Blackwell Reference Online

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Bertrand Russell, distinguished British philosopher and public intellectual, devoted the greater part of his life to peace activism. Born into an aristocratic family, until 1914 Russell largely concerned himself with his academic career at Cambridge. However, his opposition to British entry into World War I, and then against the policy of conscription, cost him his academic career and pushed him into a life of protest. During the war he was twice prosecuted for sedition; the second offense earned him a six-month prison term. By the end of the war Russell had embraced a libertarian form of socialism. Although he denounced the Bolsheviks after visiting the Soviet Union in 1920, his bohemian lifestyle and advanced views on science, education, and marriage made him popular with the progressive left and a gadfly to the establishment. He became the third Earl Russell in 1931, yet continued his attacks on conventional morality, militarism, nationalism, and unrestrained capitalism, which he regarded as significant threats to western civilization. Indeed, for most of his life Russell advocated for some form of world authority to take civilization-threatening weapons out of the hands of national governments. The advent of nuclear weapons only strengthened this belief. Although never an absolute pacifist, in the 1930s Russell rejected armed opposition to the rise of fascism, a position he ... log in or subscribe to read full text