Why Men Fight

kind of change is required, it will be possible to work out its parts in more detail. But until the war is ended there is little use in detail, since we do not know what kind of world the war will leave.[4]

Russell claimed that much of what he wrote for his lectures and the subsequent book was spontaneous, even stating in his Autobiography that the book had “a framework and formula, but I only discovered both when I had written all except the first and last words”.[5] Russell is somewhat misleading here, for the drafts of his syllabus of lectures and of his chapters demonstrate the coherence of thought he possessed throughout the period of composition.

Russell’s belief that he had a moral obligation to do all in his power to stop the war was reinforced by the success of these lectures. For throughout 1914 and early 1915 he had for the most part protested against the war in isolation, as even when he was part of an organization, notably the Union of Democratic Control, he believed that the other members were too intimi-dated to confront directly the rabid nationalism spread by corrupt elites. Then the combination of the lectures and the passage of conscription legislation provided a new focus for his anti-war activity. Within a fortnight of finishing his last lecture, Russell was working with the No-Conscription Fellowship, not only to combat conscription but to campaign in the country against the war.

News of the nature and success of the lectures also enhanced Russell’s reputation in America where many of his writings critical of the war had been received with interest. Indeed, as early as January 1916 Professor Woods of the Harvard Philosophy Department had extended Russell an invitation to take up an appointment at the University for 1917, during which he would lecture on philosophy and politics. By March 1916, after Woods had looked at a copy of the lecture series, he told Russell that the President of the University was delighted that he would be lecturing on politics and presenting a fresh approach.

Meanwhile events transpired that ensured the publication of the lectures. Through Ogden’s well-placed advertisements of Russell’s syllabus, Stanley Unwin, the Managing Editor of the newly formed firm of George Allen & Unwin Limited, read about the plan. Without having heard a word of any of the lectures, he wrote to Russell on 29 November 1915, asking for permission to publish them in the form that they were to be delivered. Unwin had been impressed with Russell’s anti-war articles in The Atlantic Monthly. Since Russell was one of the most vilified of the dissenters against the war, Unwin demonstrated independence—and business shrewdness—in seeking out a writer who was now regarded as a pariah by most of the other British publishers despite his reputation as a lucid writer of essays. Russell repaid Unwin by sending the typescripts of the lectures to him and by making Allen & Unwin his major publisher for the rest of his life.

The book was published in November 1916 in Britain and in January 1917 in the United States where the title was changed, without Russell’s approval, to Why Men Fight: A Method of Abolishing the International Duel by his American publisher, the Century Company. It appeared to enthusiastic reviews from progressive and left-wing readers, serious if often critical analysis from many philosophical reviewers and uniformly hostile and dismissive receptions from the conservative, pro-war press. A sample selection underlines this verdict. The Radical Charles P. Trevelyan spoke for the Union of Democratic Control when he claimed late in 1916 that “in all”, Russell was “revolutionary but always con-structive”. After this book, “political thinking will begin again on a new scale” and Russell “will be the regenerator of the philosophy of democracy”. The American socialist periodical The Masses asserted in 1917 that Russell had “written the most interesting, profound and illuminating book that has appeared since the war”. For all that the philosopher Delisle Burns, in The International Journal of Ethics, lamented Russell’s “unfairness to ‘reason’” and his deployment of the imprecise term “impulse”, he still perceived the book as “a turning point in constructive social theory”. In some appraisals, notably that by G. Dawes Hicks in the Hibbert Journal, the reviewer’s idealist philosophical persuasion led to critical assessments of Russell’s “atomistic philosophy”. Hicks questioned Russell’s reduction of man to “a bundle of impulses and passions” and his depiction of the State as an accidental growth or a necessary evil run by a group of elderly, not very intelligent men. Nor were Dawes Hicks and some other critics comfortable with Russell’s advocacy of world federation as a means of preventing what he saw as contemporary nation states driven to wage war externally and to stifle internally creativity and “the principles of growth” by outmoded laws and customs. For Russell, the only alternatives to the oppressive, deadening hand of the modern State were the co-operative movement and syndicalism, movements that he was to combine later in the war into his conception of Guild Socialism. This was the only way to rid society of the greed and alienation endemic under capitalism while promoting democracy on the shop floor, in school and in government.

Since the philosophical establishment in Britain was largely idealist, there were a number of attacks similar in tone and content to that of Dawes Hicks. Russell, confident of his philosophical position and already contemptuous of what he viewed as their muddle-headedness, dismissed them summarily. Yet even many critics of Russell’s atomism were to agree with his critiques of what he labelled the rigid, uncreative drudgery of the education system. Indeed, in his emphasis on instilling a spirit of reverence for learning Russell was to prefigure in Principles of Social Reconstruction many of the ideas he was to develop on education during the interwar period. Similarly, in Chapter 6, “Marriage and the Population Question”, Russell anticipated many of the arguments for expanding women’s rights and legislating freer divorce laws. These ideas were coupled with his eugenicist concern that “within the classes that are dwindling, it is the best elements that are dwindling”; he was to enlarge upon these themes in Marriage and Morals (1927). Indeed, it was for his assult upon established institutions in Principles of Social Reconstruction that the philosopher J. H. Muirhead was to compare him to William Godwin.

Soon after the book’s publication, and for many years afterwards, Russell’s fame as a social critic and reform advocate was associated in admirers’ eyes with Principles of Social Reconstruction. Disillusioned soldiers and pacifists, notably the famed French novelist and mystic Romain Rolland, looked to him for leadership not only because of his anti-war political actions but because of the ideas expressed in this book. The war poet Arthur Graeme West expressed this admiration eloquently. A few months before he was killed on the Western Front in June 1917 he wrote to Russell from the trenches near the Somme after reading Principles of Social Reconstruction:

It is only on account of thoughts such as yours that it seems worth while surviving the war … what we feared until your book came was that we would find no one in England who would build with us. Remember, then, that we are to be relied upon to do twice as much as we have done during the war, and it is after reading your book that the determination grew intenser than ever; it is for you that we would wish to live on.[6]

Richard A. Rempel

McMaster University

PREFACE

The following lectures were written in 1915, and delivered in the beginning of 1916. I had hoped to re-write them considerably, and make them somewhat less inadequate to their theme; but other work, which seemed more pressing, intervened, and the prospect of opportunity for leisurely revision remains remote.

My aim is to suggest a philosophy of politics based upon the belief that impulse has more effect than conscious purpose in moulding men’s lives. Most impulses may be divided into two groups, the possessive and the creative, according as they aim at acquiring or retaining something that cannot be shared, or at bringing into the world some valuable thing, such as knowledge or art or goodwill, in which there is no private property. I consider the best life that which is most built on creative impulses, and the worst that which is most inspired by love of possession. Political institutions have a very great influence upon the dispositions of men and women, and should be such as to promote creativeness at the expense of possessiveness. The State, war, and property are the chief political embodiments of the possessive impulses; education, marriage, and religion ought to embody the creative