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Bertrand Russell: a political life, by Alan Ryan (New York, Hill and Wang, c1988. xi+226 pp.)

Preface

I first read Russell when I was sixteen. I read A History of Western Philosophy and John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty within weeks of each other and came as close as I expect to come to the experience of religious conversion. One of my school-teachers had told me that Russell was 'an old fool' - this was the autumn of 1956 and Russell had just denounced the British invasion of the Suez Canal zone; I concluded, rebelliously, that he must be a very good thing. The History of Western Philosophy showed how right I was. It was dazzlingly clever and astonishingly funny: reactionaries, time-servers and obscurantists were mocked to death; clear-eyed, sceptical but generous liberals were praised in eloquent tones. The news that political and intellectual seriousness could also be fun was a revelation. It was less fun for my teachers. When the poor wretch who taught us 'religious knowledge' tried to teach us St Thomas Aquinas's Five Ways to the knowledge of God, it was a pleasure to meet him with Russell's demolition of each of them. When he irritably retorted that a man with four wives(松下注：ラッセルは、４度結婚したため) couldn't be an authority on such matters, it confirmed my belief that the pious and respectable were illogical, too.
Through the years of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Committee of 100, and the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, I admired the bold clarity with which Russell wrote about nuclear war and the need for Britain to abandon nuclear weapons and pursue a neutralist foreign policy. During the long-drawn-out horror of the war in Vietnam the feeling that he was often shrill and hysterical, and had become the mouthpiece of his moral and intellectual inferiors, never outweighed admiration of his refusal to grow old, calm down, and become respectable. When it emerged after his death that he had generally been right about the atrocities perpetrated in the course of the war, and about the deceptions the American government had practised on Congress and the American people, this admiration grew stronger.
Today I am more sympathetic to middle-aged teachers faced with cocksure sixteen-year-olds. Few of Russell's essays on social and political issues have stood the test of time quite unscathed, and the History of Western Philosophy too often seems casual, unfair and prejudiced, and too ready to shade the truth for the sake of the bon mot. Still, the verve and lucidity of this and almost everything else he wrote remains astonishing. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, his first response was, 'They don't like my philosophy.' The truth is that one can reject his ideas - he rejected most of them over the course of his ninety-seven years - but from first to last he wrote so well that he will always be the envy and despair of other philosophers.
This book is concerned with one side of Russell's life: his life as a polemicist, agitator, educator and popularizer. It is not about Russell's philosophy, as he understood philosophy; he thought of philosophy in the strict sense as an ally, perhaps even a branch, of science, inquiring into the most general truths about the world and the mind. Morals and politics were realms of opinion and emotion, not science; only in a loose sense could there be a moral or political philosophy, as distinct from the analysis of the logic of moral or political discourse. And it is with Russell's ideas about ethics, religion, politics, education, the pros and cons of socialism, ' the historical fate of liberalism and, above all, with his ideas about war and peace that this book is concerned. I shall not press my readers to share my view that Russell was one of the last great radicals, but I shall be sorry if none of them are moved to read him or remain untouched by what they read, especially readers thirty years younger than myself. For Russell always touched a particular chord with the young - just as he always irritated the middle-aged.
He always believed that it was to the young that we must look for salvation. In the First World War, the young conscientiotis objectors of the No-Conscription Fellowship found in him both a leader and a father confessor, a man whose mind and emotions retained the quickness and flexibility of youth - though he was forty-five to their twenty. Fifty years later, the young radicals who clustered round him in the Committee of 100 and the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation had the same experience. He in turn found comfort in the thought that if middle-aged and elderly politicians were too stuck in their ways to see the need for dramatic change, the young were not. They had no vested interest(既得権への執着) in the corrupt old order, and no accumulated pride, guilt and resentment to stop them embracing new ideas. Russell once explained the attraction of G. E. Moore's moral philosophy to 'Bloomsbury' by pointing out that Moore's conception of 'the absolute good' made it look as if the members of the Bloomsbury Group were 'absolutely good'*1. It is not too cynical to observe that one attraction of Russell's politics to the young is that it is on them that he pins his hopes - after all, so, did Plato, and both of them may have been right.
It is Russell's ideas about society and politics which concern us, and this book is not primarily a biography. There are several reasons why not. The first is that Russell's own Autobiography is in general much too good to invite competition; only where it is particularly misleading do I try to supplement it.*2 Ronald Clark's enormous biography, The Life of Bertrand Russell, has subsequently put into the public domain almost everything Russell's executors, collaborators, former wives and close friends are willing to see published.*3 It provides a more detailed and more accurate account of Russell's daily life than even the Autobiography. It would be absurd to duplicate it, even though I do not wholly like either the tone of the emphasis of the book: in his concentration on Russell's emotiona1 odyssey, and his relations with Ottoline Morrell and Constance Malleson, Clark makes him gloomier, more sentimental, more religiose and more monotonously concerned with his sexual relationships than I find him, and in the process the content of Russell's writings is too often ignored - Clark praises The Principles of Social Recostruction, for instance, as Russell's best and most considered piece of political writing, but says little about what is in it, though much that is useful about the frame of mind in which Russell wrote it.*4 Clark gives the impression that Russell engaged in intellectual and political work only to take refuge from his private ecstasies and miseries, but this is wholly belied by Russell's exuberance, vitality and stamina. The Autobiography itself is sometimes sentimental; but Russell knew that this was only one facet of his character and one he did not wholly like.*5 But Clark's account of the final twenty-five years of Russell's life is excellent. Russell's career as nuclear disarmer, 'world ombudsman', campaigner against American involvement in Vietnam and the rest raises few complicated intellectual issues but a host of biographical ones, which are handled with great tact and good sense, and my own account is very much in Clark's debt, even where I disagree with him. Katharine Tait's My Father Bertrand Russell provides a third reason for not writing another biography of her father.*6 Although hers is professedly an unintellectual, self-centred essay in reminiscence, it is, as even her father's Autobiography sometimes is not, an account of a man who was very likely to write what Russell wrote.
As an account of Russell's ideas, 'this book's aim is to explain what Russell thought, to show where it makes sense and where it does not. As history, it is the story of an aristocratic liberal who tried to influence a mass audience in an age when birth alone would no longer get him a hearing, when he would have had to work through a mass political party to gain any kind of power himself, and when the means of communication had changed from the nineteenth-century quarterly reviews to mass-circulation newspapers geared more to gossip and entertainment than to political enlightenment and persuasion. In so far as Russell was a tragic figure - and to some degree he was - his tragedy was not personal but the tragedy of an intellectual class and an intellectual style.
The organization of what follows will be familiar to anyone who has used a Michelin 'Green Guide'. Each chapter opens with 'a little history' to set the discussion in the context of Russell's own life and the politics of the day, and then tackles his main ideas on the subject in hand. No stars are awarded to the ideas, but readers will guess which I think are worth the whole journey and which only 'merit a detour'. I begin at Russell's cradle where his own radical commitments began, and spend my first chapter on his parents, his upbringing, and the liberal tradition into which he was born - all too literally, for even his birth was made the occasion of a demonstration in favour of the liberal principle of sexual equality. Until 1914 his concerns were predominantly mathematical and logical, so that if he had been run down by the proverbial bus in 1914 he would have been remembered for his work on the foundations of mathematics and for his elegantly despairing essays on the meaning of life, such as 'The Free Man's Worship'. But before 1914 he wrote a good deal more about religion, and about the nature of moral truth; he also stood in a by-election, failed to become a candidate in a general election, and turned down several chances to stand elsewhere. So Chapter Two gathers together Russell's ambivalent answers to the question whether there can be such a thing as ''moral philosophy' at all, along with his views about religion, and the politics of Edwardian England, and in so doing ranges on beyond 1914. (The only portion of what follows that non-philosophers may find difiicult is the discussion of Russell's moral philosophy; it may safely be skipped, for part of my argument is that Russell's strictly philosophical views on ethics made no difference to his moral and political commitments.) Thereafter chronology and subject keep step. Chapter Three covers the high point of Russell's political existence, his opposition to the First World War and his account of how to prevent its recurrence. Chapter Four explores further his recipe for peace, with an inquiry into his views on socialism, especially as practised in Bolshevik Russia, and his doubts about the 'scientific' reconstruction of society. All this raises two large questions - can drastic change be brought about peacefully, and will a scientifically planned society not be liberticide? The answer to both questions lies in a theory of education, and Chapter Five considers Russell's views on sex, marriage, child-rearing and schooling. Chapter Six turns again to Russell's fears concerning war and peace, and his thoughts about the fate of liberalism; the 1930s were generally miserable years for him, but Freedom and Organization (1934) and Power (1958) were among the best things he ever wrote - and Which Way te Peace? (1936) is an important expression of extreme defeatism, even if Russell soon repudiated it. Before turning to Russell's last years as nuclear disarmer, amateur world statesman, demagogue and radical hero, in Chapter Seven I step back to consider Russell's extraordinary role as a mischievous sage - a role which culminated in his Order of Merit in 1949 and his Nobel Prize in 1950. Russell's uncertainty whether to be sage or entertainer, politician or gadfly, was partly temperamental, but partly a response to dilemmas which face any politically engaged intellectual in the twentieth century, and I try to give a non-portentous account of these, too. Finally, Chapter Eight turns to Russell's views on war and peace in the nuclear age, his defence of world government, his advocacy of Britjsh disarmament and neutrality, his growing conviction that the United States was a greater threat to peace than the Soviet Union, and his last battle against American participation in the war in Vietnam. I am, I hope, more anxious to get the story straight than to decide with the benefit of hindsight who was right and who was wrong. But it would be idle to pretend that I find Dean Rusk, General Westmoreland, the editors of The New York Times - or Lloyd George and the War Office of 1916 - as sympathetic as Russell.

It remains to express thanks and acknowledge debts. My first and deepest debt must be to Michael Cherniavsky, whose readiness to take seriously the intellectual enthusiasms of schoolboys enabled me to get a liberal education in all senses of the term. The Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University have, in the persons of Ken(=Kenneth) Blackwell, Carl Spadoni and Sheila Turcon, provided endless help with sources. They, together with Dick Rempel, Louis Greenspan, Nick Griffin and Katharine Tait, have talked me through every topic discussed below, and I am very grateful to them. Martin Ceadel. Dick Rempei and Adam Roberts have read several chapters of the typescript and saved me from a good many errors, while Kate Ryan has very helpfully read it for intelligibility to the lay reader. The generous help of the British Academy and the Social Studies Faculty of the University of Oxford took me to McMaster University to plunder its resources. I have very much enjoyed myself. I hope the ieader will enjoy the result.

[Notes]
1. 'Is there an absolutc good?', Russell Archives (BRA). This was a talk he gave to the Apostles on 4 March 1922; the same thought occurred to J. M. Keynes.
2. Two important examples are Russell's claimed 'conversion' to a pro-Boer pacifism and his discussion of his work for the NCF.
3. Ronald W. Clark, The Ltfe of Bertrand Rnssell(Hamondsworth. 1974).
4. Life, pp. 334-335.
5. 'HOW I write', in Portraits from Memory, p.207, discounting 'A Free Man's Worship'.
6. Katharine Tait, My Fa'ther Bertrand Russell(London, 1976).