Why Men Fight
Bertrand Russell
This formidable work — also published under the title of Principals of Social Reconstruction — discusses war, pacifism, reason, impulse and personal liberty, and greatly contributed to Russells fame as a formidable social critic and anti-war activist.
“The supreme principle, both in politics and in private life, should be to promote all that is creative, and so to diminish the impulses and desires that centre around possession.”
Bertrand Russell
“Russell is one of the most profound thinkers of the modern age.”
The New York Times
Bertrand Russell
WHY MEN FIGHT
Le souffle, le rhythme, la vraie force populaire manqua à la réaction. Elle eut les rois, les trésors, les armées; elle écrasa les peuples, mais elle resta muette. Elle tua en silence; elle ne put parler qu’avec le canon sur ses horribles champs de bataille. …Tuer quinze millions d’hommes par la faim et l’épée, à la bonne heure, cela se peut. Mais faire un petit chant, un air aimé de tous, voilà ce que nulle machination ne donnera. …Don réservé, béni. …Ce chant peut-être à l’aube jaillira d’un cæur simple, ou l’alouette le trouvera en montant au soleil, de son sillon d’avril.
MICHELET
INTRODUCTION
This book is recognized by scholars and laymen alike as Russell’s most important contribution to political philosophy. Written as the losses in the Great War were becoming more and more appalling, he intended to replace what since 1914 he had come to believe was the outmoded nineteenth-century liberalism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Late in 1915 and early in 1916 Russell advanced a theory of politics based “upon the belief that impulse has more effect than conscious purpose in moulding men’s lives”. He stood by the ambitious analysis developed in the Principles for most of his life, claiming that the book was the “least unsatisfactory” expression of his “own personal religion”.[1] Russell’s ideas took form first as a series of lectures in London early in 1916 on “Principles of Social Reconstruction” and were published in book form under the same title on 13 November 1916. The British edition went through thirteen impressions up to 1954 until a second edition appeared in 1960; the second edition was issued in four impressions, with the last coming in 1989. In America the book was first published in January 1917 under the title Why Men Fight. It went through eight impressions up to 1971.
Little in Russell’s pre-war political experiences had prepared him for the eagerness with which his fellow citizens went to war and became even more militant as the conflict intensified. Thus, in mid-1915, he embarked upon a wholesale re-examination of the theoretical foundation of politics by analysing the roots of social, intellectual and emotional behaviour which, he argued, take their origin either in destructive or possessive impulses or in constructive or creative impulses. For Russell, the key to a healthy society was to fashion family relationships, education and political institutions in such a manner as to promote the development of creative impulses.
These arguments took Russell away from his traditional political values, for up to the outbreak of hostilities he had been a Liberal with a strong streak of the mid-Victorian Radicalism which he had imbibed at Pembroke Lodge. There is some evidence before the war indicating that Russell had thought about modifying the rationalism of the liberal tradition in favour of a psychological theory of impulse. He had been particularly impressed by two writings by the American philosopher, William James, which appeared in 1913 in a posthumous collection of his essays and addresses. The first was his famous essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” and the other a speech given in American, titled “Remarks at the Peace Banquet”. Both argued that most people needed an enemy and wanted war as a release of their vital energies. But James reasoned that since progress demanded peace it was imperative that the enemy not be human. The war reawakened Russell’s interest in James and in the question of the psychological roots of aggression. Indeed, as early as October 1914 the Jamesian influence was evident when Russell wrote his essay “Why Nations Love War” for Norman Angell’s periodical, War and Peace. Later, in Principles of Social Reconstruction, Russell referred to James directly:
His statement of the problem could not be bettered; and so far as I know, he is the only writer who has faced the problem adequately. But his solution is not adequate; perhaps no adequate solution is possible.[2]
Before 1914 Russell had also been introduced to Bernard Hart’s The Psychology of Insanity with its Freudian emphasis on unconscious impulses. Despite such reading, Russell does not appear to have read any of Freud’s works before the end of the war.
Russell initially advanced his ideas on reconstruction in a series of eight lectures presented at the Caxton Hall in London between 18 January and 7 March 1916. The idea for such a lecture series arose out of Russell’s turbulent year-long association with D. H. Lawrence. Both men were horrified by the carnage of the war and what they viewed as its relentless irrationality. Both independently became convinced that the injustices and repressions in modern society had created such deep unhappiness that people needed war to relieve their frustrations. Lady Ottoline Morrell knew Lawrence and admired his novels with their exploration of the emotional springs of aggressive behaviour. She was also well aware that her former lover, Russell, was wrestling with the same issues of why people sought violent solutions to personal and national problems. Since she was convinced that the two men had so much to offer the world, she arranged for them to meet in February 1915.
Atfirst Russell and Lawrence were completely mesmerized by each other and proceeded to plan a major lecturing tour of Britain in the autumn of 1915 with a view to converting the masses to a new understanding of morality. But by the spring of 1915 the deep differences in values and temperament between them had led Lawrence to launch a furious personal assault upon Russell and to mock his ideas as shallow and insidious. He condemned Russell as a bloodless rationalist with a secret desire for violence, while Russell came to see Lawrence as a forerunner of fascism. Although deeply shaken by Lawrence’s indictment, Russell soon recovered his equilibrium and pressed ahead on his own with the lecture scheme.
He contacted C. K. Ogden, the anti-war editor of The Cambridge Review, who agreed to advertise the lecture series and to assist in organizing it. Russell enjoyed giving the lectures and they were well received by the mostly sympathetic audiences of intellectuals, pacifists and radical politicians. In a letter to Lady Ottoline, Lytton Strachey captured the excitement many of them experienced:
Bertie’s lectures help one for they are a wonderful solace and refreshment. One hangs upon his words, and looks forward to them from week to week, and I can’t bear the idea of missing one—I dragged myself to that ghastly Caxton hall yesterday … and it was well worth it. It is splendid the way he sticks at noth-ing—Governments, religions, laws, property, even Good Form itself—down they go like ninepins—it is a charming sight! And then his constructive ideas are very grand; one feels one had always thought something like that—but vaguely and inconclu-sively; and he puts it all together, and builds it up, and plants it down solid and shining before one’s mind. I don’t believe there’s anyone quite so formidable to be found just now upon this earth. (16 February 1916)[3]
These lectures, it is well to remember, were given (and some months after published as presented) before the war had reached its most destructive stages. Certainly by early 1916 all hopes for a rapid end to the conflict had faded as, particularly on the Western Front, the struggle had bogged down into the grinding attrition of trench warfare. Just as Russell gave his lectures, the Germans embarked upon their protracted Verdun offensive in an attempt to kill so many Frenchmen as to force a surrender. And on 1 July
1916 the British Army began its own offensive on the Somme, launching what was to be the bloodiest campaign in the country’s history. Moreover, Russell advanced his views on “reconstruc-tion” before the ideological stakes in the war were to become much greater with the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in March 1917 and the American intervention in April of the same year. It is understandable, therefore, that Russell’s suggestions on “reconstruction” were often very general. As he admitted:
The civilized world has need of fundamental change if it is to be saved from decay—change both in its economic structure and in its philosophy of life. … As soon as it has become clear what 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 th
e 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 impulses, though at present they do so very inadequately. Liberation of creativeness ought to be the principle of reform both in politics and in economics. It is this conviction which has led to the writing of these lectures.
1
THE PRINCIPLE OF GROWTH
To all who are capable of new impressions and fresh thought, some modification of former beliefs and hopes has been brought by the war. What the modification has been has depended, in each case, upon character and circumstance; but in one form or another it has been almost universal. To me, the chief thing to be learnt through the war has been a certain view of the springs of human action, what they are, and what we may legitimately hope that they will become. This view, if it is true, seems to afford a basis for political philosophy more capable of standing erect in a time of crisis than the philosophy of traditional Liberalism has shown itself to be. The following lectures, though only one of them will deal with war, are all inspired by a view of the springs of action which has been suggested by the war. And all of them are informed by the hope of seeing such political institutions established in Europe as shall make men averse from war—a hope which I firmly believe to be realizable, though not without a great and fundamental reconstruction of economic and social life.
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