Posted on March 21: An important donation to the Bertrand Russell Archives: Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, 1916-1918

The William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections has acquired a cache of documents concerning Bertrand Russell, all written during the First World War.

The documents pertain primarily to the interaction between Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician and philosopher. Prior to the war, Russell had been especially close to the Whitehead family. He had been Whitehead's pupil at Cambridge University and then a collaborator with him on a monumental undertaking, Principia Mathematica (3 vols., 1910-1913).

But the First World War sadly set them apart. At the time Russell was a vigorous opponent of the British government. He was a pacifist and a defender of conscientious objection. In his campaigns with organizations such as the No-Conscription Fellowship, he set out quite deliberately to provoke government reaction. In the end not only did he lose his teaching position at Cambridge, he was imprisoned for six months in 1918. In contrast to Russell, Whitehead believed that the British government had done everything in its power to preserve the peace in Europe. In Whitehead's opinion, in order to protect Western freedom, Britain was morally compelled to resist German aggression against France and Belgium. All the Whitehead children served in the war effort. The heaviest blow to the family came in March 1918 when Eric Alfred Whitehead's airplane was shot down on a flying patrol over France.

Alfred North Whitehead gave explicit instructions to his executors that his papers were to be destroyed after his death. The discovery of this newly found material and its donation to McMaster University Library by George Whitehead make this donation all the more remarkable. It consists of the following: two letters from Russell to Whitehead and his wife Evelyn and their draft replies; a typed report of Russell's visit to General George Cockerill, Director of Special Intelligence at the War Office in September 1916; a letter from the War Office asking Russell to forward his lectures for perusal and censorship; a typescript entitled Mr. Russell's Statement of Position, explaining his refusal not to use his lectures as a vehicle for propaganda; a manuscript of 31 pages, Political Ideals; and a copy of Russell's letter of 6 May 1918 written from Brixton Prison to his brother Frank.

In his letter of 13 April 1916, Russell asked Whitehead whether he supported conscientious objection and whether he would take a public stand against the government's prosecution of conscientious objectors. Whitehead was very reluctant to engage in debate with Russell, but he could not agree with his colleague's point of view. “I had meant to avoid discussion with you,” he told Russell, “where feeling is acute, and divergence deep, discussion among intimates is often a mistake. Your letter necessitates an explanation….” Perhaps the most significant document in this donation is the holograph manuscript of Political Ideals, the first of Russell's series of lectures on the philosophical foundations of pacifism, prepared in the summer of 1916. Published by the National Council for Civil Liberties in Salisbury, the manuscript has a number of crossed-out passages. Political Ideals expresses Russell's social testament and hopes for a changing world in dark times. In his concluding paragraph he wrote: “Few men seem to realize how many of the evils from which we suffer are wholly unnecessary, and could be abolished by a united effort within a few years. If a majority in every civilized country so desired, we could, within twenty years, abolish all abject poverty, quite half of the illness in the world, the whole economic slavery which binds down nine-tenths of our population; we could fill the world with beauty and joy, and secure the reign of universal peace.” These words, written more than 85 years, are admittedly utopian in character, but like much of Russell's writing, they are eloquently stated and have not lost their relevance to our own age, fraught by discord and anxiety.