Rationalist Association

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Rationalist Association was a charity in the United Kingdom that spent nearly a century and a half making heretical ideas affordable. From 1885 until its merger with Humanists UK in January 2025, it published New Humanist magazine and put skeptical, scientific, and anti-religious literature into the hands of readers who might otherwise never have found it. Its story begins not with a lofty philosophical declaration but with a practical frustration: booksellers simply refused to stock the books its founders cared about. How did a small committee of freethinkers build one of the longest-running freethought organisations in British history? And what happens to an institution when the very ideas it championed become mainstream enough for everyone else to publish?

• 2. The Booksellers Problem

  ›

  Charles Albert Watts was the publisher behind the National Reformer and most of Charles Bradlaugh's books. In 1890, Watts ran into a wall that anyone peddling heterodox ideas knew well: mainstream booksellers would not handle secularist titles. His response was practical. He formed the Propagandist Press Committee that same year, recruiting George Jacob Holyoake as president. Holyoake had spent decades as a leading figure in British freethought, and his name lent credibility to the new venture. The committee's purpose was simple: route around the gatekeepers and get the books out. Over the following years the committee renamed itself twice, first to the Rationalist Press Committee and then, in 1899, to the Rationalist Press Association. Members paid a subscription fee and received books to the value of that fee each year. The model turned reading into a kind of dues-paying membership, binding readers to the organisation in a way that a single book purchase never could.

• 3. The Thinker's Library

  ›

  After 1902, the Association began selling reprints of serious scientific works by authors including Julian Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, and Matthew Arnold. That shift in focus lifted the organisation into genuine prominence. The real commercial and intellectual triumph came through the Thinker's Library, a series of books published by Watts and Co. from 1929 until 1951. The series ran under the leadership of Fredrick Watts, son of the Association's founder Charles. Works by Charles Darwin and John Stuart Mill appeared alongside titles deemed too anti-religious for mainstream channels. The series made classic and challenging texts cheap enough to reach readers well outside academic circles. By 1959, membership had climbed to its highest point: more than 5,000 people were paying subscribers. The Association's reach at that peak reflected something larger than institutional loyalty. There was a genuine appetite for rationalist literature in mid-century Britain, and the Thinker's Library had spent two decades feeding it.

• 4. Victim of Its Own Success

  ›

  Reaching more than 5,000 members by 1959 might sound like a cause for celebration, yet the Association's fortunes were already turning. The very ideas it had championed had grown popular enough to attract larger, more established mainstream publishers who could reach far wider audiences. Readers who once had no choice but to seek out the RPA's catalogues now found similar books in ordinary shops. Membership declined steadily. The Association had spent decades fighting for rationalist literature to be taken seriously; once it was, the monopoly that had sustained the organisation dissolved. In 2002, the RPA formally changed its name to the Rationalist Association and became a wholly owned subsidiary of a newly created charity set up to continue its work. The restructuring kept the mission alive but acknowledged that the landscape had shifted fundamentally since Charles Albert Watts first circled around hostile booksellers more than a century before.

• 5. Later Leadership and New Humanist

  ›

  Jonathan Miller was chosen as president of the Rationalist Association in 2006. On being selected, he said: "Not believing in religion is very widespread, but I think this community gets overlooked. I am flattered and honoured." Miller's remark captured something the Association had always argued: that secular and non-religious people formed a genuine community deserving recognition, not simply an absence of belief. Throughout its later decades the Association remained the publisher of New Humanist, the magazine it had produced since 1885. The quarterly continued to serve as the public face of organised rationalism in Britain even as the organisation itself shrank. Other chairs and presidents over the decades included Bertrand Russell, who held the position from 1955 until 1970, and Hermann Bondi, who served from 1982 until 1999. The chair held by Harold Laski from 1929 to 1933 and by Barbara Wootton, Baroness Wootton of Abinger from 1970 to 1973 illustrated how the Association drew from Britain's intellectual and political life across generations.

• 6. Merger and Legacy

  ›

  In January 2025, the Rationalist Association merged with Humanists UK. Humanists UK took over both ownership of the RPA and publication of New Humanist. The original 1885 organisation did not disappear entirely: it was reconstituted as the Rationalist Press, becoming the publishing imprint of Humanists UK. The merger placed the oldest continuous strand of British freethought publishing inside a larger humanist body. The Thinker's Library, which had run from 1929 to 1951 and introduced tens of thousands of readers to Darwin and Haeckel and Mill at affordable prices, stands as the organisation's most tangible achievement. The cheap reprint model that Charles Albert Watts built around bookseller hostility in 1890 outlasted the hostility itself by many decades, and the imprint that carries the RPA's name forward into Humanists UK is still, in form, the same press Watts founded.