Introduction

Summary

In the preface to Unpopular Essays, published in 1950, the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Bertrand Russell introduces his collection of essays by claiming that they were ‘written at various times during the last fifteen years, [and] are concerned to combat, in one way or another, the growth of dogmatism, whether of the Right or of the Left, which has hitherto characterized our tragic century’ (Russell 1950, preface). Russell indeed witnessed a tragic century – two world wars, a holocaust and a Cold War that threatened nuclear annihilation. He did not hesitate to speak out against these tragedies, even suffering the loss of his job at Cambridge and six months in prison in 1918 for a speech he gave criticising the US entry into the First World War; forty-three years later, at the age of eighty-nine, he would be imprisoned for seven days for participating in a London antinuclear demonstration in 1961. Speaking truth to power, to the dogmatism, partisanship and irrationality Russell saw in society and politics, was thus a lifelong passion and commitment that he took more seriously than most. Writing now, seventy years after the publication of Unpopular Essays, and in the midst of a global pandemic, one could argue that Russell would be just as concerned about today’s society as he was about his own. In fact, Russell himself saw this possibility when, as he began his Moncure Conway Lecture for 1922, ‘Free Thought and Official Propaganda’, he noted that ‘unless a vigorous and vigilant public opinion can be aroused in defence of [freedom of thought and freedom of the individual], there will be much less of both a hundred years hence than there is now’ (Russell 1996, 125). With the hyper-partisan rhetoric gripping contemporary US politics, the rise of autocratic regimes throughout the world (Russia, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, etc.), and antisemitic hate crimes and white nationalism on the rise, the latter often with the tacit approval of the former US President Donald Trump, it seems quite apparent that we do not have, in 2022, the ‘vigorous and vigilant’ defence of freedom that Russell called for in 1922.