Bertrand Russell and Power: Part One

Bertrand Russell is best known now as one of the founders of analytic philosophy, and you all should know by now what I think about that. For my generation, he was even better known as a polemicist and journalist who advocated atheism, secularity, rationality, science, evolution, democratic socialism,  peace -- and above all, SEXUAL LIBERATION.  When wingers talk about "secular humanism", they primarily mean Russell, Margaret Mead, and John Dewey -- all of whom were mainstream during the forties and fifties, and all of whom were unmistakably non-traditional and non-Christian.

Russell's journalism was fluently written and argued, but there were plenty of loose ends and he obviously didn't try to match the extreme rigor and clarity that he demanded in his technical philosophical writing. I've always been interested in the disjunction between the two Russells, though I never really know quite what to think about it.

Power: A New Social Analysis is neither technical philosophy nor polemical journalism. When Russell published this book he intended it to be a major contribution to social thought and the beginning of a new career. But the book flopped, presumably because people had more worrisome things to think about in 1938, and Russell never returned to his project.

When I started reading Power, I expected to whip through it, make some comments on the two Russells, and be done with it. A quick scan shows it to be the work of a philosophe, comparable to the writings of Macauley or Gibbon. Ungrounded generalizations, snap judgements, and moralisms stud the pages. The book apparently was constructed entirely with the use of Reason, Common Sense, common knowledge, and secondary sources, with no experimentation, research, or data collection to speak of. So I had a snappy, snarky dismissal all ready to go.

However, I've found that Russell's theories mesh with things that I've recently concluded for myself (based on the writings of Frederick Lane, Niels Steensgaard, Ernst Gellner, Alvin Gouldner, Charles Tilly, and even Michel Foucault). Military force -- what Russell calls "naked power" -- is a primary factor in history, and is at the foundation of the legitimate monopoly of violence which we call The State. And in particular, military force is the source of rent (economically defined as revenue deriving from location -- the control of territory.)

So I'll tell you what I think later -- the book is much more interesting than I had expected. It's  has been reissued , and it's well worth taking a look at.

Financial Times review of reissued edition

Andrew Sledd review

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Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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