Bertrand Russell was a founder of analytic philosophy and the quintessential public philosopher, outspoken as a sociopolitical activist and cultural critic over a career that spanned almost 80 years. He was born on May 18, 1872, in Trelleck, Monmouthshire, present-day Wales, at Ravenscroft, the country home of his parents Lord and Lady Amberley. Russell came from a progressive family, and his later ideas clearly reflected its influence. His grandfather was two-time Prime Minister Lord John Russell, whose Reform Bill of 1832 began the partial democratization of the House of Commons; his father was an atheist; and his mother campaigned for women’s suffrage and socialized with Italian revolutionary Giussepe Mazzini. Both of his parents advocated birth control, and they scandalized the public by arranging a ménage à trois with the tutor of their eldest son, Frank. Of Russell’s three maternal uncles, one converted to Catholicism and another adopted Islam, while the third was a staunch agnostic. But by the time he was six, Russell’s parents, sister, and grandfather had all died. He and Frank were taken into the care of their grandmother, a sternly Puritan Scotswoman, with whom they lived at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park, London. Frank was sent to Winchester School, but Bertrand received his education at home, with his grandmother, living in isolation from other people his age. “Throughout my childhood,” he wrote, “I had an increasing sense of loneliness and despair of ever meeting anyone with whom I could talk. Nature and books…saved me from complete despondency.” His grandmother could be overbearing, but she was a woman of convictions who impressed her values upon Russell—including a favorite Bible text, Exodus 23:2, “Thou shalt not follow a multitude who do evil.”
When Russell was 11, his brother introduced him to Euclidean geometry, a watershed that he called “as dazzling as first love.” In 1890, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, to study mathematics. There, he became a member of the Apostles, a secret and storied intellectual society, and met some of the most influential thinkers of his day, including John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, G. Lowes Dickinson, J.M.E. McTaggart, Alfred North Whitehead, and G.E. Moore. Russell studied mathematics for three years before turning to philosophy, initially adhering to British idealism, the dominant school of thought at the time. However, under the influence of Moore—as well as the German mathematicians Karl Weierstrass, Georg Cantor, and Richard Dedekind—Russell quickly shifted to a realist outlook that refuted idealism. This development eventually led him to an interest in the area now known as logicism, a focus that would occupy the next two decades of his life.
Russell wanted to find a means of proving the fundamental axioms of mathematics as true—instead of simply accepting them by intuition—therefore banishing subjectivity from the field. He sought to do this by defining these axioms in purely logical terms, a goal that became his first major philosophical project, The Principles of Mathematics. He made a leap forward after meeting Giusseppe Peano, whose logic studies in collaboration with German scholar Gottleb Frege gave Russell the tools to complete The Principles of Mathematics, published in 1903. Russell later described this period as “an intellectual honeymoon such as I’ve never experienced before or since.” Not long after completing Principles, however, he noticed a flaw—now known as Russell’s Paradox—that seemed to undermine the very core of his achievement. When he detailed the problem to Frege, the German lapsed into depression, but Russell spent the following decade striving to accomplish his initial goal while surmounting the paradox that had undone him. The result was the three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910-1913), a collaboration with Whitehead that satisfied Russell’s logicist aims.
Although Principia was enormously important in and of itself, a byproduct of its early development proved to be Russell’s most significant contribution to philosophy. In 1905, influenced by the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong, Russell published a paper titled “On Denoting,” which introduced his theory of descriptions. The theory is a cornerstone of the philosophy of language, and introduced tools with wide-ranging applications in philosophical study at large. Moreover, Russell’s approach to setting forth the theory of descriptions provided the model for analytic philosophy, now the dominant philosophical tradition in the English-speaking world.
The process of creating Principia was deeply taxing on Russell: he contemplated suicide several times, and later claimed that his intellect “never quite recovered from the strain.” Yet he is probably best known for the work he did after completing Principia, as a public intellectual. By the first decade of the 1900s, Russell was already involved in politics and activism as a campaigner for women’s suffrage and an advocate of socialism. It was World War I, however, that brought him into the public spotlight and, in the words of one commentator, “transformed him into a political animal.” Upon the outbreak of the war, he explained, “I underwent a process of rejuvenation…it shook me out of my prejudices and made me think afresh on a number of fundamental questions.” Russell joined the No Conscription Fellowship, garnered notoriety for his spirited lectures espousing pacifism, and published a number of political works, including War: The Offspring of Fear, Why Men Fight, Justice in War-time, Principles of Social Reconstruction, and Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism. “Of all the evils of the war,” he wrote, “the greatest is the purely spiritual evil: the hatred, the injustice, the repudiation of truth, the artificial conflict.” In 1916, he was fined for his antiwar writings and dismissed from his post at Trinity College, and in 1918 he was tried and convicted under the Defence of the Realm Act and jailed for six months at Brixton Prison.
Following the conclusion of the war, Trinity offered him his old position, but Russell chose instead to continue working as a freelance writer and journalist. Already in 1912, with The Problems of Philosophy, he had tried his hand at writing for a lay audience, and found himself well-suited to the task. His turn from technical philosophy towards more accessible work was further encouraged by Lady Ottoline Morrell, whom he met in 1911, beginning a passionate affair (at the time, Russell was married to his first wife, Alys Pearsall Smith). By the onset of the 1920s, he had grown tired of “the staleness that beset me whenever I tried to return to mathematical logic.”
In 1920, Russell visited the Soviet Union, where he met Lenin, Trotsky, and Gorky. Although at first sympathetic to the Russian Revolution, he revised his views following this trip—“the time I spent in Russia was one of increasing nightmare”—and he critiqued Soviet communism in The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, published the same year. In 1921, he married the feminist thinker Dora Black, and through the twenties the couple became known for their promotion of socialism and educational reform, as well as their disregard for traditional religion and marital and sexual convention. Directing much of his writing and lecturing at the public, Russell gained an increasingly large lay audience. In 1926, he published On Education, proposing a variety of alternative and progressive teaching practices, and the next year he and Dora opened Beacon Hill School, in Sussex, which provided a model for future progressive institutions. The next year, Russell gave his famous public lecture “Why I Am Not a Christian,” expounding his religious views—which had been variously atheistic and/or agnostic since he read John Stuart Mill’s autobiography at the age of 18. In 1929, Russell released Marriage and Morals, which explored a range of social conventions and issues. The book challenged prevailing sexual and marital morals and decried marital rape, but also argued for negative eugenics on the basis of “mental deficiency.”
Russell’s own marriage collapsed at the end of the 1920s, mostly under the strain of Dora’s insistence that they raise, alongside their own children, two more whom she had birthed out of wedlock with American journalist Griffin Barry. In 1932, Betrand left Dora for their children’s governess, Patricia Spence, although the divorce carried on for three bitter years. During this period Russell was involved in anti-imperialist activism, serving as chair of the India League, Britain’s most prominent lobby for Indian self-rule, from 1932 to 1939. He remained a pacifist, supporting appeasement of Nazi Germany until Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, upon which Russell arrived “reluctantly at the conviction that war against the Nazis was necessary.”
Exhausted after two decades of public life, in 1938 he took a teaching position at the University of Chicago, before moving to UCLA. Russell next accepted an appointment at City College of New York, but a State Supreme Court Justice barred his assumption of the post after various public officials, led by an Episcopalean bishop, unleashed a wave of vitriol condemning his anti-religious stance and accusing him of sexual immorality. Russell, without a job and facing backlash for his progressive theories, approached financial ruin. He was delivered by Albert Barnes, who gave Russell a position at his foundation in Philadelphia. There, he wrote The History of Western Philosophy, an accessible survey of the major schools and thinkers written in sharp, often witty, occasionally sarcastic prose. The book was a bestseller, produced the majority of Russell’s income for the rest of his life, and provided many with an introduction to philosophical study.
By this time, Russell was an international celebrity. In 1949, King George VI granted him the Order of Merit, and the next year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature; the judges referenced Marriage and Morals in commending his “many-sided and significant writings, in which he appeared as the champion of humanity and freedom of thought.” For the last two decades of his life, Russell devoted his energy to antiwar efforts and the cause of nuclear disarmament. In 1955, he issued the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, which stressed the threat of atomic weaponry and urged peaceful conflict resolution. In 1961, at the age of 89, he was jailed once again, this time after participating in public anti-nuclear demonstrations. The inciting incident came when a magistrate requested that Russell exhibit “good behavior,” to which he replied, “No, I won’t.” Thanks to his rousing rhetoric and conspicuous appearance at mass protests, his star rose increasingly high among younger generations during this time.
Russell was a famously prolific letter-writer, and in addition to the litany of authors, poets, politicians, scholars, and celebrities with whom he corresponded, he also wrote to world leaders during international emergencies. In the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he sent telegrams to both Kennedy and Kruschev; regarding the Chinese-Indian border conflict, he sent pleas to Nehru, Chou En-lai, and U.N. Secretary General U Thant. Some of Russell’s final public actions condemned U.S. prosecution of the Vietnam War, which he characterized as genocidal and imperialistic.
Russell died in London on February 2, 1970, at the age of 97. In the prologue of his autobiography, completed the year before his death, he distilled his career and creed as such: “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.”