British philosopher and mathematician, a founder of analytic philosophy and a pacifist campaigner against war and nuclear weapons
His anti-war activity in the First World War cost him his Trinity post and six months in prison in 1918; after meeting Lenin in Soviet Russia in 1920 he wrote a critique of Bolshevism.
A philosopher and mathematician, grandson of the former prime minister Earl Russell. With Whitehead he wrote Principia Mathematica, laying the foundations of analytic philosophy. Imprisoned for opposing the First World War, he stood as a Labour candidate in 1922 and 1923 and founded Beacon Hill School with Dora Russell. Marriage and Morals defended sex outside marriage, contraception and sex education, and in 1958 he signed the public letter calling for reform of the law on homosexuality. After the Second World War he led campaigns for nuclear disarmament and against the Vietnam War, and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. He died in Wales in 1970.
Activities and affiliations
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1893–1970
Scholarship and theory
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1922–1923
Scholarship and theory
War resistance, socialism and sexual reform
One of the few active opponents of the First World War, he was dismissed from Trinity College in 1916 after a conviction under the Defence of the Realm Act, spoke at the Leeds Convention of anti-war socialists in 1917, and served six months in Brixton Prison in 1918 for a lecture against inviting the United States into the war. In 1914 he wrote that “the Socialists are the hope of the world”, supported guild socialism and had high hopes for “the Communist experiment”. But after travelling to Soviet Russia with a British government delegation in 1920 and talking with Lenin for an hour, he was disappointed and wrote The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism; his lover Dora Black, visiting separately, was enthusiastic about the revolution. He married Dora in 1921 after a year lecturing in China, and stood unsuccessfully as Labour candidate for Chelsea in 1922 and 1923. In 1927 they founded the progressive Beacon Hill School, and in Marriage and Morals (1929) he argued that sex between unmarried lovers was not necessarily immoral and called for “trial marriage”, open sex education and access to contraception, drawing fierce denunciation in the United States. He also spoke at congresses of the World League for Sexual Reform. When Dora had children by another man they separated in 1932 and divorced. He chaired the India League, the leading lobby for Indian independence, from 1932 to 1939. He supported appeasing Nazi Germany until changing his view in 1943, and after the war led the campaign against nuclear weapons, issuing the Russell–Einstein Manifesto in 1955. In 1958 he signed the public letter calling for reform of the law on male homosexuality, which was partly changed in 1967, in his lifetime.