Ray Monk: Bertrand Russell 1921-70: The Ghost of madness

By CHARLES PIGDEN*

In 1921 Bertrand Russell was 49 and had 48 years to live. He was famous as the co-founder of analytic philosophy and the co-inventor of symbolic logic, and known too as an agitator and publicist.

Thinking that if something ought to be done, maybe he ought to do it, he did his level best to stop the Second World War, becoming perhaps the most notorious anti-war campaigner in Britain and losing in the process his job, his respectability and ultimately his liberty.

He was also one of the first socialists to see the Bolsheviks for what they were and to denounce them accordingly.

But there was plenty more to come.

More philosophy: five major works which have attracted the admiration of thinkers as diverse as Noam Chomsky and Karl Popper. More journalism: having lost his academic job and given away his inherited wealth, Russell earned his living as a writer, turning out books and articles on subjects from history through politics to popular science, and arguing for atheism and moral reform.

And more politics: Russell campaigned and argued at various times for a form of socialism which would respect liberal values, against resisting Hitler by force (he afterwards repented), for an aggressive policy towards Stalin's Russia (which he subsequently tried to deny), against nuclear warfare, for world peace and for British nuclear disarmament.

Thus the godson of John Stuart Mill became, in his 90s, a hero of the New Left.

In 1921 he had three marriages and two families to go, plus a family tragedy to face in the form of the madness of his much-loved son.

There is an interesting story to be told. But Monk is not the man to tell it. He lacks a basic sympathy with his subject.

Russell was a man of ideas and a man of words. But Monk disagrees with the ideas and dislikes the words. In philosophy he thinks that Wittgenstein made the running after 1930 and that Russell's writings were on the wrong track (and he falsely believes that most philosophers agree with him). He considers Russell's journalism second-rate (nobody would guess from reading Monk that much of Russell's writing is very funny) and the politics mostly misguided.

Instead, Monk concentrates on Russell's private life, which he depicts as an episode of Ricki Lake, except that instead of overweight specimens of white trash hollering at each other in hick accents we get compulsively literate English people writing each other nasty letters.

And, like Ricki Lake, Monk leads the audience on, contriving to suggest that everything that went wrong in his family life was Russell's fault. Facts favourable to Russell are downplayed, distorted or suppressed.

Monk is a gifted biographer, as his life of Wittgenstein shows. But he should not have gone ahead with the Russell project once he realised how deeply he disliked his subject. This is not a fair book.

Jonathan Cape

$85

* Dr Charles Pigden teaches in the department of philosophy at the University of Otago.