New Essays on Russell

September 24, 2010 (10:17 pm) C:\Users\Milt\Desktop\backup copy of Ken's G\WPData\TYPE3001\russell 30,1 032 red corrected.wpd Reviews 81 1 The Wrst one was Bertrand Russell on Nuclear War, Peace, and Language (Westport, ct: Praeger, 2002). Reviewed by David Blitz in this journal, 23 (2003): 176–82. 2 The essay Wrst appeared in Russell 25 (2005): 107–39. NEW ESSAYS ON RUSSELL Stefan Andersson stefankarlandersson@live.com Alan Schwerin (under the auspices of the Bertrand Russell Society), ed. Russell Revisited: Critical ReXections on the Thought of Bertrand Russell. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. Pp. ix, 158. isbn 978-1-84718-494-8. This is Alan Schwerin’s second edited collection of essays on Bertrand Russell .1 As in the Wrst, he has provided us with an indexed smorgasbord of nine essays on a variety of subjects, but this time he has been less ambitious by not adding an introduction himself and engaging some less meritorious authors. On the other hand, the subjects chosen by the amateurs (in the sense of lover, admirer, and devotee) Russell scholars are refreshingly original, interesting and executed with a simplicity and clarity that I Wnd lacking in some of the essays of the bona Wde professors and graduate students of philosophy. The Wrst essay, “Bertrand Russell and Eugenics”,2 is by Stephen Heathorn. He has published a book and over twenty peer-reviewed articles. He is also responsible for co-editing three volumes of Russell’s Collected Papers. In other words, he is a well-qualiWed researcher, and I can understand that the editor has September 24, 2010 (10:17 pm) C:\Users\Milt\Desktop\backup copy of Ken's G\WPData\TYPE3001\russell 30,1 032 red corrected.wpd 82 Reviews chosen to put his essay Wrst, since it’s the best, all things considered. Heathorn starts his interesting, well-researched and well-documented essay with a short introduction to how the connotations of the term “eugenics” have developed from the time when Francis Galton coined it in 1883 to the present time, when most people tend to associate it with the Nazis’ attempts to purify the Aryan race by killing, imprisoning or, in the best case, just sterilizing people who were deemed unWt to reproduce. But before Hitler entered the international scene in the 1930s, there was a period when “the ideas behind eugenics were both scientiWcally respectable and acceptedby intellectuals from across the entire political spectrum” (p. 1). Bertrand Russell was one of them, and this essay is an account of his public engagement with eugenics from the 1890s through to the post-World War ii years. The main thesis is that his “belief in the potential of eugenics for bettering society was increasingly outweighed, over time, by his fear of the uses to which eugenics would be put” (p. 2). As Heathorn later shows, Russell didn’t have much to say about the topic publicly after the mid-1930s, which doesn’t mean that he had stopped thinking about it. This is evident, for example, from his private correspondence with the biologist Julian Huxley in the 1960s. Russell Wrst came to eugenics by reading Francis Galton in the 1890s. His interest was motivated by both general intellectual curiosity and personal concerns . In 1894 he married Alys Pearsall Smith, something that his grandmother was dead against. When she couldn’t stop her grandson from marrying the older Quaker woman (she was his senior by Wve years), she insisted that they should not try to have any children on the grounds that there was a prevalence of mental illness among both families’ ancestorsz—zan argument that the young aristocrat could not dismiss. Although preoccupied with mathematics and political theory, he kept up to date with developments in genetic research from the late 1890s. There was an obvious connection between his interest in politics and eugenics. Many Edwardians feared the negative consequences of the so-called “diTerential birth rate”, i.e. that the poor sections of the population reproduced much faster than the wealthy. That, in the long run, could have disastrous eTects on the stability and progress of society. It seemed to be the case...

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