638
PARTISAN REVIEW
A MODERN PHILOSOPHE
AUTHORITY AND THE INDIVIDUAL. By Bertrand Russell. Simon lind
Schuster. $2.00.
This little book displays in concentrated form all of Rus–
sell's characteristic qualities: his lucidity and wit; his intellectual–
ism; his feeling that the predatory and possessive drives are the
root of all evil, and his consequent admiration for the ethics of the
Christian gospel; his dislike of puritan and bourgeois morality; his be–
lief that modem civilization has forgotten the values of contemplation
and enjoyment; and his occasional tendency to idealize simpler and
more primitive modes of existence. These qualities were more frequent
in the eighteenth century, and Russell often sounds like a French phil–
osophe born a hundred and fifty years out of his proper time.
The main subject is the prob1em of reconciling state control and
personal freedom. Writing in an age of growing bureaucracy, Russell
naturally lays his major emphasis on the deficiencies of the administra–
tive mind and on the need for maintaining individual initiative and for
finding harmless outlets for man's innate propensity for competitiveness
and aggression. Man needs freedom both because of his vices and be–
cause of his virtues. As an imperfectly socialized beast of prey he must
be allowed some expression for his animal impulses; the attempt to be
wholly moral causes so much psychological strain that it does more
harm than good. On the other hand all desirable innovations result from
the initiative of individuals. All this, however, does not cause Russell to
become cynical about Mr. Attlee's brand of socialism. The maintenance
of security and justice, economic as well as political, is the proper
function of government; but every effort must be made to decentralize
responsibility, create a maximum of local autonomy, enable individuals
to participate directly in the making of decisions, and preserve complete
intellectual and aesthetic freedom.
If
bureaucratic control becomes total
and universal, the human race will either commit suicide in outbreaks of
unsublimated aggressiveness, or else (more probably) sink into such a
state of listlessness and apathy that it will be in danger of dying of
boredom.
Nearly everything that Russell says is so incontrovertibly true that it
scarcely calls for further discussion.
It
seems more profitable to inquire
why none of Russell's writings on political and moral questions have
had much practical influence and why even his philosophical work has
not had that impact on the contemporary mind that his intellectual
brilliance might have led one to expect.
