Bertrand Russell

• 1. Introduction

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  Bertrand Russell was born on the 18th of May 1872 in a country house called Ravenscroft, in Trellech, Monmouthshire, into one of the most prominent liberal families of the British aristocracy. He would live for 97 years, bridging the Victorian era and the age of nuclear weapons. He went to prison twice for his beliefs. He wrote more than seventy books. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. And at the age of 89, he was jailed again for taking part in an anti-nuclear demonstration.

  Who was this man who shifted so dramatically from abstract mathematics to street-level protest? How did the same mind that co-authored Principia Mathematica also send telegrams to Soviet premiers and American presidents during the Cuban Missile Crisis? And what drove a British earl, grandson of a Prime Minister, to spend the last night of his very long life composing a political statement condemning a foreign government?

  Those questions pull in three directions at once: toward the cold precision of logic, toward the turbulent current of his personal life, and toward the relentless moral urgency that would define his public role for more than six decades.

• 2. Loneliness and Euclid

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  At the age of eleven, Russell's brother Frank introduced him to the work of Euclid. Russell later described the encounter in his autobiography as "one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love." That reaction tells you something important about the circumstances in which it occurred.

  By the time Frank handed him that book, Russell had already lost both parents. His mother died of diphtheria in June 1874; his sister Rachel died shortly after. His father died of bronchitis in January 1876, following a long period of depression. Frank and Bertrand were taken in by their paternal grandparents at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park. Their grandfather, former Prime Minister Earl Russell, died in 1878, leaving their grandmother, the Countess Russell, as the dominant figure of Russell's childhood.

  The Countess was from a Scottish Presbyterian family. She successfully petitioned the Court of Chancery to override a provision in Amberley's will that would have had the children raised as agnostics. Despite her religious conservatism, she accepted Darwinism and supported Irish Home Rule. Her influence on Russell's sense of social justice stayed with him throughout his life.

  His adolescence was, by his own account, deeply lonely. He wrote in his autobiography that his interests in nature, books, and mathematics saved him from "complete despondency", and that only his wish to know more mathematics kept him from suicide. He was educated at home by a series of tutors, with no peers and no outlet for what he was thinking. He discovered Percy Bysshe Shelley during this period and memorised his work, writing later that he used to wonder whether he would ever meet "any live human being with whom I should feel so much sympathy."

  Beginning at age 15, he spent considerable time thinking about Christian religious dogma and found it unconvincing. At 15 he concluded there was no free will. At 17, no life after death. At 18, after reading Mill's Autobiography, he abandoned the "First Cause" argument entirely and became an atheist. That sequence of private intellectual rebellions, conducted alone in a house in Richmond Park, would set the direction of the rest of his life.

• 3. The Architecture of Logic

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  Russell arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1890, winning a scholarship to read for the Mathematical Tripos under coach Robert Rumsey Webb. He graduated as seventh Wrangler in mathematics in 1893 and was elected a Fellow in philosophy in 1895. Along the way, he encountered Alfred North Whitehead, who recommended him to the Cambridge Apostles, and he became acquainted with the younger George Edward Moore.

  At the first International Congress of Philosophy in Paris in 1900, Russell met Giuseppe Peano and Alessandro Padoa. He was struck by the precision of Peano's arguments and returned to England carrying the Formulario mathematico, the Italians' attempt to reduce mathematics to symbolic notation. Working through that literature, he encountered what would become known as Russell's paradox.

  In February 1901, when Russell was 29, he witnessed Whitehead's wife suffering an angina attack. He later described what happened next as a "sort of mystic illumination": "I found myself filled with semi-mystical feelings about beauty and with a desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to find some philosophy which should make human life endurable." He said that at the end of those five minutes he had become "a completely different person." Whether or not one takes that claim literally, the period that followed was astonishingly productive.

  In 1903 he published The Principles of Mathematics, advancing the thesis of logicism: that mathematics and logic are one and the same. In 1905 he published the essay "On Denoting" in the journal Mind, which has since been called a "paradigm of philosophy." Then, between 1910 and 1913, the three volumes of Principia Mathematica appeared, co-authored with Whitehead. The work was a milestone in the development of classical logic and a sustained attempt to reduce the whole of mathematics to logic. It made Russell world-famous in his field.

  He had also, in 1908, been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. And in 1910, he took up a lectureship at Trinity. His standing seemed secure. It would not last.

• 4. Prison, Conscience, and the War

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  In 1916, Trinity College dismissed Russell following his conviction under the Defence of the Realm Act 1914. His offence was pacifist activity. The college had declined to grant him a fellowship that would have protected him from being fired, in part because he was agnostic and considered "anti-clerical." Russell later described the dismissal in Free Thought and Official Propaganda as an illegitimate use of state power to violate freedom of expression.

  He had refused to pay a fine of £100, hoping to be sent to prison. His books were auctioned instead to raise the money. Friends bought them back. He kept the copy of the King James Bible that came back stamped "Confiscated by Cambridge Police."

  He appeared at the Leeds Convention in June 1917, where well over a thousand anti-war socialists gathered, including delegates from the Independent Labour Party and the Socialist Party. He stood alongside Labour MPs including Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden, as well as Arnold Lupton, a former Liberal MP who had campaigned against conscription. Russell wrote afterward to Lady Ottoline Morrell that, to his surprise, "when I got up to speak, I was given the greatest ovation that was possible to give anybody."

  A later conviction, for publicly lecturing against inviting the United States to enter the war on the United Kingdom's side, resulted in six months in Brixton Prison in 1918. His account of that imprisonment is characteristically dry: he found it "in many ways quite agreeable." He had no engagements, no callers, no interruptions. He read; he wrote Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy; he began work on The Analysis of Mind. He noted that his fellow prisoners seemed "in no way morally inferior to the rest of the population, though they were on the whole slightly below the usual level of intelligence as was shown by their having been caught."

  While reading Strachey's Eminent Victorians in his cell, he laughed aloud. A warder intervened to remind him that prison was a place of punishment. Russell was reinstated to Trinity in 1919. He resigned in 1920. The reasons, as G. H. Hardy would later explain in a 61-page pamphlet he wrote without Russell's knowledge, were personal: a divorce, a subsequent remarriage, and Russell's judgment that seeking a leave of absence would have created a fresh controversy.

• 5. Between Revolutions and Republics

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  In August 1920, Russell travelled to Soviet Russia as part of an official British government delegation sent to investigate the effects of the Russian Revolution. He met Vladimir Lenin and spent an hour with him. He came away disappointed, sensing in Lenin an "impish cruelty" and comparing him to "an opinionated professor." He cruised down the Volga on a steamship. The visit destroyed what tentative support he had held for the revolution, and he wrote it up as The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism.

  His lover at the time, Dora Black, visited Soviet Russia independently at the same period and came away enthusiastic. The contrast would follow their relationship.

  The following year, Russell and Dora travelled to Peking to lecture on philosophy for a year. Before leaving China, Russell became gravely ill with pneumonia, and the Japanese press incorrectly reported his death. When the couple arrived in Japan on their return, Dora handed local journalists notices reading: "Mr. Bertrand Russell, having died according to the Japanese press, is unable to give interviews to Japanese journalists."

  Back in England, in the 1922 and 1923 general elections, Russell stood as a Labour Party candidate in the Chelsea constituency, knowing both times that he had no realistic chance of winning in what he considered a safe Conservative seat. He was not elected on either occasion.

  After the birth of his children, his attention turned to education. Together with Dora, he founded the experimental Beacon Hill School in 1927, running it initially from their residence at Telegraph House near Harting, West Sussex. He published On Education, Especially in Early Childhood during this period. He left the school in 1932; Dora continued running it until 1943.

  In 1931, upon the death of his elder brother Frank, Russell became the 3rd Earl Russell, inheriting both the earldom and a seat in the House of Lords. He held both until his death. His personal life was in rougher shape: his marriage to Dora ended in separation in 1932 and divorce not long after, following her having two children with the American journalist Griffin Barry. On the 18th of January 1936, Russell married his third wife, Patricia Spence, an Oxford undergraduate who had served as his children's governess since 1930.

• 6. The Shifting Calculus of War

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  Russell had opposed rearmament against Nazi Germany as late as 1937, writing in a personal letter that if the Germans sent an invading army to England, the best course would be to "treat them as visitors, give them quarters and invite the commander and chief to dine with the prime minister." By 1940, he had changed his position. He concluded that Hitler taking over all of Europe would represent a permanent threat to democracy. By 1943, he had settled on what he called "relative political pacifism": war was always a great evil, but in some extreme circumstances it might be "the lesser of two evils."

  During these years Russell taught at the University of Chicago and then at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1940, he was appointed professor at the City College of New York. The appointment was annulled by a court judgment that declared him "morally unfit" to teach, on the basis of his views on sexual morality, which he had set out in Marriage and Morals in 1929. The legal action was brought by a woman named Jean Kay, who was concerned about the effect of his appointment on her daughter, who was not actually a student at the college. Albert Einstein wrote an open letter to Morris Raphael Cohen, a professor emeritus at the college, on the 19th of March 1940, supporting Russell's appointment. It was in that letter that Einstein's phrase about great spirits encountering violent opposition from mediocre minds first appeared.

  Russell joined the Barnes Foundation, where his lectures on the history of philosophy became the basis for A History of Western Philosophy, published in 1945. The book became a best-seller and provided him with a steady income for the rest of his life. His relationship with the founder, Albert C. Barnes, soured, and Russell returned to the UK in 1944 to rejoin Trinity College.

  In October 1948, he survived a plane crash in Hommelvik, Norway, one of 24 survivors out of 43 passengers. He credited his survival to the fact that the people who drowned had been seated in the non-smoking part of the plane.

• 7. Nuclear Age, Nobel, and the Long Campaign

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  In the King's Birthday Honours of the 9th of June 1949, Russell was awarded the Order of Merit. When George VI decorated him, the King reportedly said: "You have sometimes behaved in a manner that would not do if generally adopted." Russell smiled. He later claimed that the reply "That's right, just like your brother" had immediately come to mind.

  The following year, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited for writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought. The prize was one of several honours accumulated across decades: the De Morgan Medal in 1932, the Sylvester Medal in 1934, the Kalinga Prize in 1957, and the Jerusalem Prize in 1963.

  The 1950s and 1960s were dominated by nuclear disarmament. The 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto called for nuclear disarmament and was signed by eleven prominent nuclear physicists and intellectuals. In October 1960, Russell and Michael Scott issued a declaration entitled "Act or Perish," forming the Committee of 100 and calling for nonviolent resistance to nuclear weapons. In September 1961, at the age of 89, Russell was jailed for seven days in Brixton Prison after taking part in an anti-nuclear demonstration in London. The magistrate offered to exempt him from jail if he pledged to behave himself. Russell replied: "No, I won't."

  In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he exchanged telegrams with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who assured him the Soviet government would not be reckless. Russell sent a telegram to President Kennedy, reading in part: "YOUR ACTION DESPERATE. THREAT TO HUMAN SURVIVAL. NO CONCEIVABLE JUSTIFICATION. CIVILIZED MAN CONDEMNS IT."

  From 1966 to 1967, he worked alongside Jean-Paul Sartre to form the Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal, investigating the conduct of the United States in Vietnam. In October 1965, he had torn up his Labour Party card over his suspicion that Harold Wilson's government planned to send troops to support the American effort there.

  Russell published his three-volume autobiography in 1967, 1968, and 1969. On the 23rd of November 1969, he wrote to The Times warning that preparations for show trials in Czechoslovakia were "highly alarming." In December 1969, he protested to Alexei Kosygin over the expulsion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Writers' Union.

• 8. The Last Statement

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  Russell died of influenza just after 8 pm on the 2nd of February 1970, at his home in Penrhyndeudraeth in Wales, at the age of 97. His body was cremated at Colwyn Bay on the 5th of February, with five people present. In accordance with his will, there was no religious ceremony, only one minute's silence. His ashes were scattered over the Welsh mountains.

  But his last political act had come the day before he died. On the 31st of January 1970, he issued a statement condemning Israeli bombing raids deep into Egyptian territory during the War of Attrition, comparing them to German raids in the Battle of Britain and to the American bombing of Vietnam. It was read aloud at the International Conference of Parliamentarians in Cairo on the 3rd of February 1970, the day after his death.

  His will, published later in 1970 on the 23rd of October, showed an estate valued at £69,423. A memorial bust was commissioned in 1980 by a committee that included the philosopher A. J. Ayer; Marcelle Quinton sculpted it, and it stands in Red Lion Square in London.

  Russell's daughter, Lady Katharine Jane Tait, founded the Bertrand Russell Society in 1974 to preserve and study his work. She also wrote a book about her father, My Father, Bertrand Russell, published in 1975. Bangladesh's first leader, Mujibur Rahman, named his youngest son Sheikh Russel in his honour.

  For the sesquicentennial of his birth in May 2022, McMaster University's Bertrand Russell Archive organised an exhibition focused on the Russell-Einstein Manifesto and the Pugwash Conference, drawing on the earliest surviving version of the manifesto. At Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, on the 18th of May 2022, the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation held a commemoration on the anniversary of his birth. The address where all of this converges, Red Lion Square, is where his sculpted face still looks out over a London he spent much of his life trying to reshape.