Bertrand Russell: A Political Life

I recall with pride the sure comfort, during the years of struggle against the American war in Vietnam, afforded by Bertrand Russell's pungent opposition to the same war for the same reasons, all of his astonishing intellectual gifts poised like a sword against the daily lies and betrayal of ideals perpetrated by Washington. While Russell's mathematical exegeses are beyond me, the thrust of his intellectual activity has remained attractive. This concise book (indeed thin, but not incomplete), while not diminishing that attraction, comes a bit like a diatribe exposing those elements of Russell's character that were no doubt conflicted, and yet were more likely an integral part of his intellectual capacity. Ryan's writing is informative, but not terribly appreciative. One feels distanced by Ryan's doubts, rather than educated by his conclusions. Clearly Russell was a complex fellow, inconstant and, in a certain respect, embittered by a life of singularity; it seems however that Ryan does little to penetrate the conflicts down to the bone of understanding them and integrating them into the whole picture of Russell's turbulent life, rather he presents the externals as elements sufficiently interesting in and of themselves, a disservice, I think, to one with a legacy as lingering and controversial as that of Bertrand Russell. The prose is intelligent and clear, and the volume is a typically attractive Oxford Univ. Press offering, small and supple, the presentation suiting the book's tone and content perfectly. I recommend this volume, but it's not everything it could have been.

In Alan Ryan's book there is good, overdue criticism concerning Russell's view of world-government And on the subject of government in general, an interesting observation is that "Russell takes no interest in the creation of legal obstacles to government misbehaviour; he does not suggest a Bill of Rights, for instance. On the whole, Russell assumes throughout that what checks government is the power of social groups rather than the provisions of the legal system...". Russell's exact views on inheritance have always been of interest to me, but they can be confusing.As far as other biographers' reports are concerned, on one hand, one reads that "he rejects the institution of inheritance, and proudly earns his own living" and that "He had given away his inheritance because he thought it wrong to have such an unfair advantage" On the other hand, Russell himself explains that "While I was writing Principia Mathematica I felt justified in living on inherited money, though I did not feel justified in keeping an additional sum of capital that I inherited from my grandmother. I gave away this sum in its entirety...to various educational objects." There are also reports that "he...lived on the income...he had inherited at twenty-one," at that at the turn of the century, at least, "the kind of life led by Russell obviously depended on a small but sufficient independent income" I think this book provides the most concise description of the Russell and his inheritance saying that "He always treated his own money as a social fund,...not in the least alarmed at the prospect of earning his own living once it was gone." A point brought out in this book more than any other biography of Russell is that "For much of his life he plainly felt a contempt for uneducated people which is entirely at odds with the sentimental profession of solidarity with humanity's sufferings....Max Eastman recalled an alarming moment when Russell observed, after a very successful public debate in the 1920s, `Anyone who takes these debates of ours seriously must be an idiot.'...Russell was more vulnerable than most to the temptation to treat his readers like fools." Moreover, he evidently felt that the financial hardships of Beacon Hill School were such as to be "making him give pot-boiling lectures to stupid audiences and write silly little articles for American newspapers." I was interested in reading Ryan's accounts of how Russell loathed American universities as "departmental, hierarchical, uncollegiate places, dominated by the kind of professionalism which might be acceptable in a law firm but hardly in the groves of academe," and how "Russell was right to think Huxley had stolen almost every idea for his novel from him" Interesting tidbits I learned were that during his 1918 six-month prison term "He read 200 books and wrote two." He acknowledged "the social value of dancing," and that he was "something of