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Bertrand Russell: Works
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Bertrand Russell was not impressed by his experience of the Soviet republic. First of all, he did not like what he saw. The regime exerted an ‘iron discipline’ over the workers that was ‘beyond the wildest dream of the most autocratic American magnate’. There was no freedom of the press, political opponents were jailed without trial, and ‘ordinary mortals’ lived ‘in fear of the Cheka’. Although Bolshevism was ‘probably more or less unavoidable’ in Russia, it was quite unsuitable for more advanced countries, as it could not be a ‘stable or desirable form of socialism’, and although capitalism may be dying, all that Bolshevism could achieve in the West was ‘chaos and destruction’. Secondly, he rejected the Bolsheviks’ philosophical approach.
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Bertrand Russell’s books were described by Time magazine as a modern substitute for the Bible. If this is so, the The Conquest of Happiness must be at the very centre of his works.
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Russell's early life was marred by tragedy and bereavement. By the time he was age six, his sister, Rachel, his parents, and his grandfather had all died, and he and Frank were left in the care of their grandmother, Countess Russell. Though Frank was sent to Winchester School, Bertrand was educated privately at home, and his childhood, to his later great regret, was spent largely in isolation from other children. Intellectually precocious, he became absorbed in mathematics from an early age and found the experience of learning Euclidean geometry at the age of 11 “as dazzling as first love,” because it introduced him to the intoxicating possibility of certain, demonstrable knowledge. This led him to imagine that all knowledge might be provided with such secure foundations, a hope that lay at the very heart of his motivations as a philosopher. His earliest philosophical work was written during his adolescence and records the skeptical doubts that led him to abandon the Christian faith in which he had been brought up by his grandmother.
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In 1916 Russell began to work for the No Conscription Fellowship; he became its chairman when all of the original committee had gone to prison. He wrote a leaflet to defend the case of Ernest Everett, who had refused military service. When six men were arrested for distributing the leaflet, Russell wrote to The Times declaring he was its author. Russell was accused of hampering recruiting, and as his own attorney he explained that the case of a conscientious objector could hardly influence someone who is considering volunteering. He cited the English tradition of liberty, but he was convicted nonetheless. When he refused to pay the fine, the authorities preferred confiscating some of his possessions to putting him in prison.
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Russell eventually discovered that Gottlob Frege had independently arrived at equivalent definitions for 0, successor, and number, and the definition of number is now usually referred to as the Frege-Russell definition. It was largely Russell who brought Frege to the attention of the English-speaking world. He did this in 1903, when he published The Principles of Mathematics, in which the concept of class is inextricably tied to the definition of number.[37] The appendix to this work detailed a paradox arising in Frege's application of second- and higher-order functions which took first-order functions as their arguments, and he offered his first effort to resolve what would henceforth come to be known as the Russell Paradox. Before writing Principles, Russell became aware of Cantor's proof that there was no greatest cardinal number, which Russell believed was mistaken. The Cantor Paradox in turn was shown (for example by Crossley) to be a special case of the Russell Paradox. This caused Russell to analyze classes, for it was known that given any number of elements, the number of classes they result in is greater than their number.
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During the war Russell published several books on politics, war, and peace. Principles of Social Reconstruction was released in America as Why Men Fight. In this work Russell began with the idea that the passions of war must be controlled, not by thought alone, but by the passion and desire to think clearly. Reason by itself is too lifeless. Wars can be prevented by a positive life of passion. Impulse must not be weakened but directed "towards life and growth rather than towards death and decay." Russell suggested that the excessive discipline of impulse not only exhausts vitality but often results in impulses of cruelty and destruction; this is why militarism is bad for national character.
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