SOURCE: Ryan, Alan. “Bertrand Russell's Politics: 1688 or 1968?” In Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics, and Culture in Britain, edited by William Roger Louis, pp. 93-107. London/Austin, England and United States: I. B. Tauris Publishers and Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, 1995.

[In the following essay, Ryan recounts Bertrand Russell's views on American life, noting that while Russell detested many characteristic features of American life, he was also a proponent of the United States serving as the self-conscious, responsible leader of the Western world.]

If Bertrand Russell is remembered in the United States by anyone other than formal logicians and analytical philosophers, it is almost certainly as the ferocious critic of America's role in the Vietnam War, and on account of the energetically anti-American stand he took at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. The violence of his rhetoric during those years opened wounds that have not since healed. When my account of Russell's politics was published, Hilton Kramer deplored the whole book in his Wall Street Journal review because I was not as wildly hostile to Russell's stand on Vietnam as he thought proper. Sidney Hook's much more kindly review chided me nonetheless for not opposing John Stuart Mill's defense of liberal interventionism to the high-pitched anti-imperialism of Russell's last years.

That Russell's last writings were unfair, that they verged on the hysterical and that they employed a rhetoric he would earlier have thought preposterous, it is hard to deny. Nor did he entirely deny it himself. When scolded by a writer in Tribune for the “unsociological” quality of his writings on nuclear disarmament, Russell replied that he had earlier devoted a good deal of time and thought to the sociology of contemporary politics, but now he felt as though he was watching “a man dropping lighted matches on heaps of TNT,” and just had to act as best he could. Elsewhere, he said over and over that even if logic was one of the greatest achievements of the human mind it would have no point if mankind had blown itself to bits.

Still, there is no denying that what came out over his name during the middle and late 1960s was very extraordinary. I say “what came out over his name,” because there is every reason to suppose that much of it was written by other people. In content, and even more importantly in style and grammatical carelessness, it reads like the standard outpourings of the student left of the time, and not at all like the immaculate and stylish prose in which Russell had previously couched his views—however outrageous those views may have seemed at the time. War Crimes in Vietnam, for instance, offers this characteristic “anti-imperialist” trope. “The people of Vietnam are heroic, and their struggle is epic; a stirring and permanent reminder of the incredible spirit of which men are capable when they are dedicated to a noble ideal. Let us salute the people of Vietnam.”

Russell had years earlier written an essay which was intended as a prophylactic against just such guff. “The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed” was a light-hearted assault on the idea that the victimized are always right. On Russell's account of the matter, the resonances of which for contemporary Eastern Europe are all too obvious, the deepest wish of the oppressed is commonly to throw off their oppressor in order to victimize somebody else. That does not mean that victimizing them is therefore all right, but it does mean that we ought not to sentimentalize them. Had Russell applied his own analysis to the case of Vietnam, he ought to have argued that North Vietnam was yet another deeply unpleasant Communist autocracy, that the Viet Cong were certainly brave and ingenious, but were also cruel and brutal, in the interest of causes with which he had no sympathy—but that none of this justified the Americans in risking world peace by making war in Vietnam. The argument against the American presence was not a matter of some high-flown principle of non-intervention, but an argument of expediency. The United States could do little good to Vietnam, but it could do a great deal of damage to the American political system. There is something very odd, not to say disheartening, about the anti-Americanism of Russell's last years; even if he was simply interested in lending his fame and prestige to young people battling in a good cause, he ought surely to have insisted on better terms for the use of a name as good as his.

Many Americans, however, remember an earlier Russell, who starred in the small courtroom drama that led to his losing the professorship at the City College of New York to which he had been appointed in 1940. On that occasion, Russell was assailed by respectable America, and liberal philosophers including John Dewey and Sidney Hook did their unavailing best to defend him against the forces of unenlightenment. At the end of the 1930s Russell found himself in an embarrassing position; he had no university position, and had for years made his living by a combination of journalism and lecturing that he very much disliked. Though he could never have made a satisfactory professor whether in a British or an American university, he hoped for some such position to be offered to him. After a series of visits to Chicago and Los Angeles, he was finally offered a post at City College, resigned from the temporary appointment at the University of California and made ready to take up the new job.

At this point, his old enemies fell upon him. He had long been regarded as a menace to good morals by Catholics, and more generally by enthusiasts for female chastity, by the foes of birth control, and by believers in the sanctity of marriage. First, the Episcopalian Archbishop Manning of New York wrote a circular letter to the press denouncing the appointment as a threat to the morals of the young. Catholic journals joined in the hue and cry. Then the mother of a CUNY student, a Mrs. McKay, brought suit against the city Board of Education, alleging that the appointment was ultra vires because Russell's teaching (in logic and the philosophy of mathematics) was, among other things, “lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent and narrow-minded.” Astonishingly, the court found in her favor and the appointment was quashed.

Since Mrs. McKay had brought suit against the Board of Education, Russell had not been a party to it, and could not defend himself. The Board behaved cravenly, and would not appeal against the decision, in spite of the urgings of the AAUP and of educators across the country who feared that if this sort of thing could happen in relatively liberal New York there was no knowing what might happen elsewhere. If Dewey had not induced Albert Barnes of the Barnes Foundation to hire Russell to lecture on the history of Western philosophy, he would have found himself unemployed and unemployable, three thousand miles from home with no hope of crossing the Atlantic in wartime, with a wife and young child to support. It is not surprising that Russell was thereafter a bit sharp about freedom of speech on American campuses.

For our purposes what is most interesting is the way Russell managed to combine two views not ordinarily found together. He detested many, perhaps even most, of the characteristic features of American life and yet thought that the United States ought to be the self-conscious, unabashed leader of the western world; indeed, from 1946-48 he argued that the USA ought to use her then monopoly of nuclear weapons to force the Soviet Union to disarm, to get Russian troops out of Eastern Europe, and, at his most ambitious, to exercise a world hegemony that would eventually lead to some form of world government. How he arrived at what seems on the face of it to be the paradoxical position that the United States is both intolerable and the only hope for the human future provides much of the substance of this lecture. But, perhaps the first thing to observe about it is that it does complicate any simple picture of Russell as just anti-American, just an elderly hanger-on of the movement for nuclear disarmament, and the anti-imperialist movements of the 1960s.

Russell used to joke that he could not be accused of being anti-American when his first and last wives had both been Americans—Alys Pearsall-Smith and Edith Finch respectively, both of them from the high-minded Philadelphia academic upper-class that Russell somehow enjoyed and disliked, mocked and abused, and yet fell in love with. In fact, his relations with his first wife give at least one clue to the anti-American side of his work. Though he fell madly in love with Alys Pearsall-Smith when they were brought together by his elder brother Frank, during the whole marriage he was driven wild with irritation at her middle-class habits. What one might have expected him to pass over as mere nervous good nature, he felt to be intolerably vulgar. It is significant that when he embarked on the affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell, which ended his first marriage and set him on the path of personal and social emancipation that he never left thereafter, he remarked that it was a tremendous relief to be in the company of someone genuinely aristocratic, where real uninhibited laughter and enjoyment were possible. America, for Russell, never quite recovered from the disadvantage of being the land of the Pearsall-Smiths.

All of this is historically explicable enough. Russell was born in 1872, the second son of a somewhat eccentric Liberal, Viscount Amberley (third son of Earl Russell), and his wonderful wife, Kate Stanley. His birth was a radical event; he was delivered by Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, as yet unable to practice as a doctor, but soon to lead the movement that brought women into medicine as something other than nurses and midwives, and eventually to give her name to the best-loved hospital in London. He was born into two ruling families—the Russells and the Stanleys—who were unusual among the English aristocracy in welcoming intellectuals into their midst. Gilbert Murray thus became a cousin by marriage some years later. In addition to the advantages of birth, he had the symbolic advantage that one of his godparents was John Stuart Mill, who had campaigned with his parents for the extension of the vote to women, for the rearrangement of the laws of property to the benefit of agricultural tenants, and for a league of nations. Mill, of course, died when Russell was only some seven months old, and his impact was not felt until Russell was eighteen. Then Russell read Mill's Autobiography, came across the passage where Mill remarks that the First Cause argument for the existence of God is invalid because it only provokes the further question, “What caused the First Cause?”, and promptly lost his faith. The story seems so nearly a parody of the inner life of the rationalist philosopher that one would not credit it but for the fact of a contemporary entry in Russell's (secret) diary recording the event.

Both Russell's parents died before he was four, and he was brought up in the household of his paternal grandmother, Countess Russell. She was by this time in her late fifties; his grandfather, Earl Russell (Lord John Russell, “finality Jack” of the First Reform Act), was twenty-three years older than she, and died in 1878, when his grandson was only six. So it was his fierce, strict grandmother who inevitably had most influence over him. He could never quite make up his mind how much he hated her.

He was appallingly lonely, stuck away in the large grace and favor house in Richmond Park that a grateful nation had bestowed on his grandparents. Visitors were agreed that it was no place for a small boy. Worse still, his older brother Frank showed early signs of the talent for getting into matrimonial trouble that eventually resulted in his being the last peer to be tried, literally, by a jury of his fellow peers—they sent him to jail for six months for inadvertent bigamy in 1912. Frank's career at Winchester persuaded Countess Russell that Bertie was better off at home where she could keep an eye on him, and at home he stayed until he was seventeen.

The regime had its advantages. Round his grandmother's table assembled Liberal luminaries by the score; few fourteen-year-olds were brought up to entertain Mr. Gladstone after dinner, even though Russell complained that he only spoke one sentence, and that was to wonder why the excellent port had been served in a claret glass. Irish Home Rule was hotly debated—friends like John Morley were enthusiastically pro-Home Rule, while Russell's Stanley grandmother was fiercely anti. Countess Russell was puritanical, devout in whatever ways a Unitarian can be devout, but not particularly interfering in her management of the succession of governesses and tutors that looked after the boy's education. Whatever Russell's miseries, his mind was taken care of.

Moreover, by the time Russell was of an age to take an intellectual interest in the world, Frank had begun to bring home interesting friends, among them the American philosopher George Santayana, and scientists such as John Tyndale. There were, however, some deep wounds. One was that his grandmother was terrified of the streak of madness that ran in the family—not absurdly either, for Russell's own elder son, John, the fourth Earl Russell, was mentally ill for much of his life, and one of John's daughters committed suicide in her early twenties. When Russell wanted to marry Alys Pearsall-Smith, his grandmother used the threat that they would produce mad children as an argument against marriage, but she had obviously dwelt on the matter before. What made it more corrosive was that there was a suggestion that somehow sexual passion and lunacy were closely allied. His Aunt Agatha had been engaged; had been forced to break it off because she suffered from delusions; she was now more or less mad, while Uncle William had spent most of his life in a hospital. What could one infer from that? Russell recorded a pathetic dream he had while the argument over his marriage to Alys was going on; he dreamed that his mother was not dead but locked up in a madhouse. It is tersely recorded, but it makes one wince. It is no wonder that Russell's Autobiography sends, as one might say, very mixed signals. Sometimes, he says his childhood was happy enough, sometimes that all that kept him from suicide was the urge to learn more geometry.

The effect of going to Cambridge after this was what one might expect. Intellectually, it was like going to heaven. One might think anything about anything, and nobody would disapprove—though they might try to argue one out of it. On the other hand, it was almost as socially narrow as the background he had come from. Moreover, the entire social and political tone was what he would afterwards have dismissed as decidedly precious; it was the background to Bloomsbury, and Russell and Bloomsbury got on very badly. Still, all his life, the effect of it stuck. He always thought that the goods that G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica celebrated as absolutely good in themselves—beauty and personal friendship—really were among the very greatest goods, even though he added to them something one may suppose that Moore took for granted too, the thought that the knowledge of abstract, universal truths such as those of philosophy, mathematics and logic was one of the great glories of human existence. What Kenneth Blackwell has labelled a “Spinozistic ethics of impersonal self-expansion” was thereafter Russell's creed; unlike Spinoza, he did not think it a dictate of reason, nor did he think one could derive one's duties from it with the lucidity of the lemmas of a geometrical theorem; still, it was what held together virtually everything he wrote thereafter on ethics and politics.

As that suggests, it was a doctrine at some distance from everyday political life. Russell always wavered, sometimes inclining towards the view that for everyday purposes, a rough and ready utilitarianism had to serve because it was impossible to tell what impact political action would have on those exalted and ultimate ends to which it was appropriate to direct our individual allegiance. At other times, he was much more prepared to invoke these ideals directly; as we shall see, this was generally when some kind of international catastrophe threatened them with the gravest damage—as in modern warfare. To the extent that this implied something recognizable as a political theory in the ordinary sense, it was simply that some political system or other was required to give a shelter for almost any human good; these human goods required more than that, for they required a government properly sensitive to the needs of private life, to the pursuit of knowledge, for the creation of art and other sorts of beauty, and therefore a government attuned to what he called in a letter to Ottoline Morrell, “the spark of the divine” in each of us. But not very much follows from this. Certainly a liberal political theory of some sort, but one that has little that is decisive to say about economic policy, or about many other issues of the nitty-gritty of policy-making. It is a view that inclines one to caution about the positive contributions of government. Governments can certainly do much damage, but it is less clear that they can do very much directly to aid these ultimate values.

Later, he advocated a form of guild socialism in his Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916), based on a dichotomy between the “possessive” and “creative” impulses that he understood to be fundamental to human nature. This picture of human nature suggested to Russell that private property and capitalist economics made for competition, divisiveness and in the last resort for war, while an emphasis on satisfying work, political participation, and educational and sexual liberation made for peace, happiness, and an emotional security that is not merely conservative and narrow minded. Though the Principles is to my mind the best thing Russell wrote on politics, it is not unkind to observe that it operates at a high level of abstraction, and that its tone owes a great deal to the exigencies of the First World War and Russell's own activities on behalf of the No-Conscription Fellowship. Indeed, the slenderer volume of lectures on Political Ideals that gave an abridged version of the Principles was published in the United States under the title of Why Men Fight.

At times of something other than the exaltation of the battle against the forces of darkness, Russell's political loyalties so far as Britain was concerned tended to settle in a ‘lib-lab’ mould. That is, he thought it impossible to achieve the Liberal program of Asquith and Lloyd George except through the medium of the Labour Party, and at the same time was fearful that the Labour Party would have too little regard for intellectual distinction, and too little awareness of the need to tolerate unpopular opinions for the sake of progress and variety. His mature position was summed up in his Reith Lectures—the first series to be given and in many people's view one of the very best—on Authority and the Individual. He took it for granted that in the middle of the twentieth century governments needed the capacity to preserve not only civil order in the simple military sense but also economic order; they needed to be able to reproduce an intelligent and skilled workforce; they needed, in short, to be able to manage a complicated modern society. This implied at least a social democratic government. But after the experience of Hitler and Stalin, we all know that the search for managerial efficiency can exact far too high a price. Efficiency easily becomes liberticide, and even benevolent despotism is despotism. What falls short of despotism may nonetheless be intolerably boring. “Give me the old days,” he quotes an old Indian as saying, “it was dangerous, but there was glory in it.” Sober Russell was Russell reminding everyone that the task was to reconcile society's need for authority for the sake of order with the individual's need for liberty for the sake of his or her pursuit of the ultimate goals.

Liberal democratic sobriety was not Russell's most characteristic style. The rest of this lecture is devoted to the less sober aspects of his ideas—some of which were sparked by his horror at modern warfare, others by his simple irritation and anger at modern society, as represented usually by the United States as most recently encountered. His interest in politics began early; his family assumed that he would go into public life, or at any rate that he would start in the Diplomatic Corps and migrate to active politics in due course. This vision of his future he rejected fairly energetically, though he stood for Parliament three times in seats he knew there was no risk of winning.

His first interest in theoretical issues in politics was evoked by the Marxism of the German Social Democratic Party; his first published work was his German Social Democracy of 1896. The real Russell came to life more visibly in 1901, and then completely in 1914. When the Boer War broke out in 1899, Russell found himself questioned by foreign friends and colleagues who could not see the justice of Britain's war against Paul Kruger's Boer Republic of the Transvaal. To them it looked like simple bullying by a strong imperial power, directed at a bunch of possibly obnoxious and certainly amazingly ignorant but otherwise apparently harmless Afrikaner farmers who happened to have stumbled on the world's richest seams of gold.

Russell's response was by later standards very odd. He was entirely hostile to the British Empire and at the same time a firm imperialist. His arguments were characteristically Russellian—acute, but counter-intuitive. He scorned all forms of militarism, the fully-fledged Prussian variety more than the dilute British form, but for none of them did he feel anything but loathing. British imperialism threatened to turn Britain into a militarist state indistinguishable from the Kaiser's Reich, and was therefore to be deplored. Yet, he took it for granted that the spread of European influence was a good thing, and that most of Africa and Asia would progress faster under European tutelage than under its own steam. European domination was the way to make progress; the only policy issue was how to carve up the continent tidily and peacefully rather than messily and by warfare. The British were absolutely entitled to squash the Boer Republic; “Je suis utilitaire,” he wrote to the mathematician Couturat, and in that light he argued that justice lay with the advanced nations whenever they encountered the less advanced. In the First World War he employed the same line of reasoning to argue that wars of self-defense were not justified, if it were a matter of war between two civilized powers, but that the conquest of uncivilized nations was entirely acceptable. Who, he asked in a tone that one would hardly risk today, can regret the passing of the American Indian? It was doubtless bad luck for the American Indian that the white man had triumphed, but viewed from a global perspective it was all to the good.

In fact, he had scarcely produced this defense of the British case than he turned against it. From his Autobiography one might almost be led to think that he simultaneously fell out of love with Alys, was turned into a mystic by his experience of the shocking loneliness of Evelyn Whitehead in her painful heart attacks, and became a “pacifist” under the combined impact of these events. Re-reading his letters shows a much slower process taking place; it also shows that he never became what he would have called a pacifist. That is, he never departed from the view that violence was not absolutely evil, and never held that war was never justified. What he held was that war was justified only to the extent that it promoted the ultimate values of European civilization. These were the values we have discussed already; in that light it is easy enough to see that wars between civilized countries are very unlikely to pass the justificatory test, while wars against uncivilized societies will have a much easier time.

There were instances of something closer to principled anti-imperialism before the First War, but the only striking example was his detestation of British and Russian policy towards Persia. There, he thought, there was a developed democratic movement, and a developing political culture. For the British to agree to a carve-up with the autocratic Russians—like all good liberals, Russell loathed Czarist Russia for its own sake and the Soviet Union as a nastier version of its Czarist parent—was the betrayal of British liberal values. For the Russians simply hanged or murdered without trial such of the local democrats as they could lay hands on, and this they did knowing the British would not interfere.

Still, it took 1914 and the outbreak of European war to bring out his activist nature. From the moment war was declared he threw himself into opposing it. He wrote endlessly against it in whatever journals would still open their pages to him; he organized meetings of the Union for Democratic Control in Cambridge until his college barred their rooms to them—provoking G. E. Moore to suggest that the college chapel ought also to be closed, since it was full of people saying they worshipped the Prince of Peace. He lectured widely, giving as lectures what became the Principles of Social Reconstruction. When conscription was introduced he promptly became a full-time organizer for the No-Conscription Fellowship led by Clifford Allen; it cost him his lectureship at Trinity, even though the move was violently deplored by the young men of Trinity on active service. They took the admirably high-minded view that they were fighting to preserve the liberties of independent people like Bertrand Russell, not to gratify the patriotism of dim and elderly Fellows of Trinity.

Eventually, it landed him in jail, when he rashly wrote in The Tribunal—the magazine put out by the No-Conscription Fellowship—that after the war was over he expected Britain to be policed by the American Army, which would be employed to put down strikers in Europe as they had traditionally been in America. This was held to be “insulting an ally” and he duly got six months, reduced on appeal to six months in the “first division”—that is, in a large cell, with no duties, meals brought in, a fellow prisoner to clean the room, and endless books. Though it had a certain comic side to it, it was effectively the end of his career as an academic, and the beginnings of his extraordinary career as a nomadic journalist, lecturer, popular broadcaster—and deeply influential part-time philosopher.

The discrepancy between his violent antipathy to the war and the philosophical underpinnings of that antipathy is still something to puzzle over, and not altogether different from the discrepancy between the violence of his opposition to the war in Vietnam and the pragmatism of the political theory that he claimed to base it on. In a series of essays on “Justice in Wartime” that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly during 1915—they were intended to sway American opinion against the war—he argued, as he always did, that pure pacifism was implausible. War was justified if its consequences were good enough, and not unless they were. Self-defense was not an argument; if one were to be held up by a highway robber, one would not be right to shoot him dead to preserve one's purse or even one's life—though one might if one had an overwhelmingly important mathematical discovery to communicate to the world. Nations had to be held to the same standard. It was certainly wrong of Germany to violate Belgian neutrality, but once they had done so, launching a war was a bad response. It would destroy European civilization, and that was an evil that nothing could exceed. This line he held through thick and thin; he engaged in an acrimonious debate with T. E. Hulme, who was deeply enraged that the Russell he had once admired for professing a heroic view of the world was now apparently ratting on it. No, said Russell, he stood by his old view; he merely thought that killing millions of young men was a perversion of these values.

This was the attitude that led him in 1946 to advocate the compulsory pacification of the world by nuclear blackmail. In 1918, his experience of war and wartime politics did much to persuade him that mankind was collectively all but mad and that he individually was inept as a practical politician. He repeatedly claimed that he longed to return to pure philosophy, but could never stand the atmosphere of the traditional universities. So, although he spent much time with old Cambridge friends and attended meetings of the Apostles with some regularity, he drifted away from that setting. He had discovered a considerable talent as a popular lecturer and writer; now, having given away the rather substantial fortune he had inherited at twenty-one, he had to turn that talent into cash. The need to do so grew more urgent when he married Dora Black, some twenty years his junior, and promptly begot two children; the need became even greater when they opened Beacon Hill School in Hampshire, which ran at a chronic loss and needed all the help Russell's lecture tours and occasional writings could give it.

This interwar phase of Russell's life produced a curious sort of semi-political intervention in public life. It is one that induces a good deal of ambivalence; on the one hand Russell usually fought for good causes—birth control, religious, racial and political toleration, a more egalitarian society, livelier educational systems, and so on—while on the other, he did so by relying on simple cleverness and a gift for dazzling phrases to carry him over complexities that a writer more respectful of his readers would have acknowledged. “What fools they must be, to take us so seriously,” he remarked to Max Eastman, after a public debate between the two of them; Eastman recoiled from the remark and never forgave Russell for it.

Whatever one's ambivalence about it all, it is hard to regret the talent that turned out over fifty “penny dreadfuls” as he used to call them, including Marriage and Morals, which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1951. Along with The Conquest of Happiness, Sceptical Essays, Popular Essays, and Unpopular Essays—so called, said Russell, because a reviewer had objected that Popular Essays contained several sentences that even an intelligent five-year-old might find difficult—they formed a library of dissident ideas that excited more teenagers and alarmed more parents and school teachers than one can count. Speaking for myself, the discovery of Russell in 1956 when I was just sixteen remains one of the aspects of my education for which I remain most grateful.

Nor did Russell always wait to turn his work into penny dreadfuls. For several years he wrote little columns for the Hearst newspapers; he could dictate 1500 words to a secretary in one go, with never a mistake, and always had something quirky and unlikely to say. Moreover, he never compromised his views. “Who May Wear Lipstick?” is not Russell the erotomaniac discoursing on the means of sexual attraction, but a deft little piece of mockery denouncing American local school boards for forbidding female employees from wearing make-up. Nor does he engage, as radicals of a later age might have done, in elaborate appeals to First Amendment rights of free expression and all the rest. He observes that it would do children a lot of good to be taught by cheerful, warm and friendly young women, not by a lot of frumps. All his life he feared that the relentless pressures of respectability deprived most women of the capacity of uninhibited thought. Many of his arguments for a more liberated outlook on sex were drawn less from a concern for sexual happiness—though that certainly moved him—than from a concern that the constant policing of young women was terribly bad for their brains.

The disquieting thing, as suggested above, is how much he disliked doing it all. Instead of cherishing a genuine, and publicly useful—if in the great scheme of things a rather minor—talent, he always fretted that he was not advancing the frontiers of pure philosophy. Between Russell the political essayist and the Russell who communed with the eternal verities, there was not merely an emotional chasm but positive hostility. The tension made for a political flightiness that could often be alarming. His daughter, Katherine Tait, suggests in her memoir of her father that he had “an essentially religious temperament.” Given his lifelong detestation of all organized religion, it is hard to go along with that in any simple way; still, there is evidently something in it. Whatever his motives for going along with Ottoline Morrell's florid mysticism in the years of their grand affair, he evidently found it no trouble to do so. He had already written “A Free Man's Worship” and the other essays that make up Mysticism and Logic. His utilitarianism was always skin-deep, and something wilder and less calculable was always waiting for expression.

In that vein, he easily dropped into a rhetoric that suggested the choices before us were simple, vast, and to be taken on pure moral conviction. Harold Macmillan was “more wicked than Hitler” because he would not agree to immediate unilateral nuclear disarmament; Has Man a Future? offered the choice between heaven on earth and a radioactive ash-heap. The thought that mankind might somehow muddle along between both extremes seemed not so much rhetorically less powerful, though it plainly is that, as intellectually less inviting. One extreme example that again shows Russell's ambivalence about the United States in a striking light is the transformation of his views about the morality of war between 1936 when he wrote Which Way to Peace? and his post-war advocacy of nuclear blackmail.

In 1936, he was straightforwardly defeatist; Hitler was certainly a menace, the Nazis certainly disgusting. Anti-semitism he hardly mentions, and after the war regretted having failed to take it seriously as a genuine driving force of Nazi policy. In 1936, he took something close to the usual appeasers' position. The Germans wanted to regain their place in the sun; in that case the British should give them as many colonies as they wanted. They were no use to the British, and might as well encumber the Germans—or indeed the Americans, who would probably purchase the British West Indies for a “good round sum in dollars.” The larger question was what to do about British reactions to German aggression and invasion. Russell's reply was that the only possible response was passive resistance. Non-cooperation and an attitude of contempt for Nazi views and projects would soon induce the occupiers to give up and go home.

The grounds of this view were what one might expect. In the age of the bomber, civilization would lie in ruins within days of the opening of air war. Gas and high-explosives would kill thousands, and reduce everyone else to gibbering incapacity. At a time when the British had only used bombs against villagers in Afghanistan, Iraq, and occasionally in the Sudan, it was easy to project their panic to a city like London, and imagine the results on a vast scale. That the actual course of events was so different, both in Britain and in Germany and in Japan until the use of the atomic bomb, does not entirely discredit him. What is harder to accept is the dichotomous style that suggests that domination by Hitler would not be too bad, while resistance would be the end of absolutely everything.

Russell never liked Which Way to Peace? He never allowed it to be reprinted. He backed away from it, and from the company it brought him into, almost as soon as he had written it. When the war actually came, his never very latent British patriotism boiled up. He desperately tried to get back to England, to lend what aid he could to the war effort. He saw that Hitler was an infinitely nastier proposition than he had supposed, not merely a German nationalist of a familiar kind, but a moral nihilist whose aim was to destroy precisely the values by which Russell thought political policies were to be judged. But he had always thought Stalin as obnoxious and dangerous as Hitler. Russophobia was never far from the surface in Russell; among the many reasons why the First World War was intolerable was the way it brought France and Britain into alliance with Russia. During the Second World War, he had told Gilbert Murray that he thought Stalin at least as evil as Hitler. As the war ended, he turned to thinking of ways in which Soviet Russia could be contained.

In 1946, in the American magazine Cavalcade, he proposed that the United States should in effect blackmail Russia into disarming. This was not because he thought the United States particularly a model for western society; as always he thought American politicians vulgar, hysterically anti-communist, hypocritical in their religious professions, and largely contaminated by greed and racism. Still, America was a liberal democracy and the Soviet Union was entirely opposed to the values of liberal democracy; moreover, America was not bent on world conquest and Russia was. Quite what he had in mind remains somewhat mysterious. In later years he claimed never to have made the proposal; when it was pointed out that he plainly had done so, he claimed he had never been serious; but that is hard to believe when he made the suggestion several times, and in various places over a period of three years. Moreover, the idea is not wholly at odds with Russell's way of thinking. He was not, as he said, a pacifist on principle. He was a consequentialist. Even nuclear warfare had to be treated in that framework.

Sometimes it seemed that he thought that the mere threat of nuclear war would suffice to induce Russia to disarm. But Russell understood better than most what nuclear weapons in their then state of development could and could not do, and he knew that limited nuclear attacks would be unable to halt the Red Army, or bring Russia to its knees overnight. So he more usually envisioned Russia refusing to disarm, refusing to open its military sites to inspection, refusing to forswear the attempt to develop nuclear weapons itself. In that case, there would have to be war. Sometimes he optimistically envisioned a quick nuclear war as when he speculated that “it would not be difficult to find a casus belli.” More often he accepted that it would be more protracted. What World War Three would be like was hard to say, but he thought that it might well kill five hundred million people and set European civilization back for five centuries. This, however, was a price worth paying for saving European values.

It is hard to assess such ideas. At one level they have the slightly mad logic of the thought that it had been necessary to destroy the town of Hue in order to save it from the Viet Cong. To kill half a billion people and push Europe back five centuries is a strange way of advancing European values. One would have to be very certain indeed that all the alternatives had been carefully thought out and rejected before one started thinking along those lines. In a way it is an example of something close to the religious mode of thought that I have suggested came naturally to him. Heaven and Hell were the only alternatives worth contemplating; that Europe had to pass through a half millennium of purgatory in order to reach Heaven and escape Hell was not unthinkable. The oddity is to bolt such a way of thinking onto the rationalist, consequentialist forms of political argument that came equally naturally to him. It is no wonder that many American readers of Russell in the last twenty years of his life wondered quite what he had against them, when he swung from the cool rationalism of the case for restraint in American foreign policy in a dangerous world to a rhetoric more reminiscent (though twenty years in advance) of the Ayatollah Khomeini's denunciations of the Great Satan.

What is one to make of it all? Three things perhaps. In the first place, the Russell whom one might describe as the heir of 1688 and the Whig Revolution was a vastly useful liberal influence. Liberals tend to suffer from a shortage of rhetorical vigor and a lack of vital energy. Russell's astonishing refusal to grow old and behave respectably was a useful counter to that depressing characteristic of liberal politics. His workaday politics were curiously, but usefully, Whig, liberal and democratic socialist all at once. The need to combine respect for an aristocracy of intellect with the benefits of the welfare state is a genuine need and one he could state better than most, as the possessor of an aristocractic intellect who had given all his money to good radical causes in his youth. His dislike of Marxism, while still recognizing its rhetorical power and the ills it fed on, was useful when he first broached it in 1896, more useful in 1920 when he wrote The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, and entirely up to date in the 1950s. His violent attacks on American foreign policy in the 1960s ought not to blind us to the fact that the last political statement he wrote was a condemnation of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. All his life, he was more nearly right than most people about the effects of both the policies he approved and those he loathed, though one result is that when people nowadays read Russell's books of the 1920s on education, marriage, sex, and social policy, they seem models of elegant prose but politically rather tame.

In the second place, there was about him an anti-political streak. This was not 1688 but 1968 when there was a demand for new visions, for the total reconstruction of everything. In this vein, he did not contribute to politics, though he certainly contributed to the vividness with which those who were totally hostile to the existing order set about attacking it. Most of the time, he saw quite clearly that it was not something one could ask from politics; but he also, and to my mind rightly, saw that it was a side of human life that one needs to protect—to find a political framework within which people can pursue these quasi-religious intimations, and find some ultimate value in their lives. As is evident, I am cautious about all this, and mistrustful of the effects of confusing salvation and political action. Still, it must be said both that this was a powerful strand in Russell's intellect, temperament and political style, and that it is hard to see how people would be motivated to take part in politics at all if they were not to a degree propelled by such passions.

And lastly, there was the side of Russell that it is impossible not to like—the Socratic gadfly, whose aim is not to rally us to a cause, but simply to stir up our grey cells. That he did wonderfully well, not just in his popular work but also in his more academic writing too. There is a lovely phrase in his essay “On Denoting” where he accuses Meinong of failing to preserve the sense of reality that should accompany even the most abstract work, and somehow he managed to convey both that sense in his abstract work—and in his potboilers the converse, the sense that there was also a higher and nobler realm of intellectual light, whose rays might if we were lucky sometimes illuminate everyday life. His ability to make hard thinking and surprising conclusions attractive to such a wide audience is one that anyone with pretensions to teach must surely find it as hard not to envy, as it is impossible to emulate. But we can at least take in it the sort of pleasure Russell evidently aimed to give.