divinely guided and led to skepticism that anything was undeniably true.

        “What these thinkers were trying to do is see how we can use terms like "truth' and "justice' in a world where we can't be sure how to define them anymore,” Mr. Menand says.

        The title of Mr. Menand's book derives from a discussion group set up in the early 1870s in Cambridge, Mass., where Holmes, James and Peirce were literary figures. (Dewey, somewhat younger, would emerge a decade later.)

        The club lasted briefly, but the participants and their disciples would help popularize variations of pragmatism for the rest of their lives. James applied it to psychology and religion, Dewey applied it to education and Holmes immortalized it in law as a Supreme Court justice.

        Mr. Menand says the influence of pragmatism declined during the Cold War, when followers of communism and capitalism did not want to be told there was no absolute truth. But now, he believes, people are more willing to listen.

        “The value at the bottom of the thought of Holmes, James, Peirce and Dewey is tolerance,” Mr. Menand writes. “In the post-Cold War world, where there are many competing belief systems, not just two, skepticism about the finality of any particular set of beliefs has begun to seem an important value again.”

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