He lifts his head up and looks about in a very energetic way.
So wrote Bertrand Russell’s mother, Kate, three days after his birth on 18th May, 1872. For almost a century, Russell did not confine himself to energetically looking about, though he surely maintained this disposition. The decades of his long and eventful life were filled with intellectual exploration – mathematical, philosophical, political and literary – and active participation in causes large and small.
In the ‘Prologue’ to his Autobiography, ‘What I have lived for’, Russell outlines the moving forces of his life:
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 deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair … 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.
Towards the end of his life, Russell established the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and The Spokesman journal to continue his work. On the occasion of the 153rd anniversary of Russell’s birth, we offer this collection of articles published in the journal he founded, The Spokesman, along with information on Russell’s books and related publications published by Spokesman Books.
Articles from The Spokesman
Bertrand Russell died a month before publication of the first issue of The Spokesman. Ken Coates’s ‘Editorial Notes’ from this issue outlines the story:
The death of Bertrand Russell has come as an extraordinary shock to all the many people, in every continent, who were engaged in the innumerable campaigns which he was waging right up to the last moment of his life. Of course, we all knew he was an old man, very old indeed. But somewhat irrationally it had seemed as is the world’s need for that often almost solitary voice might keep it speaking almost indefinitely. Now no more peace telegrams will go out to the governments from Penrhyndeudraeth, no more urgent appeals for the victims of political oppression, no more calls for the mobilisation of demonstrations all around the globe. The thought of that silence is awesome, forbidding.
Other people have celebrated the prodigious achievements of the man in half a dozen major fields. In our forthcoming issues we will try to explain some of those elements of his greatness with which was were particularly familiar. Now, we can say only a word or two.
The fact is, that during the last week of his life, after months of preparation in which he eagerly participated, we sent this issue of The Spokesman to the press. It was virtually complete on the day he died. When we composed the brief editorial notes, we had gone over the ground with him, seeking together to formulate in the briefest way the multiplicity of issues upon which The Spokesman was intending to campaign. He had wanted the journal desperately in order to be able, the better, to organise support in all the various battles in which he was engaged: we therefore took some pains to get the first editorial declaration right, and it went to press late.
For this reason, we are able to stop publication and insert instead this sad but proud statement: The Spokesman, founded by Bertrand Russell, is dedicated to carrying on his work.
Fifty-five years on, The Spokesman continues in this dedication. We reproduce a selection of Russell’s articles, republished to coincide with political developments and to add to the record of his life and work, starting from The Spokesman 83.
Russell’s essay on Tom Paine was first published in 1934. Download here
Thomas Paine, though prominent in two Revolutions and almost hanged for attempting to raise a third, is grown, in our day, somewhat dim. To our great-grandfathers, he seemed a kind of earthly Satan, a subversive infidel rebellious alike against his God and his King. He incurred the bitter hostility of three men not generally united: Pitt, Robespierre, and Washington. Of these the first two sought his death, while the third carefully abstained from measures designed to save his life. Pitt and Washington hated him because he was a democrat; Robespierre, because he opposed the execution of the King and the Reign of Terror.
On 9 July 1955, Bertrand Russell read what became known as the Russell-Einstein Manifesto to the world’s press assembled in London. He explained that signing the appeal was the last thing Einstein had done before he died. Download here
We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?
Bertrand Russell’s last message, to an international conference of Parliamentarians meeting in Cairo, addressed the crisis in the Middle East. It was published in the second number of The Spokesman, shortly after his death in 1970. Download here
The latest phase of the undeclared war in the Middle East is based upon a profound miscalculation. The bombing raids deep into Egyptian territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender, but will stiffen their resolve to resist. This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment. The Vietnamese who have endured years of American heavy bombing have responded not by capitulation but by shooting down more enemy aircraft. In 1940 my own fellow countrymen resisted Hitler’s bombing raids with an unprecedented unity and determination. For this reason, the present Israeli attacks will fail in their essential purpose, but at the same time they must be condemned vigorously throughout the world.
Russell’s review of the first volume of Max Beer’s A History of British Socialism was published in The Athenaeum in 1919. This first volume of Beer’s History, with its introduction by R.H. Tawney, was republished by Spokesman in an illustrated edition in 1984. Download here
This is an extraordinarily good book, the outcome of many years of patient research. Mr. Tawney’s Introduction informs us that the second volume was nearly completed at the outbreak of the war, and will, it is hoped, appear on the return of peace. Mr. Beer has performed a labour of love in rescuing the work of many British pioneers from the oblivion to which the carelessness of their countrymen would confine them.
In 1910, following years of intensive effort, Bertrand Russell embarked on the publication, with Cambridge University Press, of Principia Mathematica, which was to become a landmark study in the foundation of mathematics. On 15 November, in a letter to Helen Flexner, a relative by marriage who taught English at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, he wrote:
‘The first volume of the big book that Whitehead and I have been engaged on for the last 10 years is going to appear in a few weeks … This will be a great event in my life.’
To mark the centenary of this momentous event, we reprint a small selection from Russell’s own writings. There is Russell’s affectionate pen portrait of Alfred North Whitehead, his collaborator on Principia, which was published in Portraits from Memory. And, to set the scene, there is a short excerpt from Russell’s Autobiography. Download here
Russell’s statement was published in 1919 in The Guildsman: a Journal of Social and Industrial Freedom, edited by G.D.H. Cole. Download here
I have been led to Guild Socialism by the consideration of what seemed to me the good and bad elements in the existing system and in older proposals for reconstruction: it seemed to me that Guild Socialism combined the good elements and avoided those that were bad more successfully than any of its rivals.
The first meeting of Members of the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal, which took place in London on 13 November 1966, was addressed by Bertrand Russell. He was joined by Jean-Paul Sartre and the Italian jurist, Lelio Basso, among other notable men and women who were to give their time to hear the evidence presented to the Tribunal. The United States’ war on Vietnam was to continue for several long years but, during the course of its sessions in Stockholm and Copenhagen (it was prevented from meeting in Paris), the Tribunal would make available eyewitness testimony of what was actually happening there. Download here
Russell’s driven activism to avert nuclear war over Cuba is recorded in his little book, Unarmed Victory, which Spokesman republished to mark the passage of half a century since the crisis. Here, we reprint part of Russell’s opening chapter on ‘The International Background’. But first of all, Nicholas Griffin, of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre at McMaster University in Canada, sets the scene. Download here
Russell’s Autobiography, completed in the 1960s, is widely recognised as one of the high points of the genre. These excerpts are from the final chapter, simply called ‘The Foundation’. Download here
[The Foundation] should be not just for this or that purpose. It should be for any purpose that would forward the struggle against war and the armaments race, and against the unrest and injustices suffered by oppressed individuals and peoples that in very large part caused these. Such an organisation could grow to meet the widely differing demands. It could, also, reorientate itself as circumstances changed. A good part of my time, therefore, in 1963, was taken up with discussing plans for the formation of such an organisation …
Russell made this public appeal on 18 June 1966, and it was subsequently published in War Crimes in Vietnam, his little book which attracted some calumny when it appeared. Russell anticipated the formation of the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal, inaugurated in London later the same year. His searing indictment expresses the passion he felt for a cause which had absorbed him for some years already, and came to characterise the Foundation during its early years. Download here
The late Ralph Miliband had to work quite hard when interviewing Bertrand Russell at his home in Wales during the summer of 1967, but he nevertheless managed to extract some good stories, as this excerpt shows. It was originally published in the very first issue of The Spokesman, in 1970, shortly after Russell’s death. The encounter was filmed for television by Terry de Lacey. Download here
Miliband: Lord Russell, all your life you’ve been deeply concerned with ethics and morality. I’d like to ask you, have things moved your way in the last fifty years, say, in the field of sexual morality?
Russell: Oh, in the field of sexual morality they’ve moved my way enormously, much more than I should have thought it was possible for them to move, much more. There’s a greater tolerance of the sort of thing that used to be regarded as wicked, and there’s a much greater willingness to discuss sexual matters. For instance, take birth control. Now, my father lost an election through advocating birth control, not because birth control itself was particularly shocking, but because the subject of birth was shocking – you shouldn’t mention it. Well, that’s not the case any longer, and I find this a very, very great increase of freedom in the discussion of sexual matters.
Miliband: I have the impression that young people have really made their own revolution, so to speak.
Bertrand Russell opposed the First World War at its sudden outbreak in August 1914. His opposition was to cost him dear during the difficult years that followed. Russell tells the story of his turbulent war, personal and public, in a selection of his letters and writings from these years, A Pacifist at War, edited by Nicholas Griffin of McMaster University in Canada, which holds Russell’s extensive Archives. In this excerpt, writing to his erstwhile lover Ottoline Morrell in June 1917, Russell recounts his visit to Leeds to celebrate the revolutionary changes taking place in Russia. The February Revolution had removed Tsar Nicholas II, the Provisional Government had been installed, and the October Revolution was still to come. By this stage in the war, Russell had growing doubts about the usefulness of his continuing work for the No-Conscription Fellowship (NCF), which campaigned on behalf of thousands of conscientious objectors (COs) and others who were often brutally mistreated. Catherine Marshall struggled to maintain the NCF. The term ‘absolutist’ refers to imprisoned conscientious objectors who objected to any work or alternative service that would benefit the war effort. Professor Griffin sets the scene. Download here
Russell’s account of Pugwash, which he founded with the Russell-Einstein Appeal of 1955, appeared in Disarmament: Its Politics and Economics, edited by Seymour Melman for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston, 1962). Download here
The Pugwash Movement, as it is called, consists of periodical conferences of scientists from Eastern and Western and neutral countries intended to discuss in a scientific, non-polemical spirit various problems arising out of modern methods of mass destruction. It came from a projected collaboration between Einstein and myself on the dangers connected with nuclear warfare. Unfortunately, Einstein was suffering from his last, fatal illness and, while still willing to collaborate, was unable to join in the work of drafting the appeal that we had in mind. He therefore left it to me to draw up a manifesto to which I sought signatures of a limited number of very eminent men of science.
In 1958, Bertrand Russell urged ending the modern separation of science from culture, when he received the Kalinga Prize for the popularisation of science, at UNESCO House in Paris. His call resonates. Download here
There was a time when scientists looked askance at attempts to make their work widely intelligible. But, in the world of the present day, such an attitude is no longer possible. The discoveries of modern science have put into the hands of governments unprecedented powers both for good and for evil. Unless the statesmen who wield these powers have at least an elementary understanding of their nature, it is scarcely likely that they will use them wisely. And, in democratic countries, it is not only statesmen, but the general public, to whom some degree of scientific understanding is necessary.
First published in March 1968, this essay asks a pertinent question. Download here
The opening of the Cold War is now beginning to receive the critical attention that it deserves. Until recently, the fervour of the religious crusade kept most of us orthodox. I like to think that my own attitudes have been not untypical. In the period before Hungary and Suez, the late Isaac Deutscher used to visit me at my home in Richmond. I would sit silently as he propounded his views on the Cold War. His scrupulous weighing of the evidence and his balanced presentation of opposing views were always scholarly, but I remained unconvinced. For me, Stalin’s terror and the introduction of the one-party state throughout eastern Europe, following the purges and mock trials of the thirties, made unorthodoxy unpalatable, even unthinkable.
For decades, Bertrand Russell had been worrying about nuclear weapons, and organising to alert the world to the threat. This excerpt from his Autobiography recounts the founding of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, 1957-1959, edited by Carl Spadoni, will be published by Routledge. It is Volume 30 of the Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, produced at McMaster University, Canada, which holds the Russell Archives. Download here
… By November [1957], however, my concern with international affairs had boiled up. I felt that I must again do something to urge at least a modicum of common sense to break into the policies of the two Great Powers, Russian and America. They seemed to be blindly, but with determination, careering down a not very primrose-strewn path to destruction, a destruction that might – probably would – engulf us all. I wrote an open letter, to President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev, addressing them as ‘Most Potent Sirs’…
First published in 1935, Russell’s perceptive essay resonates today. It appeared in the collection Let the People Think published by Watts & Co in 1941, which was republished by Spokesman Books in 2003. Download here
When we compare our age with that of (say) George I, we are conscious of a profound change of intellectual temper, which has been followed by a corresponding change of the tone of politics. In a certain sense, the outlook of two hundred years ago may be called ‘rational,’ and that which is most characteristic of our time may be called ‘anti-rational.’ But I want to use these words without implying a complete acceptance of the one temper or a complete rejection of the other.
Russell’s excoriating speech on the Labour Government’s Foreign Policy was delivered to a meeting of the Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament on 14 October 1965, a year after the formation of Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s first government. Download here
… The Labour Government, as I shall try to persuade you, has acted in complete subservience to the Government of the United States. Those who had hoped for any improvement in international policies, have suffered a double misfortune: there were elections both in America and in Britain. In both elections, the more ferocious party was defeated. After those elections, the Governments which had been elected adopted the policy of their defeated opponents. The result has been a growth of atrocious cruelty in various parts of the world. Attempts have been made to conceal these acts. I wish to join those who try to defeat such attempts.
Adding some perspective to current concerns, Russell’s anti-nuclear broadside was delivered in Birmingham in March 1961 and subsequently published as a pamphlet by the organisers of the Second Midlands Conference for Peace. Download here
…Collective suicide, given the present known weapons of mass destruction, can only be prevented by collective action. Nothing that any one country can do in isolation will bring safety to any part of the world. If our movement against British reliance on nuclear weapons is to be effective in diminishing the peril which now threatens all nations, this result can only be achieved through international repercussions of what our own country does. Our main purpose must be to prevent a war using weapons of mass destruction – and not only to prevent it for a time by makeshift devices, but to establish such institutions in the world as shall make it reasonably certain that a war of extermination will not occur in the foreseeable future.
This Byron Foundation Lecture was delivered at University College, Nottingham on Friday 12 November 1937. Russell specified no title for his Lecture, but suggested ‘as subject the development of Byronic romanticism in politics and in ways of feeling – eg Lawrence’. In the event, ‘Byron and the Byronic’ was the title announced by Nottingham University. How did Russell’s warnings sound to his audience during those troubled years? Download here
The aristocratic rebel, of whom Byron was in his day the exemplar, is a very different type from the leader of a peasant or proletarian revolt. Those who are hungry have no need of an elaborate philosophy to stimulate or excuse discontent, and anything of the kind appears to them merely an amusement of the idle rich. They want what others have, not some intangible and metaphysical good.
In December 1961, the British fascist, Oswald Mosley, sent Bertrand Russell two of his books. Mosley wrote of ‘the two root differences between us’ in international politics, and subsequently invited Russell to lunch. On 22 January 1962, Russell declined the invitation in these terms. Download here
Bertrand Russell outlived his allotted span in this ‘auto obituary’ penned in the particular style of a London newspaper of record. Download here
In 1920 he paid a brief visit to Russia, whose government did not impress him favourably, and a longer visit to China, where he enjoyed the rationalism of the traditional civilization, with its still surviving flavour of the eighteenth century.
In April 1964 in Manchester, Russell set out his hopes for the new Foundation established in his name. Ralph Schoenman, then his secretary, made suggestions in response to Russell’s draft, some of which Russell subsequently integrated into this text. As delivered, the paper was shortened, and we reprint an excerpt from the fullest version available, as published in Russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Archives in summer 1995. Download here
An extract from Bertrand Russell’s 1959 book, Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare. Download here
I should like, in conclusion, to say a few words about the increase of general wellbeing that would result if such measures of disarmament as we have been discussing were carried out. I put first among the gains to be expected the removal of that terrible load of fear which weighs at present upon all those who are aware of the dangers with which mankind is threatened. I believe that a great upsurge of joy would occur throughout the civilized world and that a great store of energies now turned to hate and destruction and futile rivalry would be diverted into creative channels, bringing happiness and prosperity to parts of the world which, throughout long ages, have been oppressed by poverty and excessive toil. I believe that the emotions of kindliness, generosity and sympathy, which are now kept within iron fetters by the fear of what enemies may do, would acquire a new life and a new force and a new empire over human behaviour. All this is possible. It needs only that men should permit themselves a life of freedom and hope from which they are now excluded by the domination of unnecessary fear.
Russell introduced his collection, Portraits from Memory, with this abstract. Writing during tense Cold War years in the mid-1950s, he surveyed his eight decades and highlighted the pivotal impact of the First World War. More than a decade of work and conflict lay ahead of him, and Russell retained his optimistic and constructive turn of mind. Download here
But let us have done with these generalities. It is not the generalities but their practical application with which I am concerned. How long will it be before the accessible oil in the world is exhausted? Will all the arable land be turned into dustbowls as it has been in large parts of the United States? Will the population increase to the point where men again, like their remote ancestors, have no leisure to think of anything but the food supply? Such questions are not to be decided by general philosophical reflections. Communists think that there will be plenty of oil if there are no capitalists. Some religious people think that there will be plenty of food if we trust in Providence. Such ideas are superficial, even when they are called scientific, as they are by the Communists.
Under the title ‘The Bomb and Civilization’, Russell’s first known public comment of any kind on the atomic bombings appeared on 18 August 1945 in this little known article in Forward, the journal of the Independent Labour Party, published in Glasgow. It was less than two weeks since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States. Russell was to develop his thinking on nuclear questions during the decades that followed, but this short piece indicates his swift appreciation of how the world had changed following the dropping of uranium and plutonium bombs on civilian populations. Download here
One of Russell’s ‘Parables’, this story first appeared in ‘Part III Divertissements’ of Fact and Fiction (1961). Download here
The dreadful message from Earth showed that the ideologies in which they had lived were outmoded. When it appeared that the Government not specially representing either East or West had sent identical messages to both groups, the faith of each side collapsed, and each side felt that it had nothing left to live for. In sorrow, both groups met in no man’s land, and both decided that life had nothing more to offer to either. In a joint harangue, the leaders of the two sides proclaimed their common loss of faith. Sadly and solemnly, in the sight of the two assembled groups of immigrants, they set a light to two very small nuclear weapons, and after a solemn moment of waiting all were reduced to dust.
This article is dated August 1964 and was published in London in the first number of the journal, Africa and the World, in October 1964 under the title ‘Africa can stop this nuclear madness’. Download here
We can only oppose powerful Western governments which are hostile to our aims if the African states which pursue nonalignment would join directly with those of us in the West who oppose the policies of the Cold War. It would then be a practical proposition to hope that public opinion could be sufficiently aroused to end the Cold War and the danger of annihilation. The people of Africa and Asia may be militarily weak, but they are many, and together their governments and the peace groups of the West could accomplish the peace we discuss so lengthily in articles, meetings and conferences.
Russell titles available from Spokesman Books
Full information on Russell titles published by Spokesman Books can be found here and here.
