MR. RUSSELL AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF SOCIETY
The “Principles of Social Reconstruction” [1] by the Honourable Mr. Bertrand Russell is a war book. Bellicose literature, on the whole, is either propagandist or preventive. Mr. Russell’s book, though it falls under the latter, must be distinguished from the rest of the same class. Of the preventive books some argue against the unnatural geographical barriers within which have been impounded some unwilling nations by their masterful conquerors : others like Mr. Angell’s Great Illusion, attempt to show that in the calculus of war loss prevails over gain even to the victor. Mr. Russell’s however, is a diagnosis, altogether different. Wars, he believes, cannot be banished by rationalistic appeals such as above, “It is not by reason alone” he says “that wars can be prevented but by a positive life of impulses and passions antagonistic to those that lead to war. It is the life of impulse that needs to be changed, not only the life of conscious thought”. [2 ] As his diagnosis is different so is his social philosophy. To him, “the chief thing to be learned 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.” [3]
In consonance with this attitude he adopts the standpoint of the behaviouristic psychology. [4] A most important contribution of this new development in the Science of Psychology consists in a novel view of the springs of human action. It has overthrown the doctrine that external
London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. 1917, 6/—net.
Principles of Social Reconstruction, p. 13.
Ibid:, p. 9.
Readers of Mr. Russell will do well to aquaint themselves with Prof. E. L. Thorndike’s “Educational Psychology”, Vol. I, “On the Original Nature of Man”.