1086 BERTRANDRUSSELL
continued fighting of World War I. He also spent six months in jail for alleging
that U.S. troops were used for strikebreaking in America. He was reinstated in
his Cambridge position in 1919 but soon resigned and never again assumed
permanent teaching duties. During his years as a lecturer, Russell also pro-
duced some of his most important works of philosophy and logic, including
The Problems of Philosophy(1912),Our Knowledge of the External World
(1914), and Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy(written while in prison
and published in 1919).
In his post-teaching period, Russell wrote and lectured widely—often taking
controversial positions on social and political issues. For example, he alienated
many of his socialist friends when, after a visit to the Soviet Union in 1920, he
published his observations in The Theory and Practice of Bolshevism:
[Russia is] one vast prison in which the jailors were cruel bigots. When I found my
friends applauding these men as liberators and regarding the regime that they were
creating as a paradise, I wondered...whether it was my friends or I that were mad.
His book Marriage and Morals(1929) caused a stir by minimizing the seri-
ousness of extramarital affairs and by advocating informal trial marriages. His
works on religion,What I Believe(1925),Religion and Science(1935), and Why
I Am Not a Christian(1957), made Russell’s atheism explicit. Russell also tried
his hand at practical social reform. With his second wife Dora, he started a school
in 1927 to implement the educational theories of his books On Education:
Especially Early Childhood(1926) and Education and the Social Order(1932).
In 1938, Russell accepted a visiting professorship at the University of Chicago
and later at the University of California at Los Angeles. He declined a permanent
offer from UCLA in order to accept an invitation from the College of the City of
New York; however, before he could begin teaching a judge ruled him unfit,
claiming, among other things, that Russell’s appointment would constitute “a
chair of indecency.” Russell mocked the decision on the title page of his
An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth,published the next year, by listing his many
honors and then adding “Judicially pronounced unworthy to be Professor of
Philosophy at the College of the City of New York (1940).” To that long list of
honors, he would be able to add the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950.
In his later years, Russell continued to write on a variety of topics—and to get
into trouble with authorities. At age 89, he served another jail sentence—this time
for his part in a nuclear-disarmament rally in London. By the time of his death in
1970, Russell was acknowledged as the leading British philosopher of the century.
It is difficult to summarize Russell’s thought, partly because he developed and
abandoned several philosophical theories during his long lifetime. Philosopher
C.D. Broad once commented, “As we all know, Mr. Russell produces a different
system of philosophy every few years.” Even though the specifics of Russell’s
philosophic enterprise evolved, reflecting his fertile and inventive mind, at least
two basic assumptions remained within his mature philosophy.
First, Russell believed philosophy should be scientific and analytical. As he
wrote in “Logical Atomism” (1924):
