work essay by bertrand russell summary

Reason and Meaning

Philosophical reflections on life, death, and the meaning of life, summary of bertrand russell’s “in praise of idleness”.

In 1932, at age 60, my exact age as I write this post, Bertrand Russell penned a provocative essay, “ In Praise of Idleness .” Russell begins,

… I was brought up on the saying: ‘Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do.’ Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, [and] that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous …

Russell divides work into: 1) physical labor; and 2) the work of those who manage laborers (those whose work allows them to buy what the laborer’s produce, essentially almost everyone else.) In addition, there are the idle rich, who “are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work.” Russell despises this type of idleness, dependent as it is on the labor of others. But how did this all come to be?

For all of human history until the Industrial Revolution, an individual could produce little more than was necessary for subsistence. Originally any surplus was taken forcefully from the peasants by warriors and priests, but gradually laborers were induced to believe that hard work was their duty, even though it supported the idleness of others. As a result, laborers worked for their masters, and the masters, in turn, convinced themselves that what was good for them was good for everyone. But is this true?

Sometimes this is true; Athenian slave-owners, for instance, employed part of their leisure in making a permanent contribution to civilization which would have been impossible under a just economic system. Leisure is essential to civilization, and in former times leisure for the few was only rendered possible by the labors of the many. But their labors were valuable, not because work is good, but because leisure is good. And with modern technique it would be possible to distribute leisure justly without injury to civilization.

Russell saw that 1930s technology was already making more leisure time possible. (This is even more true with 21st-century technology .) Yet society had not changed in the sense that it was still a place where some work long hours, while others are unemployed. This is what he called “the morality of the Slave State …” He illustrates with a thought experiment. Suppose that a plant manufactures employs a certain number of people who work 8 hours a day and produce all the pins the world needs. Now suppose that an invention allows the same number of people to make twice as many pins.

In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

Russell notes that the rich have always despised the idea of the poor having leisure time.

In England, in the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day’s work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child … certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: ‘What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.’

Russell acknowledges that there is a duty to work in the sense that all human beings depend on labor for their existence. What follows from this is that we shouldn’t consume more than we produce, and we should give back to the world in labor or services for the sustenance we receive. But this is the only sense in which there is a duty to work. And while the idle rich are not virtuous, that is not “nearly so harmful as the fact that wage-earners are expected to overwork or starve.” Russell admits that some persons don’t use their leisure time wisely, but leisure time is essential for a good life. There is thus no good reason why most people should be deprived of it, and “only a foolish asceticism … makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.”

In the next few paragraphs Russell argues that in most societies the governing classes have always preached about the virtues of hard work. Working men are told they engage in honest labor, and unpaid women told to do their saintly duty. The rich praise honest toil, the simple life, motherhood, and domesticity because the ruling class wants to hoard their political power and leisure time. But “what will happen when the point has been reached where everybody could be comfortable without working long hours?”

Russell argues that what has happened in the West is that the rich simply grab more of what is produced and amass more leisure time—many don’t even work at all. Despite the effort of the rich to consume more—their yachts sit mostly unused—many things are produced that are not needed, and many people are unemployed. When all this fails to keep enough people working

we have a war: we cause a number of people to manufacture high explosives, and a number of others to explode them … By a combination of all these devices we manage … to keep alive the notion that a great deal of severe manual work must be the lot of the average man.”

It seems we are determined to be busy no matter what the cost.

The key philosophical idea for Russell is that physical labor, while sometimes necessary, is not the purpose of life. Why then do we so value work? First, because the rich preach that work is dignified in order to keep the workers content. Second, because we take a certain delight in how technology transforms the world. But the typical worker doesn’t think that physical or monotonous labor is meaningful. Rather “they consider work, as it should be considered, a necessary means to a livelihood, and it is from their leisure that they derive whatever happiness they may enjoy.”

Some object that people wouldn’t know what to do with more leisure time, but if this is true Russell thinks it “a condemnation of our civilization.” For why must everything be done for the sake of something else? What is wrong with deriving intrinsic pleasure from simply playing? It is tragic that we don’t value enjoyment, happiness, and pleasure as we should. Still, Russell argues that leisure time isn’t best spent on frivolity; leisure time should be used intelligently. By this, he doesn’t just mean highbrow intellectual activities, although he does favor active over passive activities as good uses of leisure time. He also believes that the preference of many people for passive rather than active pursuits reflects the fact that they are exhausted from too much work. Provide more time to enjoy life, and people will learn to enjoy it.

Consider how some of the idle rich has spent their time. Historically, Russell says, the small leisure class has enjoyed unjust advantages, and they have oppressed others. Yet that leisure class

… contributed nearly the whole of what we call civilization. It cultivated the arts and discovered the sciences; it wrote the books, invented the philosophies, and refined social relations. Even the liberation of the oppressed has usually been inaugurated from above. Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism. The method of a leisure class without duties was, however, extraordinarily wasteful … and the class as a whole was not exceptionally intelligent. The class might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers.

Today “the universities are supposed to provide, in a more systematic way, what the leisure class provided accidentally and as a by-product.” This is better, but the university has drawbacks. For one thing, those in the ivory tower are often “unaware of the preoccupations and problems of ordinary men and women.” For another thing, scholars tend to write on esoteric topics in academic jargon. So academic institutions, while useful, “are not adequate guardians of the interests of civilization in a world where everyone outside their walls is too busy for unutilitarian pursuits.”

Instead Russell advocates for a world where no one is compelled to work more, but allowed to indulge their scientific, aesthetic, or literary tastes, or their interest in law, medicine, government, or any other interest. What will be the result of all this? Russell answers this question with his quintessentially beautiful prose:

Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least one percent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly pundits.

But it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages of leisure will appear. Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.

Reflections – The hopeful nature of this last paragraph nearly move me to tears. And these are not mere quixotic ideas. Open source code, Wikipedia, my own little blog and millions like them all attest to the desire of people to express themselves through their labor.

Moreover, recent research shows that more money is not what people want from work—people want autonomy, mastery, and purpose in their pursuits. This is consistent with what Russell is saying. Give people time, and many will produce good things. So much creativity is wasted in our current social and economic system, where people are forced to do what they don’t want to do, or when they are denied the minimal amount it takes to live a decent life. In my next post , I will look at the surprising scientific evidence about what motivates people to work. Spoiler alert. It is not what you think.

5 Themes from “In Praise of Idleness” by Bertrand Russell (Essay Summary)

By Kyle Kowalski · Leave a Comment

Sloww In Praise of Idleness Bertrand Russell

“The first principle of all action is leisure.” — Aristotle

Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate.¹

In 1932, at 60 years old, he wrote In Praise of Idleness — you can view the full essay for free on Harper’s Magazine or download a PDF here .

After reading the essay, I feel like a more appropriate title would have been In Praise of Wise Leisure . And, now 86 years later, I can’t help but wonder…is today’s knowledge work the equivalent of his era’s manual labor?

5 Themes from “In Praise of Idleness” by Bertrand Russell

Before we jump in, let’s cover how Bertrand Russell defines work:

“First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.”

Throughout the essay, he generally discusses the evolution of work as he sees it:

“From the beginning of civilization until the industrial revolution a man could, as a rule, produce by hard work little more than was required for the subsistence of himself and his family, although his wife worked at least as hard and his children added their labor as soon as they were old enough to do so. The small surplus above bare necessaries was not left to those who produced it, but was appropriated by priests and warriors.”
“In the West we have various ways of dealing with this problem. We have no attempt at economic justice, so that a large proportion of the total produce goes to a small minority of the population, many of whom do no work at all. Owing to the absence of any central control over production, we produce hosts of things that are not wanted. We keep a large percentage of the working population idle because we can dispense with their labor by making others overwork. When all these methods prove inadequate we have a war: we cause a number of people to manufacture high explosives, and a number of others to explode them, as if we were children who had just discovered fireworks. By a combination of all these devices we manage, though with difficulty, to keep alive the notion that a great deal of manual work must be the lot of the average man.”
“Much that we take for granted about the desirability of work is derived from this system and, being pre-industrial, is not adapted to the modern world. Modern technic has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.”

Here’s his take on the current perception of work during his time:

“Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying ‘Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.’ Being a highly virtuous child, I believed all that I was told and acquired a conscience which has kept me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution.”
“If you ask him what he thinks the best part of his life, he is not likely to say, ‘I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man’s noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs.’”
“They consider work, as it should be considered, as a necessary means to a livelihood, and it is from their leisure hours that they derive whatever happiness they may enjoy.”

Now, let’s get into the 5 themes…

“The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life.”
“I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached.”
“I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.”
“What will happen when the point has been reached where everybody could be comfortable without working long hours?”
“Modern technic has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor necessary to produce the necessaries of life for every one.”
“Let us take an illustration. Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?”
“If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day there would be enough for everybody, and no unemployment — assuming a certain very moderate amount of sensible organization.”
“When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours’ work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried farther than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently.”
“It will be said that while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours’ work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.”
“A man who has worked long hours all his life will be bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things.”
“The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education.”
“In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and the capacity.”
“Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least one per cent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly pundits. But it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages of leisure will appear. Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen instead to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines. In this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell
https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

About Kyle Kowalski

👋 Hi, I'm Kyle―the human behind Sloww . I'm an ex-marketing executive turned self-education entrepreneur after an existential crisis in 2015. In one sentence: my purpose is synthesizing lifelong learning that catalyzes deeper development . But, I’m not a professor, philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist, scientist, mystic, or guru. I’m an interconnector across all those humans and many more—an "independent, inquiring, interdisciplinary integrator" (in other words, it's just me over here, asking questions, crossing disciplines, and making connections). To keep it simple, you can just call me a "synthesizer." Sloww shares the art of living with students of life . Read my story.

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41 Bertrand Russell–two essays

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell , 1872 – 1970 CE, was a British philosopher, writer, social critic and political activist. In the early 20th century, Russell led the British “revolt against idealism”. He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy. Russell was an anti-war activist and went to prison for his pacifism during World War I. He did conclude that the war against Adolf Hitler was a necessary “lesser of two evils” He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 “”in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.”

In “Reflections on My Eightieth Birthday” (“Postscript” in his Autobiography ), Russell wrote: “I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social.

Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times.

Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken”.

You might find it interesting to see the two things that he believed he would like to say to a future generation. It takes less than 2 minutes, but in 1959, this is what Bertrand Russell had to say:

Message to Future Generations

From Bertrand Russell’s: The Problems of Philosophy: Chapter XV: The Value of Philosophy

This is a short interview with Woodrow Wyatt in 1960, when Russell was 87 years old.

Mankind’s Future and Philosophy

The life of the instinctive man is shut up within the circle of his private interests : family and friends may be included, but the outer world is not regarded except as it may help or hinder what comes within the circle of instinctive wishes. In such a life there is something feverish and confined, in comparison with which the philosophic life is calm and free. The private world of instinctive interests is a small one, set in the midst of a great and powerful world which must, sooner or later, lay our private world in ruins.

Unless we can so enlarge our interests as to include the whole outer world, we remain like a garrison in a beleaguered fortress, knowing that the enemy prevents escape and that ultimate surrender is inevitable. In such a life there is no peace, but a constant strife between the insistence of desire and the powerlessness of will. In one way or another, if our life is to be great and free, we must escape this prison and this strife.

One way of escape is by philosophic contemplation. Philosophic contemplation does not, in its widest survey, divide the universe into two hostile camps—friends and foes, helpful and hostile, good and bad—it views the whole impartially. Philosophic contemplation, when it is unalloyed, does not aim at proving that the rest of the universe is akin to man. All acquisition of knowledge is an enlargement of the Self, but this enlargement is best attained when it is not directly sought. It is obtained when the desire for knowledge is alone operative, by a study which does not wish in advance that its objects should have this or that character, but adapts the Self to the characters which it finds in its objects. This enlargement of Self is not obtained when, taking the Self as it is, we try to show that the world is so similar to this Self that knowledge of it is possible without any admission of what seems alien. The desire to prove this is a form of self-assertion and, like all self-assertion, it is an obstacle to the growth of Self which it desires, and of which the Self knows that it is capable. Self-assertion, in philosophic speculation as elsewhere, views the world as a means to its own ends; thus it makes the world of less account than Self, and the Self sets bounds to the greatness of its goods. In contemplation, on the contrary, we start from the not-Self, and through its greatness the boundaries of Self are enlarged; through the infinity of the universe the mind which contemplates it achieves some share in infinity.

Bertrand Russell lecturing at the University California, Los Angeles where he had taken up a three-year appointment as Professor of Philosophy in March 1939.

The true philosophic contemplation, on the contrary, finds its satisfaction in every enlargement of the not-Self, in everything that magnifies the objects contemplated, and thereby the subject contemplating. Everything, in contemplation, that is personal or private, everything that depends upon habit, self-interest, or desire, distorts the object, and hence impairs the union which the intellect seeks. By thus making a barrier between subject and object, such personal and private things become a prison to the intellect. The free intellect will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive desire of knowledge—knowledge as impersonal, as purely contemplative, as it is possible for man to attain. Hence also the free intellect will value more the abstract and universal knowledge into which the accidents of private history do not enter, than the knowledge brought by the senses, and dependent, as such knowledge must be, upon an exclusive and personal point of view and a body whose sense organs distort as much as they reveal.

The mind which has become accustomed to the freedom and impartiality of philosophic contemplation will preserve something of the same freedom and impartiality in the world of action and emotion. It will view its purposes and desires as parts of the whole, with the absence of insistence that results from seeing them as infinitesimal fragments in a world of which all the rest is unaffected by any one man’s deeds. The impartiality which, in contemplation, is the unalloyed desire for truth, is the very same quality of mind which, in action, is justice, and in emotion is that universal love which can be given to all, and not only to those who are judged useful or admirable. Thus contemplation enlarges not only the objects of our thoughts, but also the objects of our actions and our affections: it makes us citizens of the universe, not only of one walled city at war with all the rest. In this citizenship of the universe consists man’s true freedom, and his liberation from the thralldom of narrow hopes and fears.

Key Takeaway

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

Bertrand Russell

Thus, to sum up our discussion of the value of philosophy; Philosophy is to be studied , not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

Ex Libris C. K. OGDEN CONWAY MEMORIAL LECTURE

FREE THOUGHT AND OFFICIAL PROPAGANDA

Delivered at south place institute on march 24, 1922, by the hon. bertrand russell, m.a., f.r.s., (professor graham wallas in the chair), watts & co., johnson’s court, fleet street, e.c.4 1922.

Moncure Conway, in whose honor we are assembled to-day, devoted his life to two great objects: freedom of thought and freedom of the individual.

“In regard to both these objects, something has been gained since his time, but something also has been lost. New dangers, somewhat different in form from those of past ages, threaten both kinds of freedom, and unless a vigorous and vigilant public opinion can be aroused in defense of them, there will be much less of both a hundred years hence than there is now. My purpose in this address is to emphasize the new dangers and to consider how they can be met.

Let us begin by trying to be clear as to what we mean by “free thought.” This expression has two senses.

In its narrower sense it means thought which does not accept the dogmas of traditional religion. In this sense a man is a “free thinker” if he is not a Christian or a Mussulman or a Buddhist or a Shintoist or a member of any of the other bodies of men who accept some inherited orthodoxy. In Christian countries a man is called a “free thinker” if he does not decidedly believe in God, though this would not suffice to make a man a “free thinker” in a Buddhist country.

I do not wish to minimize the importance of free thought in this sense. I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out. I do not believe that, on the balance, religious belief has been a force for good. Although I am prepared to admit that in certain times and places it has had some good effects, I regard it as belonging to the infancy of human reason, and to a stage of development which we are now outgrowing.

But there is also a wider sense of “free thought,” which I regard as of still greater importance. Indeed, the harm done by traditional religions seems chiefly traceable to the fact that they have prevented free thought in this wider sense. The wider sense is not so easy to define as the narrower, and it will be well to spend some little time in trying to arrive at its essence.

To begin with the most obvious. Thought is not “free” when legal penalties are incurred by the holding or not holding of certain opinions, or by giving expression to one’s belief or lack of belief on certain matters. Very few countries in the world have as yet even this elementary kind of freedom.

In England, under the Blasphemy Laws , it is illegal to express disbelief in the Christian religion, though in practice the law is not set in motion against the well-to-do. It is also illegal to teach what Christ taught on the subject of non-resistance. Therefore, whoever wishes to avoid becoming a criminal must profess to agree with Christ’s teaching, but must avoid saying what that teaching was.

In America no one can enter the country without first solemnly declaring that he disbelieves in anarchism and polygamy; and, once inside, he must also disbelieve in communism.

In Japan it is illegal to express disbelief in the divinity of the Mikado . It will thus be seen that a voyage round the world is a perilous adventure.

A Mohammedan, a Tolstoyan, a Bolshevik, or a Christian cannot undertake it without at some point becoming a criminal, or holding his tongue about what he considers important truths. This, of course, applies only to steerage passengers; saloon passengers are allowed to believe whatever they please, provided they avoid offensive obtrusiveness.

Legal penalties are, however, in the modern world, the least of the obstacles to freedom of thoughts . The two great obstacles are economic penalties and distortion of evidence. It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions makes it impossible to earn a living. It is clear also that thought is not free if all the arguments on one side of a controversy are perpetually presented as attractively as possible, while the arguments on the other side can only be discovered by diligent search. Both these obstacles exist in every large country known to me, except China, which is the last refuge of freedom. It is these obstacles with which I shall be concerned—their present magnitude, the likelihood of their increase, and the possibility of their diminution.

We may say that thought is free when it is exposed to free competition among beliefs —i.e., when all beliefs are able to state their case, and no legal or pecuniary advantages or disadvantages attach to beliefs. This is an ideal which, for various reasons, can never be fully attained. But it is possible to approach very much nearer to it than we do at present.

Three incidents in my own life will serve to show how, in modern England, the scales are weighted in favor of Christianity. My reason for mentioning them is that many people do not at all realize the disadvantages to which avowed Agnosticism still exposes people.

The first incident belongs to a very early stage in my life. My father was a Freethinker, but died when I was only three years old. Wishing me to be brought up without superstition, he appointed two Freethinkers as my guardians. The Courts, however, set aside his will, and had me educated in the Christian faith. I am afraid the result was disappointing, but that was not the fault of the law. If he had directed that I should be educated as a Christadelphian or a Muggletonian or a Seventh-Day Adventist, the Courts would not have dreamed of objecting. A parent has a right to ordain that any imaginable superstition shall be instilled into his children after his death, but has not the right to say that they shall be kept free from superstition if possible.
The second incident occurred in the year 1910 . I had at that time a desire to stand for Parliament as a Liberal, and the Whips recommended me to a certain constituency. I addressed the Liberal Association, who expressed themselves favorably, and my adoption seemed certain. But, on being questioned by a small inner caucus, I admitted that I was an Agnostic. They asked whether the fact would come out, and I said it probably would. They asked whether I should be willing to go to church occasionally, and I replied that I should not. Consequently, they selected another candidate, who was duly elected, has been in Parliament ever since, and is a member of the present Government.
The third incident occurred immediately afterwards. I was invited by Trinity College, Cambridge, to become a lecturer, but not a Fellow. The difference is not pecuniary; it is that a Fellow has a voice in the government of the College, and cannot be dispossessed during the term of his Fellowship except for grave immorality. The chief reason for not offering me a Fellowship was that the clerical party did not wish to add to the anti-clerical vote. The result was that they were able to dismiss me in 1916, when they disliked my views on the War. If I had been dependent on my lectureship, I should have starved.

These three incidents illustrate different kinds of disadvantages attaching to avowed freethinking even in modern England. Any other avowed Freethinker could supply similar incidents from his personal experience, often of a far more serious character. The net result is that people who are not well-to-do dare not be frank about their religious beliefs.

It is not, of course, only or even chiefly in regard to religion that there is lack of freedom. Belief in communism or free love handicaps a man much more than Agnosticism. Not only is it a disadvantage to hold those views, but it is very much more difficult to obtain publicity for the arguments in their favor. On the other hand, in Russia the advantages and disadvantages are exactly reversed: comfort and power are achieved by professing Atheism, communism, and free love, and no opportunity exists for propaganda against these opinions. The result is that in Russia one set of fanatics feels absolute certainty about one set of doubtful propositions, while in the rest of the world another set of fanatics feels equal certainty about a diametrically opposite set of equally doubtful propositions. From such a situation war, bitterness, and persecution inevitably result on both sides.

Russell was an atheist. He has specific reasons for this. Listen to it in his own words:

Bertrand Russell on Religion

William James used to preach the “will to believe.” For my part, I should wish to preach the “will to doubt.” None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error. The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate. These methods are practiced in science, and have built up the body of scientific knowledge.

Every man of science whose outlook is truly scientific is ready to admit that what passes for scientific knowledge at the moment is sure to require correction with the progress of discovery; nevertheless, it is near enough to the truth to serve for most practical purposes, though not for all. In science, where alone something approximating to genuine knowledge is to be found, men’s attitude is tentative and full of doubt.

In religion and politics, on the contrary, though there is as yet nothing approaching scientific knowledge , everybody considers it de rigueur to have a dogmatic opinion, to be backed up by inflicting starvation, prison, and war, and to be carefully guarded from argumentative competition with any different opinion. If only men could be brought into a tentatively agnostic frame of mind about these matters, nine-tenths of the evils of the modern world would be cured. War would become impossible, because each side would realize that both sides must be in the wrong. Persecution would cease. Education would aim at expanding the mind, not at narrowing it. Men would be chosen for jobs on account of fitness to do the work, not because they flattered the irrational dogmas of those in power. Thus rational doubt alone, if it could be generated, would suffice to introduce the millennium.

We have had in recent years a brilliant example of the scientific temper of mind in the theory of relativity and its reception by the world. Einstein, a German-Swiss-Jew pacifist, was appointed to a research professorship by the German Government in the early days of the War; his predictions were verified by an English expedition which observed the eclipse of 1919, very soon after the Armistice. His theory upsets the whole theoretical framework of traditional physics; it is almost as damaging to orthodox dynamics as Darwin was to Genesis . Yet physicists everywhere have shown complete readiness to accept his theory as soon as it appeared that the evidence was in its favor. But none of them, least of all Einstein himself, would claim that he has said the last word. He has not built a monument of infallible dogma to stand for all time. There are difficulties he cannot solve; his doctrines will have to be modified in their turn as they have modified Newton’s. This critical un-dogmatic receptiveness is the true attitude of science.

Albert Einstein during a lecture in Vienna in 1921 by Ferdinand Schmutzer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite.

If it is admitted that a condition of rational doubt would be desirable , it becomes important to inquire how it comes about that there is so much irrational certainty in the world. A great deal of this is due to the inherent irrationality and credulity of average human nature. But this seed of intellectual original sin is nourished and fostered by other agencies, among which three play the chief part—namely, education, propaganda, and economic pressure .

Let us consider these in turn.

The committee which framed these laws, as quoted by the New Republic , laid it down that the teacher who “does not approve of the present social system……must surrender his office,” and that “no person who is not eager to combat the theories of social change should be entrusted with the task of fitting the young and old for the responsibilities of citizenship.”

Thus, according to the law of the State of New York, Christ and George Washington were too degraded morally to be fit for the education of the young . If Christ were to go to New York and say, “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” the President of the New York School Board would reply: “Sir, I see no evidence that you are eager to combat theories of social change. Indeed, I have heard it said that you advocate what you call the kingdom of heaven, whereas this country, thank God, is a republic. It is clear that the Government of your kingdom of heaven would differ materially from that of New York State, therefore no children will be allowed access to you.” If he failed to make this reply, he would not be doing his duty as a functionary entrusted with the administration of the law.

The effect of such laws is very serious. Let it be granted, for the sake of argument, that the government and the social system in the State of New York are the best that have ever existed on this planet; yet even then both would presumably be capable of improvement. Any person who admits this obvious proposition is by law incapable of teaching in a State school. Thus the law decrees that the teachers shall all be either hypocrites or fools.

Bust of Bertrand Russell by Marcelle Quinton (1980) in Red Lion Square Camden/London

Religious toleration, to a certain extent, has been won because people have ceased to consider religion so important as it was once thought to be. But in politics and economics, which have taken the place formerly occupied by religion, there is a growing tendency to persecution, which is not by any means confined to one party. The persecution of opinion in Russia is more severe than in any capitalist country. I met in Petrograd an eminent Russian poet, Alexander Block, who has since died as the result of privations. The Bolsheviks allowed him to teach æsthetics, but he complained that they insisted on his teaching the subject “from a Marxian point of view.” He had been at a loss to discover how the theory of rhythmics was connected with Marxism, although, to avoid starvation, he had done his best to find out. Of course, it has been impossible in Russia ever since the Bolsheviks came into power to print anything critical of the dogmas upon which their regime is founded.

The examples of America and Russia illustrate the conclusion to which we seem to be driven—namely, that so long as men continue to have the present fanatical belief in the importance of politics free thought on political matters will be impossible, and there is only too much danger that the lack of freedom will spread to all other matters, as it has done in Russia. Only some degree of political skepticism can save us from this misfortune.

It must not be supposed that the officials in charge of education desire the young to become educated. On the contrary, their problem is to impart information without imparting intelligence. Education should have two objects: first, to give definite knowledge—reading and writing, languages and mathematics, and so on; secondly, to create those mental habits which will enable people to acquire knowledge and form sound judgments for themselves. The first of these we may call information, the second intelligence. The utility of information is admitted practically as well as theoretically; without a literate population a modern State is impossible. But the utility of intelligence is admitted only theoretically, not practically; it is not desired that ordinary people should think for themselves, because it is felt that people who think for themselves are awkward to manage and cause administrative difficulties. Only the guardians, in Plato’s language, are to think; the rest are to obey, or to follow leaders like a herd of sheep. This doctrine, often unconsciously, has survived the introduction of political democracy, and has radically vitiated all national systems of education.

This Mikado's Empire, His Imperial Japanese Majesty, Mutsuhito, Emperor of Japan, and the 123d Mikado of the By Internet Archive Book Images [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons.,

Definite mis-statements of fact can be legitimately objected to, but they are by no means necessary. The mere words “Pear’s Soap,” which affirm nothing, cause people to buy that article. If, wherever these words appear, they were replaced by the words “The Labour Party,” millions of people would be led to vote for the Labour Party, although the advertisements had claimed no merit for it whatever. But if both sides in a controversy were confined by law to statements which a committee of eminent logicians considered relevant and valid, the main evil of propaganda, as at present conducted, would remain.

Suppose, under such a law, two parties with an equally good case, one of whom had a million pounds to spend on propaganda, while the other had only a hundred thousand . It is obvious that the arguments in favor of the richer party would become more widely known than those in favor of the poorer party, and therefore the richer party would win. This situation is, of course, intensified when one party is the Government. In Russia the Government has an almost complete monopoly of propaganda, but that is not necessary. The advantages which it possesses over its opponents will generally be sufficient to give it the victory, unless it has an exceptionally bad case.

There are two simple principles which, if they were adopted, would solve almost all social problems.

The first is that education should have for one of its aims to teach people only to believe propositions when there is some reason to think that they are true.

The second is that jobs should be given solely for fitness to do the work.

To take the second point first . The habit of considering a man’s religious, moral, and political opinions before appointing him to a post or giving him a job is the modern form of persecution, and it is likely to become quite as efficient as the Inquisition ever was. The old liberties can be legally retained without being of the slightest use. If, in practice, certain opinions lead a man to starve, it is poor comfort to him to know that his opinions are not punishable by law. There is a certain public feeling against starving men for not belonging to the Church of England, or for holding slightly unorthodox opinions in politics. But there is hardly any feeling against the rejection of Atheists or Mormons, extreme communists, or men who advocate free love. Such men are thought to be wicked, and it is considered only natural to refuse to employ them. People have hardly yet waked up to the fact that this refusal, in a highly industrial State, amounts to a very rigorous form of persecution.

If this danger were adequately realized, it would be possible to rouse public opinion , and to secure that a man’s beliefs should not be considered in appointing him to a post. The protection of minorities is vitally important; and even the most orthodox of us may find himself in a minority some day, so that we all have an interest in restraining the tyranny of majorities. Nothing except public opinion can solve this problem. Socialism would make it somewhat more acute, since it would eliminate the opportunities that now arise through exceptional employers. Every increase in the size of industrial undertakings makes it worse, since it diminishes the number of independent employers.

The battle must be fought exactly as the battle of religious toleration was fought. And as in that case, so in this, a decay in the intensity of belief is likely to prove the decisive factor. While men were convinced of the absolute truth of Catholicism or Protestantism, as the case might be, they were willing to persecute on account of them. While men are quite certain of their modern creeds, they will persecute on their behalf. Some element of doubt is essential to the practice, though not to the theory, of toleration.

And this brings me to my other point, which concerns the aims of education. If there is to be toleration in the world, one of the things taught in schools must be the habit of weighing evidence, and the practice of not giving full assent to propositions which there is no reason to believe true.

By Hilo Tribune, March 21, 1905 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

History should be taught in the same way. Napoleon’s campaigns of 1813 and 1814, for instance, might be studied in the Moniteur , leading up to the surprise which Parisians felt when they saw the Allies arriving under the walls of Paris after they had (according to the official bulletins) been beaten by Napoleon in every battle. In the more advanced classes, students should be encouraged to count the number of times that Lenin has been assassinated by Trotsky, in order to learn contempt for death. Finally, they should be given a school history approved by the Government, and asked to infer what a French school history would say about our wars with France. All this would be a far better training in citizenship than the trite moral maxims by which some people believe that civic duty can be inculcated.

If I am asked how the world is to be induced to adopt these two maxims—namely

(1) that jobs should be given to people on account of their fitness to perform them;

(2) that one aim of education should be to cure people of the habit of believing propositions for which there is no evidence—

I can only say that it must be done by generating an enlightened public opinion . And an enlightened public opinion can only be generated by the efforts of those who desire that it should exist. I do not believe that the economic changes advocated by Socialists will, of themselves, do anything towards curing the evils we have been considering. I think that, whatever happens in politics, the trend of economic development will make the preservation of mental freedom increasingly difficult, unless public opinion insists that the employer shall control nothing in the life of the employee except his work.

Freedom in education could easily be secured, if it were desired , by limiting the function of the State to inspection and payment, and confining inspection rigidly to the definite instruction. But that, as things stand, would leave education in the hands of the Churches, because, unfortunately, they are more anxious to teach their beliefs than Freethinkers are to teach their doubts. It would, however, give a free field, and would make it possible for a liberal education to be given if it were really desired. More than that ought not to be asked of the law.

My plea throughout this address has been for the spread of the scientific temper , which is an altogether different thing from the knowledge of scientific results. The scientific temper is capable of regenerating mankind and providing an issue for all our troubles. The results of science, in the form of mechanism, poison gas, and the yellow press, bid fair to lead to the total downfall of our civilization. It is a curious antithesis, which a Martian might contemplate with amused detachment. But for us it is a matter of life and death. Upon its issue depends the question whether our grandchildren are to live in a happier world, or are to exterminate each other by scientific methods, leaving perhaps to Negroes and Papuans the future destinies of mankind.

If you would like to hear a more thorough interview with Russell, you can find it here at:

Face to Face Interview with the BBC

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Title: The Problems of Philosophy

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In Praise of Idleness: Bertrand Russell on the Relationship Between Leisure and Social Justice

By maria popova.

“Everybody should be quiet near a little stream and listen,” the great children’s book author Ruth Krauss — a philosopher, really — wrote in her last and loveliest collaboration with the young Maurice Sendak in 1960. At the time of her first collaboration with Sendak twelve years earlier, just after the word “workaholic” was coined, the German philosopher Josef Pieper was composing Leisure, the Basis of Culture — his timeless and increasingly timely manifesto for reclaiming our human dignity in a culture of busyness. “Leisure,” Pieper wrote, “is not the same as the absence of activity… or even as an inner quiet. It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness.”

A generation earlier, with a seer’s capacity to peer past the horizon of the present condition and anticipate a sweeping cultural current before it has flooded in, and with a sage’s ability to provide the psychic buoy for surviving the current’s perilous rapids, Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) addressed the looming cult of workaholism in a prescient 1932 essay titled In Praise of Idleness ( public library ).

Russell writes:

A great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.

With his characteristic wisdom punctuated by wry wit, he examines what work actually means:

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e., of advertising.

Russell points to landowners as a historical example of a class whose idleness was only made possible by the toil of others. For the vast majority of our species’ history, up until the Industrial Revolution, the average person spent nearly every waking hour working hard to earn the basic necessities of survival. Any marginal surplus, he notes, was swiftly appropriated by those in power — the warriors, the monarchs, the priests. Since the Industrial Revolution, other power systems — from big business to dictatorships — have simply supplanted the warriors, monarchs, and priests. Russell considers how the exploitive legacy of pre-industrial society has corrupted the modern social fabric and warped our value system:

A system which lasted so long and ended so recently has naturally left a profound impress upon men’s thoughts and opinions. Much that we take for granted about the desirability of work is derived from this system, and, being pre-industrial, is not adapted to the modern world. Modern technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

Writing nearly a century after Kierkegaard extolled the existential boon of idleness , Russell considers how this manipulated mentality has hypnotized us into worshiping work as virtue and scorning leisure as laziness, as weakness, as folly, rather than recognizing it as the raw material of social justice and the locus of our power:

The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own. Of course the holders of power conceal this fact from themselves by managing to believe that their interests are identical with the larger interests of humanity. Sometimes this is true; Athenian slave owners, for instance, employed part of their leisure in making a permanent contribution to civilization which would have been impossible under a just economic system. Leisure is essential to civilization, and in former times leisure for the few was only rendered possible by the labors of the many. But their labors were valuable, not because work is good, but because leisure is good. And with modern technique it would be possible to distribute leisure justly without injury to civilization.

Russell notes that WWI — which was dubbed “the war to end all wars” by a world willfully blind to the fact that violence begets more violence, unwitting that this world war would pave the way for the next — furthered our civilizational conflation of duty with work and work with virtue, lulling us into the modern trance of busyness. More than half a century before Annie Dillard observed that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Russell traces the ledger of our existential spending back to war’s false promise of freedom:

The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of work had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.

Pointing out that this equivalence originates in the same morality — or, rather, immorality — that produced the slave state, he exposes the core cultural falsehood it has effected, which stands as a monumental obstruction to equality and social justice in contemporary society:

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich.

Born in an era when urban workingmen had just acquired the right to vote in Great Britain, Russell draws on his own childhood for a stark illustration of this belief and its far-reaching tentacles of socioeconomic oppression:

I remember hearing an old Duchess say: “What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.” People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion.

That sentiment, Russell reminds us again and again, is ahistorical. Advances in science, technology, and the very mechanics of society have made it no longer necessary for the average person to endure fifteen-hour workdays in order to obtain basic sustenance, as adults — and often children — had to in the early nineteenth century. But while the allocation of our time in relation to need has changed immensely, our attitudes about how that time is spent hardly have. He writes:

Every human being, of necessity, consumes, in the course of his life, a certain amount of the produce of human labor. […] The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life will be bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.

But while reinstating the dignity of leisure — or what Russell calls idleness — is a necessary condition for recalibrating our life-satisfaction to more adequately reflect the contemporary realities of work and need, it is not a sufficient one. Exacerbating our already warped relationship with work is the muddling of needs and wants at the heart of capitalist materialism — something Russell would address nearly two decades later in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, listing acquisitiveness as the first of the four desires driving human behavior . He considers the radical shift that would take place if we were to stop regarding the virtue of work as an end in itself and begin seeing it as a means to a state of being in which work is no longer needed, reinstating leisure and comfort — that is, a contented sense of enoughness — as the proper existential end:

What will happen when the point has been reached where everybody could be comfortable without working long hours? In the West, we have various ways of dealing with this problem. We have no attempt at economic justice, so that a large proportion of the total produce goes to a small minority of the population, many of whom do no work at all. Owing to the absence of any central control over production, we produce hosts of things that are not wanted. We keep a large percentage of the working population idle, because we can dispense with their labor by making the others overwork. When all these methods prove inadequate, we have a war; we cause a number of people to manufacture high explosives, and a number of others to explode them, as if we were children who had just discovered fireworks. By a combination of all these devices we manage, though with difficulty, to keep alive the notion that a great deal of severe manual work must be the lot of the average man.

Our society, Russell argues, is driven by “continually fresh schemes, by which present leisure is to be sacrificed to future productivity.” He challenges the inanity of this proposition:

The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare. We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labor, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect. The other is the new pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly clever changes that we can produce on the earth’s surface. Neither of these motives makes any great appeal to the actual worker. If you ask him what he thinks the best part of his life, he is not likely to say: “I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man’s noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs.” I have never heard workingmen say this sort of thing. They consider work, as it should be considered, a necessary means to a livelihood, and it is from their leisure hours that they derive whatever happiness they may enjoy.

Decades before Diane Ackerman made her exquisite case for the evolutionary and existential value of play , Russell considers how the cult of productivity has demolished one of life’s pillars of satisfaction. Noting that modern people — true of the moderns of 1932, even truer of today’s — enjoy a little leisure but wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they had to work only four hours a day, he observes:

In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for lightheartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.

The seedbed of this soul-shriveling belief is the notion — a driving force of consumerism — that the only worthwhile activities are those that bring material profit. A formidable logician, Russell exposes the self-unraveling nature of this argument:

Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad. Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profit-making is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.

Another result, Russell argues, is a kind of split between positive idleness, which ought to be the nourishing end of work, and negative idleness, which ends up being the effect of work under the spell of consumerism and its consequent socioeconomic inequality. He writes:

The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

With an eye to our civilization’s triumphs and failures of self-actualization, Russell points out that, historically, there has been a small leisure class enjoying a great many privileges without a basis in social justice, profiting on the backs of a large working class toiling for survival. While this rendered the oppressive leisure class morally condemnable, it resulted in the vast majority of art and science — “the whole of what we call civilization.” He writes:

Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged from barbarism. The method of a hereditary leisure class without duties was, however, extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class had been taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not exceptionally intelligent. The class might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers.

Russell’s most compelling point is the most counterintuitive — the idea that reclaiming leisure is not a reinforcement of elitism but the antidote to elitism itself and a form of resistance to oppression, for it would require dismantling the power structures of modern society and undoing the spell they have cast on us to keep the poor poor and the rich rich. To correctly calibrate modern life around a sense of enough — that is, around meeting the need for comfort rather than satisfying the endless want for consumerist acquisitiveness — would be to lay the groundwork for social justice. In such a society, Russell argues, no one would have to work more than four hours out of twenty-four — a proposition even more countercultural today than it was in his era. He paints the landscape of possibility:

In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational potboilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and the capacity. […] Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least 1 per cent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly pundits. But it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages of leisure will appear. Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for the others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.

In Praise of Idleness has only grown timelier by the ticking of the decades. Complement it with trailblazing anthropologist Margaret Mead on leisure and creativity , then revisit Russell on what makes a fulfilling life , our mightiest defense against political manipulation , power-knowledge vs. love-knowledge , why “fruitful monotony” is essential for happiness , and his remarkable response to a fascist’s provocation .

— Published December 27, 2018 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/12/27/in-praise-of-idleness-bertrand-russell/ —

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More Praise for Idleness

Bertrand russell argued that the time spent working by an average person should be drastically reduced, work being an overrated virtue. paul western believes that ‘idleness’ is still not valued highly enough..

In his 1932 essay ‘In Praise of Idleness’, Bertrand Russell argued that work was an overrated virtue, and that civilised living demanded leisure time in which personal interests could be pursued. Moreover, he believed he was writing in an era when the mechanisation of production had reached a point such that no-one needed to work more than twenty hours a week or so in order to make a fair contribution to society. And yet he saw a society in which large numbers were left unemployed whilst most of the rest were overworked (often providing products and services of questionable value). Despite today’s even more effective production, we still have a far from fair distribution of ‘idleness’.

Russell saw the belief in a duty to work as part of the ‘morality of slaves’: a device used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interest of their masters. This provided those masters with leisure, but Russell was not praising the idleness that feeds on the industry of others. Of course, some of the leisure gained by the powerful is used to advance civilisation. “Leisure is essential to civilisation,” he argued, “and in former times leisure for the few was only rendered possible by the labours of the many. But their labours were valuable, not because work is good, but because leisure is good. And with modern techniques it would be possible to distribute leisure justly without injury to civilisation.”

The maintenance of the civilian standard of living during the First World War indicated to Russell just how much production could be achieved with a reduced work force. In peacetime, the supposed virtue of work led to half the population being overworked, whilst the rest were unemployed. Whilst everybody owes the community some work, four hours a day would provide enough production to meet people’s needs, so that everyone could enjoy ‘time to be civilised’.

If it were true that people would not know what to do with this time, this was a condemnation of our civilisation. Russell saw the answer in two parts. Firstly, we would need to learn to accept a place in life for pleasure for its own sake. If there is virtue in work, there must be a balancing virtue in enjoying its fruits. Secondly, we would need to spend more time on education in a broad sense: then people would discover how to use their time in ways that were constructive. If Russell’s choice of reviving peasant dances as an example seems patrician and patronising, it does not negate his basic point that people would be more able to take up involved and active pastimes, including ones that were publicly useful. As people learnt what they could do with their lives, creativity, charity and simple happiness would flourish.

It must be admitted that Russell’s view on on how a fair distribution of work was to be brought about was vague and hopelessly Utopian. It was all down to the ‘scientific organisation of production’. Whatever this was meant to be, it was not going to appear overnight, in one step. So, in the sixtyfive years since Russell wrote his tribute to ease, have we come to put more value on our own time, in other words on our very lives themselves? Certainly, some steps have been made in this direction. Children stay at school for longer and the working week is generally shorter. But ‘shorter’ is still a long way from ‘as short as possible’. There is still a massive polarisation between millions who feel overworked, and other millions who suffer enforced idleness, an idleness that cannot be enjoyed because of shortage of money. The basic injustice that Russell saw is still with us.

There is a belief that a growing economy creates a growing amount of work and that this will naturally reduce unemployment. Let us leave aside the question of whether a society in which everybody is guaranteed to be overworked is desirable. More to the point is the fact that more work to be done does not necessarily mean more work for people . As technology progresses, the proportion of work, both existing activities and new, that can be effectively automated is increasing. That there is pressure on the opportunities for human work is revealed by the increasingly contrived service jobs people are prepared to take. Some of these are just pointless, like twenty-four hour opening or kiss-o-grams; some are desperate, like the return of domestic service. If all this misdirected effort, which must bring little satisfaction to those making it, were released to a mixture of leisure time and beneficial work, there would be no real loss and a great deal gained. More and more people are making the effort to spend less time in conventional work. By ‘downshifting’, they have found a happy medium between working themselves into the ground, and the underfunded inactivity of unemployment. I am one of them: cutting a day from my own working week has at last given me the time to think and write. But this is still a distinctly privileged position to be in. Opportunities to work reduced hours are much more readily available to those with sought-after skills. Furthermore, the transition is often softened financially by a redundancy cheque or savings. In general, many people feel obliged to work far more than their contracted hours, and much part-time work is too poorly paid to be a true liberation.

What is needed is the opportunity, for anyone who wanted it, to obtain a satisfactory income from a minimal working week (20 hours still seems like a reasonable target). Achieving the circumstances in which a person could live adequately on twenty hours’ work would require that people receive a fairer proportion of the wealth they generate than is the norm now, and that they maintain that share when the profits they generate are spent on technological advancement. If the amount of work a person can do doubles, then they should be able to work half as much for the same pay. ‘Half’ meaning half the time at work, not spreading the reduced effort over the same time. Someone whose work period is full of unproductive gaps too short to put to some other use really is idle, and this is not what Russell meant at all. Proper distribution of the benefits of improving technology would ensure that what can be produced and purchased by a person earning a ‘satisfactory income’ does not stagnate.

If a just distribution of free time was imaginable in 1932, it is vastly more so now. Given that some progress has been made, the process of change seems to be already underway. There are still many people, however, who believe that working long hours confers some kind of moral worth, and there remain those who promote this supposed virtue for ulterior motives. We continue to need reminding that the idea of work as intrinsically virtuous is a fiction. We have an obligation to do our fair share, but that obligation can be discharged in less time than ever before. There needs to be an end to the perverse admiration of long hours, with its consequent tolerance of systematic unemployment. These are, we are supposed to believe, ‘the way of the world.’ Nonsense. Twenty hours a week each spent meeting society’s demands would provide enough for everyone, leaving us all with the time to get on with our real lives.

Paul Western lives in Teddington, Middlesex, and is surprisingly industrious.

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Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872–1970) was a British philosopher, logician, essayist and social critic best known for his work in mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. His most influential contributions include his championing of logicism (the view that mathematics is in some important sense reducible to logic), his refining of Gottlob Frege ’s predicate calculus (which still forms the basis of most contemporary systems of logic), his defense of neutral monism (the view that the world consists of just one type of substance which is neither exclusively mental nor exclusively physical), and his theories of definite descriptions , logical atomism and logical types .

Together with G.E. Moore , Russell is generally recognized as one of the founders of modern analytic philosophy. His famous paradox , theory of types and work with A.N. Whitehead on Principia Mathematica invigorated the study of logic throughout the twentieth century (Schilpp 1944, xiii; Wilczek 2010, 74). In the public mind, he was famous as much for his evangelical atheism as for his contributions to technical philosophy.

Over the course of a long career, Russell also made important contributions to a broad range of other subjects, including ethics , politics, educational theory and religious studies, cheerfully ignoring Hooke’s admonition to the Royal Society against “meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetorick, or Logick” (Kreisel 1973, 24). Generations of general readers have also benefited from his popular writings on a wide variety of topics in both the humanities and the natural sciences. Like Voltaire , to whom he has been compared (Times of London 1970, 12), he wrote with style and wit and had enormous influence.

After a life marked by controversy – including dismissals from both Trinity College, Cambridge, and City College, New York – Russell was awarded the Order of Merit in 1949 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. Noted also for his many spirited anti-nuclear protests and for his campaign against western involvement in the Vietnam War, Russell remained a prominent public figure until his death at the age of 97.

Interested readers may listen to two sound clips of Russell speaking.

1. Russell’s Chronology

2. russell’s work in logic, 3. russell’s work in analytic philosophy, 4. russell’s theory of definite descriptions, 5. russell’s theory of neutral monism, 6. russell’s atheism, 7. russell’s social and political philosophy, 8. contemporary russell scholarship, primary literature, secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

A short chronology of the major events in Russell’s life is as follows:

Attempts to sum up Russell’s life have been numerous. One of the more famous comes from the Oxford philosopher A.J. Ayer . As Ayer writes, “The popular conception of a philosopher as one who combines universal learning with the direction of human conduct was more nearly satisfied by Bertrand Russell than by any other philosopher of our time” (1972a, 127). Another telling comment comes from the Harvard philosopher W.V. Quine : “I think many of us were drawn to our profession by Russell’s books. He wrote a spectrum of books for a graduated public, layman to specialist. We were beguiled by the wit and a sense of new-found clarity with respect to central traits of reality” (1966c, 657).

Despite such comments, perhaps the most memorable encapsulation of Russell’s life and work comes from Russell himself. As Russell tells us,

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness – that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what – at last – I have found. With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved. Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me. (1967, 3–4)

By any standard, Russell led an enormously full life. In addition to his ground-breaking intellectual work in logic and analytic philosophy, he involved himself for much of his life in politics. As early as 1904 he spoke out frequently in favour of internationalism and in 1907 he ran unsuccessfully for Parliament. Although he stood as an independent, he endorsed the full 1907 Liberal platform. He also advocated extending the franchise to women, provided that such a radical political change could be introduced through constitutionally recognized means (Wood 1957, 71). Three years later he published his Anti-Suffragist Anxieties (1910).

With the outbreak of World War I, Russell became involved in anti-war activities and in 1916 he was fined 100 pounds for authoring an anti-war pamphlet. Because of his conviction, he was dismissed from his post at Trinity College, Cambridge (Hardy 1942). Two years later, he was convicted a second time, this time for suggesting that American troops might be used to intimidate strikers in Britain (Clark 1975, 337–339). The result was five months in Brixton Prison as prisoner No. 2917. In 1922 and 1923 Russell ran twice more for Parliament, again unsuccessfully, and together with his second wife, Dora, he founded an experimental school that they operated during the late 1920s and early 1930s (Russell 1926 and Park 1963). Perhaps not surprisingly, some of Russell’s more radical activities – including his advocacy of post-Victorian sexual practices – were linked in many people’s minds to his atheism, made famous in part by his 1948 BBC debate with the Jesuit philosopher Frederick Copleston over the existence of God.

Although Russell became the third Earl Russell upon the death of his brother in 1931, Russell’s radicalism continued to make him a controversial figure well through middle-age. While teaching at UCLA in the United States in the late 1930s, he was offered a teaching appointment at City College, New York. The appointment was revoked following a series of protests and a 1940 judicial decision which found him morally unfit to teach at the College (Dewey and Kallen 1941, Irvine 1996, Weidlich 2000). The legal decision had been based partly on Russell’s atheism and partly on his fame as an advocate of free love and open marriages.

In 1954, Russell delivered his famous “Man’s Peril” broadcast on the BBC, condemning the Bikini H-bomb tests. A year later, together with Albert Einstein, he released the Russell-Einstein Manifesto calling for the curtailment of nuclear weapons. In 1957, he became a prime organizer of the first Pugwash Conference, which brought together a large number of scientists concerned about the nuclear issue. He became founding president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958 and Honorary President of the Committee of 100 in 1960.

In 1961, Russell was once again imprisoned, this time for a week in connection with anti-nuclear protests. The media coverage surrounding his conviction only served to enhance Russell’s reputation and to further inspire the many idealistic youth who were sympathetic to his anti-war and anti-nuclear message. Beginning in 1963, he began work on a variety of additional issues, including lobbying on behalf of political prisoners under the auspices of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation.

Throughout much of his life, Russell saw himself primarily as a writer rather than as a philosopher, listing “Author” as his profession on his passport. As he says in his Autobiography , “I resolved not to adopt a profession, but to devote myself to writing” (1967, 125). Upon being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, Russell used his acceptance speech once again to emphasize themes relating to his social activism.

Over the years, Russell has served as the subject of numerous creative works, including T.S. Eliot’s “Mr Apollinax” (1917), D.H. Lawrence’s “The Blind Man” (1920), Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow (1921), Bruce Duffy’s The World as I Found It (1987) and the graphic novel by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou, Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth (2009).

Readers wanting additional information about Russell’s life are encouraged to consult Russell’s five autobiographical volumes: Portraits from Memory and other Essays (A1956b), My Philosophical Development (1959) and The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (3 volumes, 1967, 1968, 1969). In addition, John Slater’s accessible Bertrand Russell (1994) gives a short but informative introduction to Russell’s life, work and influence. Other sources of biographical information include Ronald Clark’s authoritative The Life of Bertrand Russell (1975), Ray Monk’s two volumes, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (1996) and Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness (2000), and the first volume of Andrew Irvine’s Bertrand Russell: Critical Assessments (1999).

For a chronology of Russell’s major publications, readers are encouraged to consult the Primary Literature section of the Bibliography below. For a complete, descriptive bibliography, see A Bibliography of Bertrand Russell (3 volumes, 1994), by Kenneth Blackwell and Harry Ruja. A less detailed list appears in Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (1944).

For a detailed bibliography of the secondary literature surrounding Russell up to the close of the twentieth century, see Andrew Irvine, Bertrand Russell: Critical Assessments , Volume 1 (1999). For a list of new and forthcoming books relating to Russell, see the Forthcoming Books page at the Bertrand Russell Archives.

Russell’s main contributions to logic and the foundations of mathematics include his discovery of Russell’s paradox , also known as the Russell-Zermelo paradox (Linsky 2013), his development (together with Whitehead) of the theory of types , his championing of logicism (the view that mathematics is, in some significant sense, reducible to formal logic), his impressively general theory of logical relations, his formalization of the mathematics of quantity and of the real numbers, and his refining of the first-order predicate calculus.

Russell discovered the paradox that bears his name in 1901, while working on his Principles of Mathematics (1903). The paradox arises in connection with the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. Such a set, if it exists, will be a member of itself if and only if it is not a member of itself. In his 1901 draft of the Principles of Mathematics , Russell summarizes the problem as follows:

The axiom that all referents with respect to a given relation form a class seems, however, to require some limitation, and that for the following reason. We saw that some predicates can be predicated of themselves. Consider now those … of which this is not the case. … [T]here is no predicate which attaches to all of them and to no other terms. For this predicate will either be predicable or not predicable of itself. If it is predicable of itself, it is one of those referents by relation to which it was defined, and therefore, in virtue of their definition, it is not predicable of itself. Conversely, if it is not predicable of itself, then again it is one of the said referents, of all of which (by hypothesis) it is predicable, and therefore again it is predicable of itself. This is a contradiction. (CP, Vol. 3, 195)

The paradox is significant since, using classical logic, all sentences are entailed by a contradiction. Russell’s discovery thus prompted a large amount of work in logic, set theory, and the philosophy and foundations of mathematics .

Russell’s response to the paradox came between 1903 and 1908 with the development of his theory of types . It was clear to Russell that some form of restriction needed to be placed on the original comprehension (or abstraction) axiom of naïve set theory, the axiom that formalizes the intuition that any coherent condition (or property) may be used to determine a set. Russell’s basic idea was that reference to sets such as the so-called Russell set (the set of all sets that are not members of themselves) could be avoided by arranging all sentences into a hierarchy, beginning with sentences about individuals at the lowest level, sentences about sets of individuals at the next lowest level, sentences about sets of sets of individuals at the next lowest level, and so on. Using a vicious circle principle similar to that adopted by the mathematician Henri Poincaré, together with his so-called “no class” theory of classes (in which class terms gain meaning only when placed in the appropriate context), Russell was able to explain why the unrestricted comprehension axiom fails: propositional functions , such as the function “ x is a set,” may not be applied to themselves since self-application would involve a vicious circle. As a result, all objects for which a given condition (or predicate) holds must be at the same level or of the same “type.” Sentences about these objects will then always be higher in the hierarchy than the objects themselves.

Although first introduced in 1903, the theory of types was further developed by Russell in his 1908 article “Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types” and in the three-volume work he co-authored with Alfred North Whitehead , Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913). The theory thus admits of two versions, the “simple theory” of 1903 and the “ramified theory” of 1908. Both versions of the theory came under attack: the simple theory for being too weak, the ramified theory for being too strong. For some, it was important that any proposed solution be comprehensive enough to resolve all known paradoxes at once. For others, it was important that any proposed solution not disallow those parts of classical mathematics that remained consistent, even though they appeared to violate the vicious circle principle. (For discussion of related paradoxes, see Chapter 2 of the Introduction to Whitehead and Russell (1910), as well as the entry on paradoxes and contemporary logic in this encyclopedia.)

Russell himself had recognized several of these same concerns as early as 1903, noting that it was unlikely that any single solution would resolve all the known paradoxes. Together with Whitehead, he was also able to introduce a new axiom, the axiom of reducibility, which lessened the vicious circle principle’s scope of application and so resolved many of the most worrisome aspects of type theory. Even so, critics claimed that the axiom was simply too ad hoc to be justified philosophically. (For additional discussion see Linsky (1990), Linsky (2002) and Wahl (2011).)

Of equal significance during this period was Russell’s defense of logicism, the theory that mathematics is in some important sense reducible to logic. First defended in his 1901 article “Recent Work on the Principles of Mathematics,” and later in greater detail in his Principles of Mathematics and in Principia Mathematica , Russell’s logicism consisted of two main theses. The first was that all mathematical truths can be translated into logical truths or, in other words, that the vocabulary of mathematics constitutes a proper subset of the vocabulary of logic. The second was that all mathematical proofs can be recast as logical proofs or, in other words, that the theorems of mathematics constitute a proper subset of the theorems of logic. As Russell summarizes, “The fact that all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic is one of the greatest discoveries of our age; and when this fact has been established, the remainder of the principles of mathematics consists in the analysis of Symbolic Logic itself” (1903, 5).

Like Gottlob Frege , Russell’s basic idea for defending logicism was that numbers may be identified with classes of classes and that number-theoretic statements may be explained in terms of quantifiers and identity. Thus the number 1 is to be identified with the class of all unit classes, the number 2 with the class of all two-membered classes, and so on. Statements such as “There are at least two books” would be recast as statements such as “There is a book, x , and there is a book, y , and x is not identical to y .” Statements such as “There are exactly two books” would be recast as “There is a book, x , and there is a book, y , and x is not identical to y , and if there is a book, z , then z is identical to either x or y .” It follows that number-theoretic operations may then be explained in terms of set-theoretic operations such as intersection, union, and difference. In Principia Mathematica , Whitehead and Russell were able to provide many detailed derivations of major theorems in set theory, finite and transfinite arithmetic, and elementary measure theory. They were also able to develop a sophisticated theory of logical relations and a unique method of founding the real numbers. Even so, the issue of whether set theory itself can be said to have been successfully reduced to logic remained controversial. A fourth volume on geometry was planned but never completed.

Russell’s most important writings relating to these topics include not only his Principles of Mathematics (1903), “Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types” (1908), and Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913), but also his earlier Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (1897) and his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919a), the last of which was written while Russell was serving time in Brixton Prison as a result of his anti-war activities. Coincidentally, it was at roughly this same time that Ludwig Wittgenstein , Russell’s most famous pupil, was completing his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) while being detained as a prisoner of war at Monte Cassino in Italy during World War I.

Anyone needing assistance in deciphering the symbolism found in the more technical of Russell’s writings is encouraged to consult the Notation in Principia Mathematica entry in this encyclopedia.

In much the same way that Russell used logic in an attempt to clarify issues in the foundations of mathematics, he also used logic in an attempt to clarify issues in philosophy. As one of the founders of analytic philosophy, Russell made significant contributions to a wide variety of areas, including metaphysics , epistemology, ethics and political theory. His advances in logic and metaphysics also had significant influence on Rudolf Carnap and the Vienna Circle .

According to Russell, it is the philosopher’s job to discover a logically ideal language – a language capable of describing the world in such a way that we will not be misled by the accidental, imprecise surface structure of natural language. As Russell writes, “Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say” (1931, 82). Just as atomic facts (the association of properties and relations with individuals) combine to form molecular facts in the world itself, such a language will allow for the description of such combinations using logical connectives such as “and” and “or.” In addition to the existence of atomic and molecular facts, Russell also held that general facts (facts about “all” of something) are needed to complete our picture of the world. Famously, he vacillated on whether negative facts are also required (1918, 1919).

The reason Russell believes many ordinarily accepted statements are open to doubt is that they appear to refer to entities that may be known only through inference. Thus, underlying Russell’s various projects was not only his use of logical analysis, but also his long-standing aim of discovering whether, and to what extent, knowledge is possible. “There is one great question,” he writes in 1911. “Can human beings know anything, and if so, what and how? This question is really the most essentially philosophical of all questions” (quoted in Slater 1994, 67).

Motivating this question was the traditional problem of the external world. If our knowledge of the external world comes through inferences to the best explanation, and if such inferences are always fallible, what guarantee do we have that our beliefs are true? Russell’s response to this question was partly metaphysical and partly epistemological. On the metaphysical side, Russell developed his famous theory of logical atomism , in which the world is said to consist of a complex of logical atoms (such as “little patches of colour”) and their properties and relations. (The theory was crucial for influencing Wittgenstein’s theory of the same name.) Together these atoms and their properties form the facts which, in turn, combine to form logically complex objects. What we normally take to be inferred entities (for example, enduring physical objects) are then understood as logical constructions formed from the immediately given entities of sensation, viz., “sensibilia.”

On the epistemological side, Russell argues that it is also important to show how each questionable entity may be reduced to, or defined in terms of, another entity (or entities) whose existence is more certain. For example, on this view, an ordinary physical object that normally might be thought to be known only through inference may be defined instead

as a certain series of appearances, connected with each other by continuity and by certain causal laws. … More generally, a ‘thing’ will be defined as a certain series of aspects, namely those which would commonly be said to be of the thing. To say that a certain aspect is an aspect of a certain thing will merely mean that it is one of those which, taken serially, are the thing. (1914a, 106–107)

The reason we are able to do this, says Russell, is that

our world is not wholly a matter of inference. There are things that we know without asking the opinion of men of science. If you are too hot or too cold, you can be perfectly aware of this fact without asking the physicist what heat and cold consist of. … We may give the name ‘data’ to all the things of which we are aware without inference. (1959, 23)

We can then use these data (or “sensibilia” or “ sense data ”) with which we are directly acquainted to construct the relevant objects of knowledge. Similarly, numbers may be reduced to collections of classes; points and instants may be reduced to ordered classes of volumes and events; and classes themselves may be reduced to propositional functions.

It is with these kinds of examples in mind that Russell suggests we adopt what he calls “the supreme maxim in scientific philosophizing,” namely the principle that “Whenever possible, logical constructions,” or as he also sometimes puts it, “logical fictions,” are “to be substituted for inferred entities” (1914c, 155; cf. 1914a, 107, and 1924, 326). Anything that resists construction in this sense may be said to be an ontological atom. Such objects are atomic, both in the sense that they fail to be composed of individual, substantial parts, and in the sense that they exist independently of one another. Their corresponding propositions are also atomic, both in the sense that they contain no other propositions as parts, and in the sense that the members of any pair of true atomic propositions will be logically independent of one another. Russell believes that formal logic, if carefully developed, will mirror precisely, not only the various relations between all such propositions, but their various internal structures as well.

It is in this context that Russell also introduces his famous distinction between two kinds of knowledge of truths: that which is direct, intuitive, certain and infallible, and that which is indirect, derivative, uncertain and open to error (1905, 41f; 1911, 1912, and 1914b). To be justified, every indirect knowledge claim must be capable of being derived from more fundamental, direct or intuitive knowledge claims. The kinds of truths that are capable of being known directly include truths about immediate facts of sensation and truths of logic. Examples are discussed in The Problems of Philosophy (1912a) where Russell states that propositions with the highest degree of self-evidence (what he here calls “intuitive knowledge”) include “those which merely state what is given in sense, and also certain abstract logical and arithmetical principles, and (though with less certainty) some ethical propositions” (1912a, 109).

Eventually, Russell supplemented this distinction between direct and indirect knowledge of truths with his equally famous distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. As Russell explains, “I say that I am acquainted with an object when I have a direct cognitive relation to that object, i.e. when I am directly aware of the object itself. When I speak of a cognitive relation here, I do not mean the sort of relation which constitutes judgment, but the sort which constitutes presentation” (1911, 209). Later, he clarifies this point by adding that acquaintance involves, not knowledge of truths, but knowledge of things (1912a, 44). Thus, while intuitive knowledge and derivative knowledge both involve knowledge of propositions (or truths), knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description both involve knowledge of things (or objects). This distinction is slightly complicated by the fact that, even though knowledge by description is in part based upon knowledge of truths, it is still knowledge of things, and not of truths. (I am grateful to Russell Wahl for reminding me of this point.) Since it is things with which we have direct acquaintance that are the least questionable members of our ontology, it is these objects upon which Russell ultimately bases his epistemology.

Also relevant was Russell’s reliance upon his so-called regressive method (Irvine 1989, Mayo-Wilson 2011) and his eventual abandoning of foundationalism in favour of a more recognizably coherentist approach to knowledge (Irvine 2004). As Russell puts it, even in logic and mathematics

We tend to believe the premises because we can see that their consequences are true, instead of believing the consequences because we know the premises to be true. But the inferring of premises from consequences is the essence of induction; thus the method in investigating the principles of mathematics is really an inductive method, and is substantially the same as the method of discovering general laws in any other science. (1907, 273–274)

Russell’s contributions to metaphysics and epistemology are also unified by his views concerning the centrality of scientific knowledge and the importance of there being an underlying methodology common to philosophy and science. In the case of philosophy, this methodology expresses itself through Russell’s use of logical analysis (Hager 1994, Irvine 2004). In fact, Russell often claims that he has more confidence in his methodology than in any particular philosophical conclusion.

This broad conception of philosophy arose in part from Russell’s idealist origins (Hylton 1990a, Griffin 1991). This is so, even though Russell tells us that his one, true revolution in philosophy came as a result of his break from idealism. Russell saw that the idealist doctrine of internal relations led to a series of contradictions regarding asymmetrical (and other) relations necessary for mathematics. As he reports,

It was towards the end of 1898 that Moore and I rebelled against both Kant and Hegel. Moore led the way, but I followed closely in his footsteps. … [Our rebellion centred upon] the doctrine that fact is in general independent of experience. Although we were in agreement, I think that we differed as to what most interested us in our new philosophy. I think that Moore was most concerned with the rejection of idealism, while I was most interested in the rejection of monism. (1959, 54)

The two ideas were closely connected through the so-called doctrine of internal relations. In contrast to this doctrine, Russell proposed his own new doctrine of external relations:

The doctrine of internal relations held that every relation between two terms expresses, primarily, intrinsic properties of the two terms and, in ultimate analysis, a property of the whole which the two compose. With some relations this view is plausible. Take, for example, love or hate. If A loves B, this relation exemplifies itself and may be said to consist in certain states of mind of A. Even an atheist must admit that a man can love God. It follows that love of God is a state of the man who feels it, and not properly a relational fact. But the relations that interested me were of a more abstract sort. Suppose that A and B are events, and A is earlier than B. I do not think that this implies anything in A in virtue of which, independently of B, it must have a character which we inaccurately express by mentioning B. Leibniz gives an extreme example. He says that, if a man living in Europe has a wife in India and the wife dies without his knowing it, the man undergoes an intrinsic change at the moment of her death. (1959, 54)

This is the type of doctrine Russell opposed, especially with respect to the asymmetrical relations necessary for mathematics. For example, consider two numbers, one of which is found earlier than the other in a given series:

If A is earlier than B, then B is not earlier than A. If you try to express the relation of A to B by means of adjectives of A and B, you will have to make the attempt by means of dates. You may say that the date of A is a property of A and the date of B is a property of B, but that will not help you because you will have to go on to say that the date of A is earlier than the date of B, so that you will have found no escape from the relation. If you adopt the plan of regarding the relation as a property of the whole composed of A and B, you are in a still worse predicament, for in that whole A and B have no order and therefore you cannot distinguish between “A is earlier than B” and “B is earlier than A.” As asymmetrical relations are essential in most parts of mathematics, this doctrine was important. (1959, 54–55)

Thus, by the end of 1898 Russell had abandoned the idealism that he had been encouraged to adopt as a student at Cambridge, along with his original Kantian methodology. In its place he adopted a new, pluralistic realism . As a result, he soon became famous as an advocate of “the new realism” and of his “new philosophy of logic,” emphasizing as he did the importance of modern logic for philosophical analysis. The underlying themes of this revolution included Russell’s belief in pluralism, his emphasis on anti-psychologism and his belief in the importance of science. Each of these themes remained central to his philosophy for the remainder of his life (Hager 1994, Weitz 1944).

Russell’s most important writings relating to these topics include Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description (1911), The Problems of Philosophy (1912a), “Our Knowledge of the External World” (1914a), On the Nature of Acquaintance (1914b, published more completely in Collected Papers , Vol. 7), “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” (1918, 1919), “Logical Atomism” (1924), The Analysis of Mind (1921), The Analysis of Matter (1927a), Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948), and Theory of Knowledge (CP, Vol. 7).

Russell’s philosophical method has at its core the making and testing of hypotheses through the weighing of evidence. Hence Russell’s comment that he wished to emphasize the “scientific method” in philosophy. His method also requires the rigorous analysis of problematic propositions using the machinery of first-order logic. It was Russell’s belief that by using the new logic of his day, philosophers would be able to exhibit the underlying “logical form” of natural-language statements. A statement’s logical form, in turn, would help resolve various problems of reference associated with the ambiguity and vagueness of natural language.

Since the introduction of the modern predicate calculus, it has been common to use three separate logical notations (“ Px ”, “ x = y ”, and “∃ x ”) to represent three separate senses of the natural-language word “is”: the is of predication, e.g. “Cicero is wise”; the is of identity, e.g. “Cicero is Tully”; and the is of existence, e.g. “Cicero is”. It was Russell’s suggestion that, just as we use logic to make clear these distinctions, we can also use logic to discover other ontologically significant distinctions, distinctions that should be reflected in the analysis we give of each sentence’s correct logical form.

On Russell’s view, the subject matter of philosophy is then distinguished from that of the sciences only by the generality and a prioricity of philosophical statements, not by the underlying methodology of the discipline. In philosophy, just as in mathematics, Russell believed that it was by applying logical machinery and insights that advances in analysis would be made.

Russell’s most famous example of his new “analytic method” concerns so-called denoting phrases, phrases that include both definite descriptions and proper names. Like Alexius Meinong , Russell had initially adopted the view that every denoting phrase (for example, “Scott,” “the author of Waverley ,” “the number two,” “the golden mountain”) denoted, or referred to, an existing entity. On this view, even fictional and imaginary entities had to be real in order to serve as truth-makers for true sentences such as “Unicorns have exactly one horn.” By the time his landmark article, “On Denoting,” appeared in 1905, Russell had modified his extreme realism, substituting in its place the view that denoting phrases need not possess a theoretical unity. As Russell puts it, the assumption that every denoting phrase must refer to an existing entity was the type of assumption that exhibited “a failure of that feeling for reality which ought to be preserved even in the most abstract studies” (1919a, 165).

While logically proper names (words such as “this” or “that” which refer to sensations of which an agent is immediately aware) do have referents associated with them, descriptive phrases (such as “the smallest number less than pi”) should be viewed merely as collections of quantifiers (such as “all” and “some”) and propositional functions (such as “ x is a number”). As such, they are not to be viewed as referring terms but, rather, as “incomplete symbols.” In other words, they are to be viewed as symbols that take on meaning within appropriate contexts, but that remain meaningless in isolation.

Put another way, it was Russell’s insight that some phrases may contribute to the meaning (or reference) of a sentence without themselves being meaningful. As he explains,

If “the author of Waverley ” meant anything other than “Scott”, “Scott is the author of Waverley ” would be false, which it is not. If “the author of Waverley ” meant “Scott”, “Scott is the author of Waverley ” would be a tautology, which it is not. Therefore, “the author of Waverley ” means neither “Scott” nor anything else – i.e. “the author of Waverley ” means nothing, Q.E.D. (1959, 85)

If Russell is correct, it follows that in a sentence such as

(1) The present King of France is bald,

the definite description “The present King of France” plays a role quite different from the role a proper name such as “Scott” plays in the sentence

(2) Scott is bald.

Letting K abbreviate the predicate “is a present King of France” and B abbreviate the predicate “is bald,” Russell assigns sentence (1) the logical form

(1′) There is an x such that Kx , for any y , if Ky then y=x , and Bx .

Alternatively, in the notation of the predicate calculus, we write

(1″) ∃ x [( Kx & ∀ y ( Ky → y=x )) & Bx ].

In contrast, by allowing s to abbreviate the name “Scott,” Russell assigns sentence (2) the very different logical form

(2′) Bs .

This distinction between logical forms allows Russell to explain three important puzzles.

The first concerns the operation of the Law of Excluded Middle and how this law relates to denoting terms. According to one reading of the Law of Excluded Middle, it must be the case that either “The present King of France is bald” is true or “The present King of France is not bald” is true. But if so, both sentences appear to entail the existence of a present King of France, clearly an undesirable result, given that France is a republic and so has no king. Russell’s analysis shows how this conclusion can be avoided. By appealing to analysis (1′′), it follows that there is a way to deny (1) without being committed to the existence of a present King of France, namely by changing the scope of the negation operator and thereby accepting that “It is not the case that there exists a present King of France who is bald” is true.

The second puzzle concerns the Law of Identity as it operates in (so-called) opaque contexts. Even though “Scott is the author of Waverley ” is true, it does not follow that the two referring terms “Scott” and “the author of Waverley ” need be interchangeable in every situation. Thus, although “George IV wanted to know whether Scott was the author of Waverley ” is true, “George IV wanted to know whether Scott was Scott” is, presumably, false.

Russell’s distinction between the logical forms associated with the use of proper names and definite descriptions again shows why this is so. To see this, we once again let s abbreviate the name “Scott.” We also let w abbreviate “ Waverley ” and A abbreviate the two-place predicate “is the author of.” It then follows that the sentence

is not at all equivalent to the sentence

(4) ∃ x [( Axw & ∀ y ( Ayw → y=x )) & x=s ].

Sentence (3), for example, is a necessary truth, while sentence (4) is not.

The third puzzle relates to true negative existential claims, such as the claim “The golden mountain does not exist.” Here, once again, by treating definite descriptions as having a logical form distinct from that of proper names, Russell is able to give an account of how a speaker may be committed to the truth of a negative existential without also being committed to the belief that the subject term has reference. That is, the claim that Scott does not exist is false since

(5) ~∃ x ( x=s )

is self-contradictory. (After all, there must exist at least one thing that is identical to s since it is a logical truth that s is identical to itself!) In contrast, the claim that a golden mountain does not exist may be true since, assuming that G abbreviates the predicate “is golden” and M abbreviates the predicate “is a mountain,” there is nothing contradictory about

(6) ~∃ x ( Gx & Mx ).

Russell’s most important writings relating to his theory of descriptions include not only “On Denoting” (1905), but also The Principles of Mathematics (1903), Principia Mathematica (1910) and Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919). (See too Kaplan 1970, Kroon 2009 and Stevens 2011.)

Yet another of Russell’s contributions is his defence of neutral monism , the view that the world consists of just one type of substance which is neither exclusively mental nor exclusively physical. Like idealism (the view that nothing exists but the mental) and physicalism (the view that nothing exists but the physical), neutral monism rejects dualism (the view that there exist distinct mental and physical substances). However, unlike both idealism and physicalism, neutral monism holds that this single existing substance may be viewed in some contexts as being mental and in others as being physical. As Russell puts it,

“Neutral monism” – as opposed to idealistic monism and materialistic monism – is the theory that the things commonly regarded as mental and the things commonly regarded as physical do not differ in respect of any intrinsic property possessed by the one set and not by the other, but differ only in respect of arrangement and context. (CP, Vol. 7, 15)

To help understand this general suggestion, Russell introduces his analogy of a postal directory:

The theory may be illustrated by comparison with a postal directory, in which the same names come twice over, once in alphabetical and once in geographical order; we may compare the alphabetical order to the mental, and the geographical order to the physical. The affinities of a given thing are quite different in the two orders, and its causes and effects obey different laws. Two objects may be connected in the mental world by the association of ideas, and in the physical world by the law of gravitation. … Just as every man in the directory has two kinds of neighbours, namely alphabetical neighbours and geographical neighbours, so every object will lie at the intersection of two causal series with different laws, namely the mental series and the physical series. ‘Thoughts’ are not different in substance from ‘things’; the stream of my thoughts is a stream of things, namely of the things which I should commonly be said to be thinking of; what leads to its being called a stream of thoughts is merely that the laws of succession are different from the physical laws. (CP, Vol. 7, 15)

In other words, when viewed as being mental, a thought or idea may have associated with it other thoughts or ideas that seem related even though, when viewed as being physical, they have very little in common. As Russell explains, “In my mind, Caesar may call up Charlemagne, whereas in the physical world the two were widely sundered” (CP, Vol. 7, 15). Even so, it is a mistake, on this view, to postulate two distinct types of thing (the idea of Caesar and the man Caesar) that are composed of two distinct substances (the mental and the physical). Instead, “The whole duality of mind and matter, according to this theory, is a mistake; there is only one kind of stuff out of which the world is made, and this stuff is called mental in one arrangement, physical in the other” (CP, Vol. 7, 15).

Russell appears to have developed this theory around 1913, while working on his Theory of Knowledge manuscript and on his 1914 Monist article, “On the Nature of Acquaintance.” Decades later, in 1964, he remarked that “I am not conscious of any serious change in my philosophy since I adopted neutral monism” (Eames 1967, 511). Even so, over the next several decades Russell continued to do a large amount of original work, authoring such important books as The Analysis of Mind (1921), The Analysis of Matter (1927a), An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (1940) and Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948).

Today several authors, including David Chalmers (1996, 155), Thomas Nagel (2002, 209) and Erik Banks (2014, 114), have shown renewed interest in considering Russell’s general approach to the mind.

In addition to the above titles by Russell, Russell’s most influential writings relating to his theories of metaphysics and epistemology include Our Knowledge of the External World (1914a), “The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics” (1914c), “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” (1918, 1919), “On Propositions: What They Are and How They Mean” (1919b) and An Outline of Philosophy (1927b).

Russell sums up his views about religion quite plainly: “My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race” (A1957, 18). According to Russell, not only are most religious beliefs intellectually and morally pernicious, the religious point of view itself “is a conception quite unworthy of free men” (A1957, 17). Throughout his life, Russell thus put significant effort into opposing religious ideas and institutions of all kinds. As he reports in his Autobiography , upon arriving at Brixton Prison in 1918, “I was much cheered on my arrival by the warder at the gate, who had to take particulars about me. He asked my religion, and I replied ‘agnostic.’ He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: ‘Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God.’ This remark kept me cheerful for about a week” (1968, 34).

Russell’s discussions about religion fall largely into four categories: his criticisms of arguments favouring the existence of God; his observation that religion has historically served to impede the advancement of knowledge; his observation that religion has regularly advanced theories of morality that are more harmful than good; and his analysis of religion, not simply as a body of belief but as a mode of feeling.

Perhaps most importantly, Russell opened the door to the demystification of religion, writing in plain language at a time when people had been told that serious discussions about religion required a detailed knowledge of Latin and church history. The result was twofold: first, that many people came to understand religion as a subject about which they were entitled to develop their own beliefs and views; second, that arguments from ecclesiastical authority suddenly became less formidable and less influential than they had been for centuries. In this respect, it is not too much to say that Russell did as much to usher in the twentieth century’s age of secularism as Luther did to usher in the sixteenth century’s age of Protestantism. As the Nobel Prize committee noted, the 1950 award went to Russell “in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought” (Nobel Media 2020). Russell himself reports that he received the award primarily for his anti-religious book, Marriage and Morals (1969, 30).

Russell’s analysis of traditional arguments in favour of the existence of God appears in both his popular and his philosophical writings. In his book on Leibniz, he discusses Leibniz’s treatment of several such arguments, noting that they are “the weakest part in Leibniz’s philosophy, the part most full of inconsistencies” (1900, sec. 106, p. 172). In his more popular writings, he repeatedly emphasizes his views about religion, noting that “The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd” (1929, 58). In his 1922 booklet Free Thought and Official Propaganda , he tells his readers that “I am myself a dissenter from all known religions, and I hope that every kind of religious belief will die out” (1922a, 1). Later, in his 1941 collection of essays Let the People Think , he adds that “modern science gives us no indication whatever of the existence of the soul” (A1941, 113), and in the preface to his 1957 book Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects , he notes that “I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue” (1957, xi).

Russell’s criticism of arguments traditionally offered in favour of the existence of God includes his discussion of the First Cause Argument, the Problem of Evil, the Ontological Argument, the Teleological Argument, the Argument from Pre-established Harmony, the Natural Law Argument, the Argument from Morality, the Remediation of Injustice Argument and the Argument from Religious Experience.

Underlying all of these discussions is Hume’s suggestion that belief needs to be proportioned to the available evidence, an idea neatly summed up in Russell’s teapot analogy:

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. It is customary to suppose that, if a belief is widespread, there must be something reasonable about it. I do not think this view can be held by anyone who has studied history. (1952, 547–8)

The First Cause (or Cosmological ) Argument is the argument that since everything has a cause, there must have been a first cause, and it is to this first cause that we give the name God. In response to this argument, Russell notes the obvious: If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If everything must have a creator, then God must have a creator. Alternatively, if God can exist without a cause, then it is just as likely that the world can exist without a cause. In fact, this is even more likely than the existence of an uncaused, hypothetical, supernatural creator who manufactures and then intervenes in the world, since there “is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all” (A1957, 4). To those who suggest that unlike God, since every part of the world has a cause, it follows that the world itself must have a cause, Russell notes that just because every man has a mother it does not follow that the human race must have a mother (A1957, 152). Put in more formal language, although causation connects each contingent stage of the world to the next, it need not follow that there is an “extramundane” creator of the world as a whole (1900, sec. 109, p. 176). To those who claim that without such a creator, there can never be sufficient reason for “why there are any states at all,” Russell points out that the traditional view of God as being uncaused because he exists necessarily is simply inconsistent with God's creation of a contingent universe. No series of contingent states may have come about by the necessity that accompanies God’s actions, since the contingency of existential propositions rests on the assertion that God acts, not from necessity but contingently (1900, sec. 110, p. 177). Thus, either the world itself has no supernatural cause or the supernatural cause itself will act and exist contingently, and so it, too, cannot be necessary and must require a creator.

Related to this argument is the Problem of Evil . As Russell notes, the creation of a contingent world could never eliminate God’s responsibility for the existence of evil:

The world, we are told, was created by a God who is both good and omnipotent. Before He created the world He foresaw all the pain and misery that it would contain; He is therefore responsible for all of it. It is useless to argue that the pain in the world is due to sin. In the first place, this is not true; it is not sin that causes rivers to overflow their banks or volcanoes to erupt. But even if it were true, it would make no difference. If I were going to beget a child knowing that the child was going to be a homicidal maniac, I should be responsible for his crimes. If God knew in advance the sins of which man would be guilty, He was clearly responsible for all the consequences of those sins when He decided to create man. (A1957, 22)

In response to the Ontological Argument , the argument that since perfection implies existence, the idea of a non-existent, perfect God is self-contradictory, Russell points out that the argument rests ultimately on the mistaken claim that existence is a property or, in Russell’s terminology, a predicate. His reasoning is as follows: If existence were a predicate then, like all other predicates, it would (or would not) be part of the nature of any given substance. But upon being created, each such substance would acquire a new predicate. “Hence the special position of existence, as a contingent and synthetic predicate, falls to the ground. If all substances always contain all their predicates, then all substances always contain or do not contain the predicate existence, and God must be as powerless over this predicate as over any other. To add the predicate existence must be metaphysically impossible. Thus, either creation is self-contradictory, or, if existence is not a predicate, the ontological argument is unsound” (1900, sec. 115, p. 185).

In response to the Teleological Argument (or Argument from Design ), the argument that the complexity and purpose we find in the world shows that there must have been a creator, Russell points out that “since the time of Darwin we understand much better why living creatures are adapted to their environment. It is not that their environment was made to be suitable to them, but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaption. There is no evidence of design about it” (A1957, 6). Russell also reminds his readers about the pre-Darwin observation made famous by David Hume, that “it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects,” is the best that an omnipotent, omniscient creator could have been able to create in millions of years. (A1957, 6).

In response to the Argument from Pre-established Harmony , the argument that “The world is so well constructed, we are told, that it must have had a highly skillful Architect” or, as Leibniz preferred to say, that “the harmony of all the monads can only have arisen from a common cause” (1900, sec. 114, p. 183), Russell notes that this is simply a version of the Argument from Design and that “Being more palpably inadequate than any of the others, it has acquired a popularity which they have never enjoyed” (1900, sec. 114, p. 183).

In response to the Natural Law Argument , the argument that the existence of laws of nature shows that there must have been a lawgiver, Russell points out that the argument arises simply as a result of a confusion between natural and human laws (A1957, 5). Human laws are commands that we choose to follow or ignore. In contrast, laws of nature are simply descriptions of how things in fact are. There is thus no need to assume a lawmaker unless the Argument from Design is sound, which it is not. Aternatively, if we assume there must have been a lawmaker who brought about these laws, this raises the question of why the lawmaker chose to make these laws and not others: “If you say that He did it simply from His own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted. If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues He had a reason for giving those laws rather than others – the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it – if there was a reason for the laws which God gave, then God himself was subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary” (A1957, 5–6). In either case, there is no need to postulate a supernatural lawmaker.

In response to the Argument from Morality (or the Divine Command Theory Argument ), the argument that there could be no right or wrong unless God existed, Russell adapts the reply given by Socrates to Euthyphro 2,300 years earlier (Plato, Euthyphro , 5d-15e). Assuming there is a difference between right and wrong, is this difference due to God’s commands or not? If it is, then for God there must have originally been “no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good” (A1957, 8). Alternatively, if we take a more traditional theological line and insist that God is good, and it is for this reason that God commands some actions and not others, then we will also have to say “that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God’s fiat, because God’s fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that He made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God” (A1957, 8). Of course, we might then feel compelled to suggest the existence of a superior deity, one who ordered the God who created world to act as he did, but this option will be of no value to the traditional theist. There is also “the line that some of the gnostics took up – a line which I often thought was a very plausible one – that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking,” but again, this is not the kind of option that would give comfort to the traditional theist (A1957, 8).

In response to the Remediation of Injustice Argument , the argument that God is needed to bring justice to the world, to ensure that at the end of time the scales of justice have been balanced, Russell asks what evidence we have that such remediation is ever going to occur. “In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying; but if you are going to have justice in the universe as a whole you have to suppose a future life to redress the balance of life here on earth. So they say that there must be a God, and there must be heaven and hell in order that in the long run there may be justice” (A1957, 9). Despite such wishful thinking, we have no concrete evidence that such remediation is ever going to occur: “Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue: ‘The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance.’ You would say: ‘Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment,’ and that is really what a scientific person would argue about the universe” (A1957, 9).

Finally, in response to the Argument from Religious Experience , the argument that people report having had direct experience of the supernatural or the divine, Russell simply notes that we are just as likely to make mistakes when reporting such experiences as we are to make mistakes in other areas of our lives: “If you have jaundice you see things yellow that are not yellow. You’re making a mistake” (A1957, 161). Thus, it is our total body of evidence that needs to be considered when making such judgments, a body of evidence that leans heavily against the existence of anything divine or supernatural.

On the question of whether religion has impeded the advancement of knowledge and introduced harmful theories of morality, Russell writes equally plainly: “The objections to religion are of two sorts – intellectual and moral. The intellectual objection is that there is no reason to suppose any religion true; the moral objection is that religious precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they are, and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow” (A1957, 23). The conclusion to be drawn, says Russell, is that religious faith has served as a shield against the advancement of knowledge, both in ethics and in the sciences: “When two men of science disagree, they do not invoke the secular arm; they wait for further evidence to decide the issue, because, as men of science, they know that neither is infallible. But when two theologians differ, since there are no criteria to which either can appeal, there is nothing for it but mutual hatred and an open or covert appeal to force” (A1957, 173). Today, no one

believes that the world was created in 4004 BC; but not so very long ago skepticism on this point was thought an abominable crime … It is no credit to the orthodox that they do not now believe all the absurdities that were believed 150 years ago. The gradual emasculation of the Christian doctrine has been effected in spite of the most vigorous resistance, and solely as the result of the onslaughts of Freethinkers (A1957, 28).

The tortures of the Inquisition, the condoning of slavery in the Bible and the Koran, the burning of women and men for witchcraft, the coming together to pray for deliverance at times of plague (which only led to the further spread of disease), all resulted from religious beliefs and practices. The conclusion, says Russell, is obvious: “the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs” (A1957, 15).

In his own time, Russell was criticized severely for his view that the church’s attempt to keep sexual knowledge away from the young was “extremely dangerous to mental and physical heath” (A1957, 21). Against the practice of his time, he advocated sex education for the young. He also recommended temporary, childless marriages for those not ready to begin a family and held that “Christian ethics inevitably, through the emphasis laid upon sexual virtue, did a great deal to degrade the position of women” (1929, 60–61). In support of his view that the writings handed down by the church fathers were “full of invectives against Woman,” he quotes the historian, W.E.H. Lecky: “Woman was represented as the door to hell, as the mother of all human ills. She should be ashamed at the very thought that she is a woman. She should live in continual penance, on account of the curses she has brought upon the world” (1929, 61). Russell concludes that “It is only in quite modern times that women have regained the degree of freedom which they enjoyed in the Roman Empire” (1929, 60–61).

Among Russell’s critics, it was argued that in this case and others like it, Russell had simply got his facts wrong:

It is incredible that a philosopher of note could be so unreliable, so unfamiliar with the fact that early Christianity has exalted the conception of women in the adoration given to Mary and the saints, and that by treating marriage as a sacrament it emancipated women of all classes from the old traditions of the absolute authority of parents and the seignorial power of feudal lords. It is intellectual blindness not to recognize the revolutionary import of early Christianity, whatever the contemporary feeling concerning the sacrament of marriage may be, when it set itself like a wall against the tides of boundless sensuality and impressed upon the Roman world the sanctity of human life. (Kayden 1930, 88)

Contrary to what was often said about his personal life, it is also worth noting that Russell did not practice or defend a libertine ethic. He thought that sex was a natural need, like food and drink, but that it should not be trivialized by disassociating it “from serious emotion and from feelings of affection” (1929, 127). As Alan Wood notes, the result was that “More than anyone else, he changed the outlook on sex morality of a whole new generation; and during his lifetime he saw the cause of Women’s Rights, once regarded as a crank’s crusade, end up as an established part of the laws and customs of the land” (Wood, 1957, 166). As Wood also notes,

Perhaps the finest tribute to his success is that few people now even realize the nature of the old ideas. Russell, it must be repeated, was fighting a cruel and indefensible state of affairs where sexual ignorance was deliberately fostered, so a boy might think the changes of puberty were signs of some dreadful disease, and a girl might marry without knowing anything of what lay ahead of her on her bridal night; were women were taught to look on sex, not as a source of joy, but of painful matrimonial duty; where prudery went to the extent of covering the legs of pianos in draperies; where artificial mystery evoked morbid curiosity, and where humbug went hand in hand with unhappiness … . (Wood, 1957, 174)

Underlying Russell’s writings on religion was also his observation that religion is not simply a body of doctrine but also a vehicle for the expression of emotion. This explains why arguments against the existence of the supernatural, although influential among intellectuals, are not the main driving force behind most religious belief (A1957, 9). Instead, religion is based largely on fear and ignorance: our fear of the mysterious, our lack of knowledge of natural causes, our fear of death (A1957, 16).

With regard to the propositional content of religion, or what Russell calls theology, Russell notes that central to the idea of Christianity are belief in God, belief in immortality and, at the very least, “belief that Christ was, if not divine, at least the best and wisest of men. If you are not going to believe that much about Christ, I do not think you have any right to call yourself a Christian” (A1957, 2). Since it is this propositional content that varies from religion to religion, it turns out, as a matter of logic, that at most one religion can be true (A1957, xi).

Even so, as Jack Pitt writes, Russell is more than just a “heroic heretic hounding the sacred cows of a sterile tradition while spreading a new gospel of human freedom and secular enlightenment” (Pitt 1975, 152). Instead, “Russell sees religion (as distinct from theology) as essentially a mode of feeling, perhaps as a set of attitudes which inevitably have practical consequences for the ethical tone and style of a person’s life” (Pitt 1975, 160). Russell says much the same thing when he notes that

Religion has three main aspects. In the first place, there are a man’s serious personal beliefs, insofar as they have to do with the nature of the world and the conduct of life. In the second place there is theology. In the third place there is institutionalized religion, i.e., the churches. The first of these aspects is somewhat vague, the but word “religion” is coming more and more to be used in this sense. … What makes my attitude towards religion complex is that, although I consider some form of personal religion highly desirable, and feel many people unsatisfactory through the lack of it, I cannot accept the theology of any well-known religion, and I incline to think that most churches at most times have done more harm than good. (Schilpp 1944, 725–6).

One suggestion about the source of this three-fold division is connected to Russell’s love of Ottoline Morrell. Separating religious feelings from religious belief would have allowed Russell to find some common ground with Morrell’s spiritually, without having to accept any particular theology. (See Swanson, 2019, 93–4 for a helpful discussion of this suggestion). An alternative view is that the complexity of Russell’s view was generated by the fact that even our most serious emotions and most important feelings need not result solely from the propositional content of our beliefs. Among Russell’s most famous suggestions about the nature of the good life is his observation that “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge” (A1957, 44). For Russell, this is a view so basic that it is more like a goal than a description. As a result, it becomes impossible to think of it as a claim purely connected to propositional content. As Russell explains,

Suppose, for instance, your child is ill. Love makes you wish to cure it, and science tells you how to do so. There is not an intermediate stage of ethical theory, where it is demonstrated that your child had better be cured. Your act springs directly from desire for an end, together with knowledge of means. This is equally true of all acts, whether good or bad. (A1957, 48)

The result is that in many cases, emotion drives belief: “I cannot, therefore, prove that my view of the good life is right; I can only state my view, and hope that as many as possible will agree” (A1957, 44).

These observations should not be interpreted as giving unfettered licence to religious belief. As Russell points out “some very important virtues are more likely to be found among those who reject religious dogmas than among those who accept them. I think this applies especially to the virtue of truthfulness or intellectual integrity. I mean by intellectual integrity the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive” (A1957, 169). In the case of religion, it is not simply that such virtues are ignored. Instead, they are positively frustrated:

If theology is thought necessary to virtue and if candid inquirers see no reason to think the theology true, the authorities will set to work to discourage candid inquiry. In former centuries, they did so by burning the inquirers at the stake. In Russia they still have methods which are little better; but in Western countries the authorities have perfected somewhat milder forms of persuasion. Of these, schools are perhaps the most important: the young must be preserved from hearing the arguments in favour of the opinions which the authorities dislike, and those who nevertheless persist in showing an inquiring disposition will incur social displeasure and, if possible, be made to feel morally reprehensible. (A1957, 171)

Societies as well as individuals, says Russell, need to choose whether the good life is one that is guided by honest inquiry and the weighing of evidence, or by the familiarity of superstition and the comforts of religion.

Russell’s writings on religion and related topics include Chapter 15 of his A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (1900), as well as A Free Man’s Worship (1923b), Why I Am Not a Christian (1927c), reprinted in Why I am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects (A1957), “The Existence and Nature of God” (1939), “Is There a God?” (1952) and What I Believe (A2013).

Russell’s significant social influence stems from three main sources: his long-standing social activism, his many writings on the social and political issues of his day as well as on more theoretical concerns, and his popularizations of numerous technical writings in philosophy and the natural sciences.

Among Russell’s many popularizations are his two best-selling works, The Problems of Philosophy (1912) and A History of Western Philosophy (1945). Both of these books, as well as his numerous books popularizing science, have done much to educate and inform generations of general readers. His History is still widely read and did much to initiate twentieth-century research on a wide range of historical figures from the presocratics to Leibniz . His Problems is still used as an introductory textbook over a century after it was first published. Both books can be read by the layman with satisfaction. Other popular books, particularly those relating to developments in modern science such as The ABC of Atoms (1923a) and The ABC of Relativity (1925), are now of more historical interest. Even so, they continue to convey something of the intellectual excitement associated with advances in twentieth-century science and philosophy.

Naturally enough, Russell saw a link between education in this broad sense and social progress. As he put it, “Education is the key to the new world” (1926, 83). Partly this is due to our need to understand nature, but equally important is our need to understand each other:

The thing, above all, that a teacher should endeavor to produce in his pupils, if democracy is to survive, is the kind of tolerance that springs from an endeavor to understand those who are different from ourselves. It is perhaps a natural human impulse to view with horror and disgust all manners and customs different from those to which we are used. Ants and savages put strangers to death. And those who have never traveled either physically or mentally find it difficult to tolerate the queer ways and outlandish beliefs of other nations and other times, other sects and other political parties. This kind of ignorant intolerance is the antithesis of a civilized outlook, and is one of the gravest dangers to which our overcrowded world is exposed. (1950, 121)

It is in this same context that Russell is famous for suggesting that a widespread reliance upon evidence, rather than superstition, would have enormous social consequences: “I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration,” says Russell, “a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true” (A1928, 11).

Unlike Russell’s views about the importance of education, the precise connection between Russell’s political activism and his more theoretical work has been more controversial. In part, this has been because Russell himself repeatedly maintained that he saw no significant connection between his philosophical work and his political activism. Others have seen things differently. One of the best summaries is given by Alan Wood:

Russell sometimes maintained, partly I think out of perverseness, that there was no connection between his philosophical and political opinions. … But in fact I think there are perfectly obvious connections between Russell’s philosophical and other views. … To begin with, it is natural enough to find an analytic anti-monist philosopher like Russell upholding the individual against the state, whereas Hegel did the reverse … [In addition, the] whole bent of Russell’s mind in philosophy was an attempt to eliminate the a priori and to accentuate the empirical; and there was exactly the same trend in his political thinking … Unless it is realized that Russell’s approach to political questions was usually empirical and practical, based on the evidence of the moment and not on a priori principles and preconceptions, it is quite impossible to understand why his views appeared to vary so much. This was perfectly legitimate, and even praiseworthy, in a world which never stays the same, and where changing circumstances continually change the balance of arguments on different sides. (Wood 1957, 73–4)

Thus, in addition to Russell’s numerous contributions to the politics of his day, he also contributed significantly to our understanding of the social world around us. Among Russell’s more theoretical contributions were his anticipation of John Mackie’s error theory in ethics, the view that moral judgments are cognitive (that is, they are either true or false), but because of their content they in fact are invariably false. (Mackie’s paper “The Refutation of Morals” appeared in 1946; Russell’s paper “Is There an Absolute Good?”, although not published until 1988 was first delivered in 1922.)

Russell also anticipated the modern theory of emotivism (as introduced by A.J. Ayer in his 1936 Language, Truth and Logic ), arguing that “Primarily, we call something ‘good’ when we desire it, and ‘bad’ when we have an aversion from it” (1927b, 242), a view that “he had been flirting with since 1913” (see the entry on Russell’s Moral Philosophy in this encyclopedia; see too Schilpp 1944, 719f). Even so, Russell remained less than satisfied with his views on meta-ethics for most of his life (CP, Vol. 11, 310).

This dissatisfaction appears not to have extended to his work in political theory. There Russell focused primarily on the notion of power, or what he called “the production of intended effects” (1938, 35). As V.J. McGill writes, “The concept of power overshadows all of Russell’s political and economic writings” (Schilpp 1944, 581). Russell himself summarizes his point of view with the observation that “The laws of social dynamics are – so I shall contend – only capable of being stated in terms of power in its various forms” (1938, 15). As a result, it is only by understanding power in all its human instantiations that we understand the social world around us.

Russell’s cataloging of the perceived evils of his age are well known. (As Popper neatly sums up Russell’s general outlook, “we are clever, perhaps too clever, but we are also wicked; and this mixture of cleverness and wickedness lies at the root of our troubles” [1956, 365].) Even so, underlying Russell’s criticism of both the political left and the political right lies a common worry: the unequal distribution of power. As McGill sums up, “Evidently he has become convinced that the thirst for Power is the primary danger of mankind, that possessiveness is evil mainly because it promotes the power of man over man” (Schilpp 1944, 581). The problem with this analysis and of Russell’s desire for a more equitable distribution of power is that any proposed solution appears to lead to paradox:

Suppose certain men join a movement to disestablish Power, or to distribute it more equally among the people! If they are successful, they carry out the behest of Power, becoming themselves as powerful, in terms of Mr. Russell’s definition, as any tyrant. Even though they spread the good life to millions, the more successful they are, the more usurpatious and dangerous. (Schilpp 1944, 586)

Like his writings about religion, Russell’s writings in ethics and politics brought him to the attention of large numbers of non-academic readers. His most influential books on these topics include his Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916), On Education (1926), Marriage and Morals (1929), The Conquest of Happiness (1930), The Scientific Outlook (1931), and Power: A New Social Analysis (1938).

Since his death in 1970, Russell’s reputation as a philosopher has continued to grow. This increase in reputation has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in scholarship. Older first-hand accounts of Russell’s life, such as Dora Russell’s The Tamarisk Tree (1975, 1981, 1985), Katharine Tait’s My Father Bertrand Russell (1975) and Ronald Clark’s The Life of Bertrand Russell (1975), have been supplemented by more recent accounts, including Caroline Moorehead’s Bertrand Russell (1992), John Slater’s Bertrand Russell (1994), and Ray Monk’s Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (1996) and Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness (2000).

This increase in scholarship has benefited greatly from the existence of the Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University, where the bulk of Russell’s library and literary estate are housed, and from the Bertrand Russell Research Centre , also housed at McMaster. Books such as Nicholas Griffin’s Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell (1992, 2001), Gregory Landini’s Russell’s Hidden Substitutional Theory (1998) and Bernard Linsky’s The Evolution of Principia Mathematica (2011) have helped make public archival material that, in the past, has been available only to specialists. Since 1983 the Bertrand Russell Editorial Project , initiated by John Slater and Kenneth Blackwell, has also begun to release authoritative, annotated editions of Russell’s Collected Papers . When complete, this collection will run to over 35 volumes and will bring together all of Russell’s writings, other than his correspondence and previously published monographs.

Recent scholarship has also helped remind readers of the influence Russell’s students had on Russell’s philosophy. Ludwig Wittgenstein and Frank Ramsey especially presented Russell with helpful criticisms of his work and new problems to solve. Both men pushed Russell to develop new theories in logic and epistemology. Despite the fact that Wittgenstein was less than satisfied with Russell’s Introduction to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), Michael Potter’s Wittgenstein’s Notes on Logic (2009) and the introductory materials published in Russell’s Theory of Knowledge: The 1913 Manuscript (CP, Vol. 7) show the extent and fruitfulness of the interaction between teacher and student.

Since Russell’s death, debate has also taken place over the ultimate importance of Russell’s contributions, not just to philosophy, but to other disciplines as well. Advocates of Russell’s inclusion in the canon remind readers that few have done more to advance both formal logic and analytic philosophy. As P.F. Strawson concludes, Russell’s influence “on the philosophy of his and our time has perhaps been greater than that of any other single individual” (Strawson 1984, 104).

Critics of Russell’s inclusion in the canon, or at least of his canonization, remind readers of Russell’s early enthusiasm for British imperialism (1967, 134) and of his controversial comments about eugenics and race (1929, 259, 266). Others have noted his apparent early antisemitism and his advocacy of a preemptive nuclear war against the Soviet Union following World War II (Hook 1976, Stone 1981, Perkins 1994, Blitz 2002). On the issue of a preemptive war, Russell himself later denied he had ever advocated such a course of action. However, after carefully reviewing the historical record, biographer Ronald Clark comes to a different conclusion. Clark is also unequivocal about Russell’s lack of sincerity on the issue: “If the suggestion that he deliberately tried to conceal his earlier views is repugnant, the record does not really allow any other conclusion to be drawn” (Clark 1975, 530). Perhaps as a result of such observations, many readers remain undecided when attempting to evaluate Russell’s overall contribution to the intellectual life of the twentieth century.

Monk’s two volumes are a significant case in point. In addition to his ground-breaking biographical work, Monk relates Wittgenstein’s humorous suggestion that all of Russell’s books should be bound in two colours, “those dealing with mathematical logic in red – and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue – and no one should be allowed to read them” (Monk 2000, 278). Others, such as Peter Stone, have argued that such caricatures are based on “a misunderstanding of the nature of Russell as a political figure” (2003, 89) and that “Whatever one thinks of Russell’s politics, he was one of the few public figures in the west to stand against capitalism without succumbing to illusions about Stalinist Russia. If for no other reason than this, Russell deserves some credit for his political instincts” (2003, 85). (See, for example, Russell 1920 and 1922c, and Russell et al. 1951.)

How is the ordinary reader to decide between such conflicting evaluations? Unlike the many logical advances Russell introduced, in politics he is still usually understood to be more of an advocate than a theoretician. As a result, his reputation as a political thinker has not been as high as his reputation in logic, metaphysics and epistemology.

Even so, regardless of his many particular contributions, Russell’s lasting reputation has also benefited significantly from his constant willingness to abandon unsupported theories and outdated beliefs. To his great credit, when new evidence presented itself, Russell was always among the first to take it into account: “Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect,” says Russell, “my travels were very useful to me” (1967, 133).

A short anecdote recounted in Russell’s Autobiography is also typical. As a young man, he says, he spent part of each day for many weeks

reading Georg Cantor, and copying out the gist of him into a notebook. At that time I falsely supposed all his arguments to be fallacious, but I nevertheless went through them all in the minutest detail. This stood me in good stead when later on I discovered that all the fallacies were mine. (1967, 127)

Major Books and Articles by Russell

Major anthologies of russell’s writings, the collected papers of bertrand russell.

1896, German Social Democracy , London: Longmans, Green.
1897, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry , Cambridge: At the University Press.
1900, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz , Cambridge: At the University Press.
1901, “Recent Work on the Principles of Mathematics,” International Monthly , 4: 83–101; reprinted as “Mathematics and the Metaphysicians,” in Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays , New York, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1918, 74–96; also appearing in Collected Papers , Volume 3.
1903, The Principles of Mathematics , Cambridge: At the University Press.
1905, “On Denoting,” Mind , 14: 479–493; reprinted in Bertrand Russell, Essays in Analysis , London: Allen and Unwin, 1973, 103–119; and in Bertrand Russell, Logic and Knowledge , London: George Allen and Unwin, 1956, 41–56; also appearing in Collected Papers , Volume 4.
1907, “The Regressive Method of Discovering the Premises of Mathematics,” in Bertrand Russell, Essays in Analysis , London: Allen and Unwin, 1973, 272–283; also appearing in Collected Papers , Volume 5.
1908, “Mathematical Logic as Based on the Theory of Types,” American Journal of Mathematics , 30: 222–262; reprinted in Bertrand Russell, Logic and Knowledge , London: Allen and Unwin, 1956, 59–102; also appearing in Collected Papers , Volume 5.
1910, 1912, 1913 (with Alfred North Whitehead), Principia Mathematica , 3 volumes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2nd edn, 1925 (Volumes 1), 1927 (Volumes 2, 3); abridged as Principia Mathematica to *56 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962.
1911, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 11: 108–128; reprinted in Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays , New York, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1918, 209–232; also appearing in Collected Papers , Volume 6.
1912a, The Problems of Philosophy , London: Williams and Norgate; New York: Henry Holt and Company.
1912b, “On the Relations of Universals and Particulars,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 12: 1–24; reprinted in Bertrand Russell, Logic and Knowledge , London: Allen and Unwin, 1956, 105–124; also appearing in Collected Papers , Volume 6.
1914a, Our Knowledge of the External World , Chicago and London: The Open Court Publishing Company.
1914b, “On the Nature of Acquaintance,” Monist , 24: 1–16, 161–187, 435–453; reprinted in Logic and Knowledge , London: George Allen and Unwin, 1956, 127–174; also appearing in Collected Papers , Volume 7.
1914c, “The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics,” Scientia , 16: 1–27; reprinted in Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays , New York, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1918, 145–179; also appearing in Collected Papers , Volume 8.
1916, Principles of Social Reconstruction , London: George Allen and Unwin; reprinted as Why Men Fight , New York: The Century Company, 1917.
1917, Political Ideals , New York: The Century Company.
1918, 1919, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism,” Monist , 28: 495–527; 29: 32–63, 190–222, 345–380; reprinted in Bertrand Russell, Logic and Knowledge , London: Allen and Unwin, 1956, 177–281; also appearing in Collected Papers , Volume 8.
1919a, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: The Macmillan Company.
1919b, “On Propositions: What They Are and How They Mean,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , Supplementary Volume 2: 1–43; also appearing in Collected Papers , Volume 8.
1920, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism , London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.
1921, The Analysis of Mind , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: The Macmillan Company.
1922a, Free Thought and Official Propaganda , London: Watts & Co. and George Allen and Unwin Ltd.
1922b, “Is There an Absolute Good?”, in Collected Papers , Volume 9.
1922c, The Problem of China , London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.
1923a, The ABC of Atoms , London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd.
1923b, A Free Man’s Worship , Portland, Maine: Thomas Bird Mosher; reprinted as What Can A Free Man Worship? Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1927.
1924, “Logical Atomism,” in J.H. Muirhead (ed.), Contemporary British Philosophers , London: Allen and Unwin, 1924, 356–383; reprinted in Bertrand Russell, Logic and Knowledge , London: Allen and Unwin, 1956, 323–343; also appearing in Collected Papers , Volume 9.
1925, The ABC of Relativity , London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd.
1926, On Education, Especially in Early Childhood , London: George Allen and Unwin; reprinted as Education and the Good Life , New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926; abridged as Education of Character , New York: Philosophical Library, 1961.
1927a, The Analysis of Matter , London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner; New York: Harcourt, Brace.
1927b, An Outline of Philosophy , London: George Allen and Unwin; reprinted as Philosophy , New York: W.W. Norton, 1927.
1927c, Why I Am Not a Christian , London: Watts; New York: The Truth Seeker Company.
1929, Marriage and Morals , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Horace Liveright.
1930, The Conquest of Happiness , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Horace Liveright.
1931, The Scientific Outlook , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: W.W. Norton.
1938, Power: A New Social Analysis , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: W.W. Norton.
1939, “The Existence and Nature of God,” in John G. Slater (ed.), A Fresh Look at Empiricism, 1927–42 ( The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell : Volume 10), London and New York: Routledge, 1996, 253–68.
1940, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: W.W. Norton.
1945, A History of Western Philosophy , New York: Simon and Schuster; London: George Allen and Unwin, 1946; rev. edn, 1961.
1948, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
1949a, Authority and the Individual , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
1949b, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism , Minneapolis, Minnesota: Department of Philosophy, University of Minnesota; reprinted as Russell’s Logical Atomism , D.F. Pears (ed.), Oxford: Fontana/Collins, 1972.
1951 (with L.B. Schapiro, C.D. Darlington, Francis Watson, W.N. Ewer and Victor Feather), Why Communism Must Fail , London: The Batchworth Press.
1952, “Is There a God?” in John G. Slater (ed.), Last Philosophical Testament, 1943–68 ( The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell : Volume 11), London and New York: Routledge, 1997, 542–548.
1954, Human Society in Ethics and Politics , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
1959, My Philosophical Development , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
1961, Has Man a Future? , London: Allen and Unwin.
1963, Unarmed Victory , London: Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
1967, 1968, 1969, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell , 3 volumes, London: George Allen and Unwin; Boston: Little Brown and Company (Volumes 1 and 2), New York: Simon and Schuster (Volume 3).
1967a, War Crimes in Vietnam , London: Allen and Unwin; New York: Monthly Review Press.
A1910, Philosophical Essays , London: Longmans, Green.
A1918, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays , New York, London: Longmans, Green & Co.; reprinted as A Free Man’s Worship and Other Essays , London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1976.
A1928, Sceptical Essays , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: W.W. Norton.
A1935, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: W.W. Norton.
A1941, Let the People Think , London: Watts & Co.
A1950, Unpopular Essays , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
A1956a, Logic and Knowledge: Essays, 1901–1950 , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: The Macmillan Company.
A1956b, Portraits From Memory and Other Essays , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
A1957, Why I am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
A1961a, The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, 1903–1959 , London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster.
A1961b, Fact and Fiction , London: Allen and Unwin; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962.
A1968, The Art of Philosophizing and Other Essays , New York: Philosophical Library.
A1969, Dear Bertrand Russell , London: George Allen and Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
A1973, Essays in Analysis , London: George Allen and Unwin.
A1992, The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume 1 , London: Allen Lane, and New York: Houghton Mifflin.
A1999a, Russell on Ethics , London: Routledge.
A1999b, Russell on Religion , London: Routledge.
A2001, The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume 2 , London: Routledge.
A2003, Russell on Metaphysics , London: Routledge.
A2013, What I Believe , London: Routledge.
CP, Vol. 1, Cambridge Essays, 1888–99 , Kenneth Blackwell, Andrew Brink, Nicholas Griffin, Richard A. Rempel and John G. Slater (eds.), London, Boston, Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1983.
CP, Vol. 2, Philosophical Papers, 1896–99 , Nicholas Griffin and Albert C. Lewis (eds.), London and New York: Routledge, 1990.
CP, Vol. 3, Toward the Principles of Mathematics, 1900–02 , Gregory H. Moore (ed.), London and New York: Routledge, 1993.
CP, Vol. 4, Foundations of Logic, 1903–05 , Alasdair Urquhart (ed.), London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
CP, Vol. 5, Toward Principia Mathematica, 1905–08 , Gregory H. Moore (ed.), London and New York: Routledge, 2014.
CP, Vol. 6, Logical and Philosophical Papers, 1909–13 , John G. Slater (ed.), London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
CP, Vol. 7, Theory of Knowledge: The 1913 Manuscript , Elizabeth Ramsden Eames (ed.), London, Boston, Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1984; paperbound, 1992.
CP, Vol. 8, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays, 1914–19 , John G. Slater (ed.), London: George Allen and Unwin, 1986.
CP, Vol. 9, Essays on Language, Mind and Matter, 1919–26 , John G. Slater (ed.), London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.
CP, Vol. 10, A Fresh Look at Empiricism, 1927–42 , John G. Slater (ed.), London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
CP, Vol. 11, Last Philosophical Testament, 1943–68 , John G. Slater (ed.), London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
CP, Vol. 12, Contemplation and Action, 1902–14 , Richard A. Rempel, Andrew Brink and Margaret Moran (eds.), London, Boston, Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1985.
CP, Vol. 13, Prophecy and Dissent, 1914–16 , Richard A. Rempel (ed.), London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.
CP, Vol. 14, Pacifism and Revolution, 1916–18 , Richard A. Rempel, Louis Greenspan, Beryl Haslam, Albert C. Lewis and Mark Lippincott (eds.), London and New York: Routledge, 1995.
CP, Vol. 15, Uncertain Paths to Freedom: Russia and China, 1919–22 , Richard A. Rempel and Beryl Haslam (eds.), London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
CP, Vol. 21, How to Keep the Peace: The Pacifist Dilemma, 1935–38 , Andrew G. Bone and Michael D. Stevenson (eds.), London and New York: Routledge, 2008.
CP, Vol. 26, Cold War Fears and Hopes, 1950–52 , Andrew G. Bone (ed.), London and New York: Routledge, 2020.
CP, Vol. 28, Man’s Peril, 1954–55 , Andrew G. Bone (ed.), London and New York: Routledge, 2003.
CP, Vol. 29, Détente or Destruction, 1955–57 , Andrew G. Bone (ed.), London and New York: Routledge, 2005.
Vol. 16, Labour and Internationalism, 1922–25 .
Vol. 17, Authority versus Enlightenment, 1925–27 .
Vol. 18, Behaviourism and Education, 1927–31 .
Vol. 19, Science and Civilization, 1931–33 .
Vol. 20, Fascism and Other Depression Legacies, 1933–34 .
Vol. 22, The CCNY Case, 1938–40 .
Vol. 23, The Problems of Democracy, 1941–44 .
Vol. 24, Civilization and the Bomb, 1944–47 .
Vol. 25, Defense of the West, 1948–50 .
Vol. 27, Culture and the Cold War, 1952–53 .
Vol. 30, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 1957–59 .
Vol. 31, The Committee of 100, 1960–62 .
Vol. 32, A New Plan for Peace and Other Essays, 1963–64 .
Vol. 33, The Vietnam Campaign, 1965–66 .
Vol. 34, International War Crimes Tribunal, 1967–70 .
Vol. 35, Newly Discovered Papers .
Vol. 36, Indexes .
Andersson, Stefan, 1994, In Quest of Certainty , Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.
Ayer, A.J., 1971, Russell and Moore , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
–––, 1972a, “Bertrand Russell as a Philosopher,” Proceedings of the British Academy , 58: 127–151; reprinted in A.D. Irvine (ed.) (1999) Bertrand Russell: Critical Assessments , 4 volumes, London: Routledge, Volume 1, 65–85.
–––, 1972b, Russell , London: Fontana/Collins.
Banks, Erik C., 2014, The Realistic Empiricism of Mach, James and Russell: Neutral Monism Reconceived , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Blackwell, Kenneth, 1983, “‘Perhaps You will Think Me Fussy …’: Three Myths in Editing Russell’s Collected Papers ,” in H.J. Jackson (ed.), Editing Polymaths , Toronto: Committee for the Conference on Editorial Problems, 99–142.
–––, 1985, The Spinozistic Ethics of Bertrand Russell , London: George Allen and Unwin.
–––, and Harry Ruja, 1994, A Bibliography of Bertrand Russell , 3 volumes, London: Routledge.
Blitz, David, 2002, “Did Russell Advocate Preventive Atomic War Against the USSR?” Russell , 22: 5–45.
Bostock, David, 2012, Russell’s Logical Atomism , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Burke, Tom, 1994, Dewey’s New Logic: A Reply to Russell , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Carnap, Rudolf, 1931, “The Logicist Foundations of Mathematics,” Erkenntnis , 2: 91–105; reprinted in Paul Benacerraf, and Hilary Putnam (eds.), Philosophy of Mathematics , 2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 41–52; reprinted in E.D. Klemke (ed.), Essays on Bertrand Russell , Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970, 341–354; and reprinted in David F. Pears (ed.), Bertrand Russell: A Collection of Critical Essays , Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1972, 175–191.
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–––, 1976, “Comparison of Russell’s Resolution of the Semantical Antinomies with That of Tarski,” Journal of Symbolic Logic , 41: 747–760; reprinted in A.D. Irvine, Bertrand Russell: Critical Assessments , Volume 2, New York and London: Routledge, 1999, 96–112.
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–––, 1981, Bertrand Russell and His World , London: Thames and Hudson.
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–––, 1969, Bertrand Russell’s Theory of Knowledge , London: George Allen and Unwin.
–––, 1989, Bertrand Russell’s Dialogue with his Contemporaries , Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
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Grattan-Guinness, I., 1977, Dear Russell, Dear Jourdain: A Commentary on Russell’s Logic, Based on His Correspondence with Philip Jourdain , New York: Columbia University Press.
–––, 2000, The Search for Mathematical Roots, 1870–1940 , Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press.
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––– (ed.), 2003, The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
––– (ed.), 2014, Bertrand Russell, A Pacifist at War: Letters and Writings 1914–1918 , Nottingham: Spokesman Books.
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–––, and Bernard Linsky (eds.), 2013, The Palgrave Centenary Companion to Principia Mathematica , London: Palgrave Macmillan.
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–––, 1976, “Bertrand Russell the Man”, Commentary , July 1976, 52–54.
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Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to Kenneth Blackwell, Francisco Rodríguez-Consuegra, Fred Kroon, Mark Mercer, Jim Robinson, Russell Wahl, John Woods and several anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this material.

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Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

A History of Western Philosophy

64 pages • 2 hours read

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Book 1, Introductory

Book 1, Part 1

Book 1, Part 2, Chapters 11-18

Book 1, Part 2, Chapters 19-24

Book 1, Part 3

Book 2, Introduction and Part 1

Book 2, Part 2, Chapters 7-10

Book 2, Part 2, Chapters 11-15

Book 3, Part 1, Chapters 1-5

Book 3, Part 1, Chapters 6-11

Book 3, Part 1, Chapters 12-17

Book 3, Part 2

Key Figures

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

Published in 1945, Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy is still one of the most widely-read texts on philosophical history. Russell himself was one of the 20th century’s most noted philosophers and was at the height of his fame and notoriety when the History was published. The book evolved from lectures Russell had given at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. The History is organized into three Books corresponding to what Russell sees as the three main periods of Western philosophy: Ancient, Catholic, and Modern. Each of the Books is further divided into Parts and Chapters, with each chapter generally dealing with a single philosopher, a particular area of a philosopher’s work, or a historical period or movement. Although critical reaction was mixed, the book was a great popular and commercial success, becoming one of the factors in Russell’s attainment of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.

As Russell acknowledges in the Preface to the book, his wife Patricia Russell assisted in research, and she may have edited or even written portions of the book.

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In Book 1: “Ancient Philosophy,” Russell traces the origins of philosophy in ancient Greek civilization, starting with the Mediterranean peoples that preceded the rise of Greece. Greek philosophy began with the Pre-Socratics, who were mainly concerned with explaining the physical universe. Pythagoras was the main thinker in this school, and his thought influenced Socrates and Plato.

In his teaching, Socrates combined mystical insights with an endless curiosity about the world as expressed in the Socratic method . Although Socrates was executed for his beliefs, his thought lived on in the writings of his student Plato, whose dialogue-style works dealt with topics ranging from the theory of knowledge and cosmogony to political philosophy. Plato’s student Aristotle continued his teacher’s thought in some respects and departed from it in others. His treatise-style writings on ethics, metaphysics , and physical science emphasize the empirical observation of the world more than Plato had done.

Both Plato and Aristotle exerted a profound influence on later Western thought. After Aristotle and Plato, philosophy took on a more otherworldly and mystical emphasis, influenced in part by religion. Stoicism was the most enduring new philosophy developed during this period, which preceded the rise of Christianity.

Book 2: “Catholic Philosophy” covers the thousand-year period from the Christian church fathers through the Schoolmen, or Scholastic philosophers. Christianity and the Catholic Church were the main influences upon thinkers during this period, who often concentrated on creating a harmonious synthesis of secular and Christian teaching. The Dark Ages, one of the most difficult periods in Europe’s history, gradually gave way to a period of revival of learning and culture which counted St. Thomas Aquinas as its major philosopher and theologian.

Book 3: “Modern Philosophy” traces the evolution of thought from the Renaissance to the early 20th century, in which science became an increasingly prominent influence in Western thinking. Russell divides this period into two sections, with Part 1 covering the Renaissance to Hume and Part 2 covering Rousseau to the present day (1945).

In Part 1, religious turmoil caused by the Reformation led to skepticism about older religious systems and spawned a new secular emphasis on using philosophy as a tool to gain power, as seen in the thought of Hobbes and Machiavelli. At the same time, traditional religious and political questions were examined in a new light by Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Locke, with special emphasis on empirical observation. In the 18th century, David Hume’s empirical skepticism questioned a number of traditional beliefs.

In Part 2, Romanticism and the sociopolitical theories of Rousseau ushered in a new age in which the rational tradition of the Enlightenment was often questioned. Kant steered rationalism in the direction of Idealism , a development then continued by Hegel, who analyzed history as a predetermined scheme leading to a final synthesis. Hegel’s ideas about history influenced the sociopolitical thought of Marx, who advocated for social and economic revolution.

The Romantic emphasis on the heroic rebel informed the philosophy of Nietzsche, which put into question the entire Western moral tradition, while the Utilitarians and Marx continued the tradition of empirical thought. The Americans William James and John Dewey transformed empiricism into pragmatism and brought philosophy into the 20th century. Russell ends the book with a look at one of the most recent (for 1945) schools of thought: logical positivism , the philosophical school to which Russell himself belonged. Russell favors this school because of its rational, scientific, and problem-solving emphasis, which he believes will resolve the chaos of modern intellectual and political anarchy.

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On the Value of Scepticism

Read our detailed notes below on the essay “On the Value of Scepticism” by Bertrand Russel. Our notes cover On the Value of Scepticism summary and analysis.

On the Value of Scepticism by Bertrand Russel Summary

Paragraph 1.

In the first paragraph Russel says that he wants to talk about a doctrine which will be somewhat fearful in terms of repercussions. The doctrine is that a proposition of any nature shall be trusted unless proved by any supporting and logical argument.

He says that he aware of the depth of this statement. He says that by talking about the above fact, he would come in conflict with all the clairvoyants, bookmakers, bishops and others who have belief in irrational and illogical propositions which have no factual ground. He says this because the repercussions of proving this statement would reduce the income of all those above mentioned people who propagate things without their logical basis.

Paragraph 2

He then narrates the story of Pyro who is the founder of Pyrrhonism (means Skepticism). Pyro states that our knowledge about different things is very less on the basis of which we cannot decide about one thing as wiser than other. Russell says that, one day Pyro was going and in the way he saw his teacher of skepticism with his head stuck in a ditch. The teacher was unable to get out of the ditch with all his efforts. Pyro stopped near him and thought for some time whether he should help his teacher or not but then he left his teacher in the same way. The others blamed Pyro for his heartlessness and help his teacher to come out of the ditch. Pyro rejected their blame and said there was no ground to prove that he was doing well in taking the teacher out of the ditch. So he left him. His teacher who was the man of principles, applauded and praised Pyro for his consistency in the field.

Russell states that he does not advocate such skepticism because he has common sense. He then says that he admits that the facts science provides have some sort of ground and proofs. He says he admits that they are not always true but they present some basis for rational action. He then gives an example if science announced a date for moon eclipse so he would he see on such date whether it really was taking place or not. He then says that Pyro would have not believed the argument of science. Russell then says that he is happy because he neither is of Pyro`s party as extremely extremist nor a conventional believer to believe without any logicality.

Paragraph 3

He says that there some matters about which the people who investigate them get agreed. While there are some matters about which they don’t agree. He then says that if they agreed on some matters, it is not the proof that they would be right. He presents the case of Einstein. Einstein`s view about the magnitude of the deflection of light by gravitation would have been clearly rejected by the experts, few years ago. But it is now proved that he was right. He then says, however, the unanimous opinions of experts must be accepted by the non-experts because there are chances that they could be right. He then comes to his on view of skepticism. Russell says that the skepticism he advocates is;

When experts are agreed on some matter, so, the opposite matter cannot be held true. It has to be false then. When the experts are not agreed, so the non-experts must think about something as certain and true. When the experts says that there are no sufficient grounds for the proof of something, so, the ordinary man must not reject the stance of expert. He says that if these propositions are implemented, they can bring about a greater change.

Paragraph 4:

Russell says there are three classes of opinions for which people are always willing to fight. He then adds that the skepticism he advocates, condemns these categories.

He says when there are something which has ground of proof is left by people and they want it to get operated by itself. He says that such opinions are dealt by people with calm and no passion.

All other opinions which are dealt with full passion and zeal have no sufficient grounds. He says that the passion shows that the one who shows passion is lacking in rational conviction.

He says that opinions in politics and religion are held with passion. It shows no presence of legal grounds. He says in China, a man having no strong opinions is called poor creature. He then talks about the common thought of belief according to which rational thinking is considered false because it can make practical life impossible as the demands of practical life are different. Russell says that he thinks of the contrary to this thought. He then says the he is going to prove it.

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He talks about the unemployment in the years after 1920. He says the view of one party was that it was due to the wickedness of trade unions. The view of other party was that it was due to the confusion on the Continent. A third party, stated that it was due to the policy of the Bank of England in trying to increase the value of the pound sterling. This third party contained experts.

Politicians do not take any interest in the view when it is not in their party favor. The ordinary people favor those views which can be of adverse effects to their enemies. He says, because of this people fight for some illogical and irrelevant causes. The other people who have rational views are not listened properly.

6th paragraph:

He says that he wants to talk about the marriage and its customs. He says that a number of population in every country is motivated to all marriage customs. He then says that those who do not stand by these customs lose their lives. In India, remarriage of widow is considered a wrong thing. In Catholic countries, divorce is regarded as wicked. In America, divorce is easy and extra conjugal activities are condemned. He then says that Muslims favor polygamy but we think it wrong. He then says that all these different beliefs are strongly supported by the followers and those who oppose them are doomed. He then says that, unfortunately, no one tries to prove that the customs of his country are more contributive to the happiness of the humans.

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He says that when we open any scientific treatise on the subject of marriage we across some strange facts. He says that we find every types of custom has existed in which may should have been opposed. We think we can understand polygamy, as a custom forced upon women by male oppressors. But what we can say to the custom Tibet where one woman has several husbands. He says that almost all customs of marriage involve cruelty and intolerance.

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He then says that nationalism is also an example of fervent belief. He says that any scientific historian would have been in prison if he had written about the Great War. He said that China is the only exception to this case because the truth tellers are not punished there. He says that opposition to the established belief is considered wicked and no application of reason in such matters is tolerated.

When people are challenged as to why skepticism should be considered wicked, so, the only answer is that myths help to win wars. Their opinion is that a rational nation would be killed rather than kill.

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He posts a question; what would be the effect of a spread of rational skepticism?

Human events spring from passions, resulting in generating systems of myths. He says when a person calls himself a king and states that he mistreated so people lock him up. But the same person, if says, something for nation, he becomes a political or religious leader.. In this way a collective insanity grows up, which follows laws very similar to those of individual insanity. Everyone knows that it is dangerous to dispute with a lunatic who thinks he is King but when a whole nation shares a delusion, its anger is of the same kind as that of an individual.

10th Paragraph:

He says the intellectual factors in human behavior is a matter of much disagreement among psychologists. There are two quite distinct questions: (1) how far are beliefs operative as causes of actions? (2) How far are beliefs derived from logically adequate evidence, or capable of being so derived? On both questions, psychologists are agreed in giving a much smaller place to the intellectual factors. He then takes both the questions in detail way.

How far are beliefs operative as causes of action?

11th Paragraph

He talks about the question by taking an example of ordinary man`s life. He gets up in the morning because of habit and there is no belief in it. He eats his breakfast, catches his train, reads his newspaper, and goes to his office, all because of habit. All this routine is formed because of habit except for the choice of job. He believed that the job offered to him was as good as he deserved. In most men, belief plays a role in the original choice of a career.

12th 13th Paragraph

At the office, if he is a low rank person, he will continue to act because of habit. On the other hand, if he is a partner in the firm or director of the firm, he will have to take difficult decisions. He then says that in such decisions belief plays a great role. He believes that some things will go up and others will go down. And he acts accordingly to the beliefs.

14th Paragraph

In his home-life there will be much more involvement of the belief. At ordinary times, his behavior to his wife and children will be governed by habit. On great occasions like some serious decisions in life, he cannot be guided by habit. In proposing marriage, he may be helped more by instinct, or he may be influenced by the belief that the lady is rich. If he is guided by instinct, he will trust that the lady is the best partner for him then his course of action are fine enough. In choosing a school for his son, belief plays a greater role.

15th Paragraph

He then adds that although beliefs are not directly responsible a larger part of action in our life but the actions for which they are responsible are among the most important, and largely determine the general structure of our lives. In particular, our religious and political actions are associated with beliefs.

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He then comes to the second question:

I come now to our second question, (a) how far are beliefs in fact based upon evidence? (b) How far is it possible or desirable that they should be?

He says that the ratio according to which beliefs are based on evidence is very less. Take the kind of action which is most nearly rational: the investment of money by a rich City man. He takes the example of rich man and says that his views on the rise in currency rate depend upon his political sympathies. He says, even, in bankruptcies the original cause of ruin is sentimental factor. Political opinions are hardly based upon evidence. He then tells the readers that they have got accustomed to Frued1s view of “rationalizing,” i.e. the process of inventing what seem to ourselves rational grounds for a decision or opinion that is in fact quite irrational. But, according to Russell, especially in English-speaking countries, a contrary process is in vogue which may be called “irrationalizing.” A shrewd man will sum up, more or less subconsciously, the advantages and disadvantages of a question from a selfish point of view. A man comes to a decision with the help of his unconscious, and invents a set of high-sounding phrase to manifest that he is concerned for public good. Anybody who believes that these phrases give his real reasons must suppose him quite incapable of judging evidence, because the public good he is talking about cannot be ascertained from his action as his action is in his own perspectives. In this case a man appears less rational than he is; what is still more curious, the irrational part of him is conscious and the rational part unconscious. It is this trait in our characters that has made the English and Americans so successful.

17th Paragraph

Russell argues that shrewdness belongs more to the unconscious part of our nature. He says that this shrewdness is the main quality for the success of business. He says it is good from business perspective but from the moral perspective it is selfish. If the Germans had shrewdness, they would not have adopted the unlimited submarine campaign. If the French had shrewdness, they would not have behaved as they did in the Ruhr. If Napoleon had shrewdness, he would not have gone to war again after the Treaty of Amiens.

18th Paragraph

He says that he thinks he has gone out of his topic but he, then, says that but it was necessary to disentangle unconscious reason, which is called shrewdness, from the conscious variety. He then taunts the ordinary methods of education which has no effect upon the unconscious, so that shrewdness cannot be taught by our present technique.

19th Paragraph

He says, even, morality cannot be taught by present methods. He thinks that people should be made shrewd by intellectual means. He then says that he does not know how teach shrewdness but he knows to teach them to be rational. By rationality he means a scientific habit of mind in forecasting the effects of our actions.

On the Value of Scepticism Literary Analysis

This essays is one of the hall marks of Bertrand Russell.
The main argument of this essays is that skepticism is only way through which we can find out truth in this world.
Skepticism can promote positivism in life because it allows a logical and objective view of life.
Skepticism broadens the view of the eye and gives the capability to challenge the rights and the wrongs.
Skepticism builds a road way to rationality which facilitates human in conclusion and accomplishing life goals.
Russell is against staunch skepticism where a man never believes any proposition.
He is against dogmatic knowledge where people blindly follow the path directed to them.
His way is a moderate way of skepticism. He does not challenge the ideas when the experts get agreed to.
His view is very wide about skepticism.
His opinion is that we must not follow the tradition blindly because it can contain something which is against humanity.
The skepticism which Russell advocates is not the one which denounces morality, religion and God.
His skepticism is directed for the betterment of humanity.
He wants us to be skeptical so that humanity focused efforts could be done.

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5 Themes from “In Praise of Idleness” by Bertrand Russell (Essay Summary)

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41 Bertrand Russell–two essays

From Bertrand Russell’s: The Problems of Philosophy: Chapter XV: The Value of Philosophy

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On the Value of Scepticism by Bertrand Russel Summary

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On the Value of Scepticism Literary Analysis

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