Bertrand Russell: 1921-1970, The Ghost of Madness [Hardcover]

Ray Monk (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 20, 2001

In the second half of his life, Bertrand Russell transformed himself from a major philosopher, whose work was intelligible to a small elite, into a political activist and popular writer, known to millions throughout the world. Yet his life is the tragic story of a man who believed in a modern, rational approach to life and who, though his ideas guided popular opinion throughout the twentieth century, lost everything.

Russell's views on marriage, religion, education, and politics attracted legions of devoted followers and, at the same time, provoked harsh attacks from every direction. On the one hand, he was stripped of his post at New York's City College because he was thought to be a bad influence on his students, and on the other, he was awarded the Order of Merit, the Nobel Prize in literature, and a lifetime Fellowship of Trinity College, Cambridge. He lived to be ninety-seven, and as he became older he became increasingly controversial. Monk quotes Russell's telegrams to Kennedy and Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis, an influence that Russell and his followers believed tipped the balance toward peace. Russell devoted his last years to a campaign organized by his secretary to lend support to Che Guevara's call for a globally coordinated revolutionary struggle against "U.S. imperialism." Until now, this last campaign has been misunderstood as a -- perhaps misguided, but nevertheless innocent -- plea for world peace. Monk reveals it was no such thing.

Drawing on thousands of documents collected at the Russell archives in Canada, Monk steers through the turbulence of Russell's public activities, scrutinizing his sometimes paradoxical and often outrageouspronouncements. Monk's focus, however, is on the tragedy of Russell's personal life, and in revealing this inner drama Monk has relied heavily on the cooperation of Russell's surviving relatives and access to previously unexamined legal and private correspondence. A central player in Russell's life was his first son, John. Russell applied the methods of the new science of child psychology in his parenting, believing that a new generation of children could be reared to be "independent, fearless, and free." But instead of being a model of this new generation, John became anxious, withdrawn, and eventually schizophrenic. Nor was John's daughter Lucy (who was Russell's favorite grandchild) to be a model of the new generation; gradually she grew so emotionally disturbed that, at the age of twenty-six, she took her own life.

"The Ghost of Madness" completes the most searching examination yet published of Bertrand Russell's unique life and work. Together with Ray Monk's highly praised first volume of the biography, "The Spirit of Solitude," this is the classic account of an extraordinary man who championed the great ideas of the twentieth century and was all but destroyed by them. It is a portrait of the mind of a century.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This rich, variegated biography (Monk's second and final volume after The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921) starts off on a happy note for Russell, with his second marriage (of four) and the longed-for birth of a son. Unfortunately, from that point on, things only go downhill for him emotionally. Throughout his life, Russell (1873-1970) felt that he might go insane. He believed very much in romantic love but was apparently incapable of truly loving anyone. This emotional insecurity led him to multiple liaisons outside of his marriages (at the age of 64, his third marriage was to a 20-year-old) and strained relationships with his two children. Particularly upsetting to Russell was the homosexuality of his son, since he was on record as saying that homosexuality was the consequence of bad parenting. These domestic problems aside, Monk does a marvelous job of covering the highlights of the last half of Russell's long life: his Nobel prize in literature, the Russell-Einstein Manifesto against nuclear proliferation, his imprisonment for antinuclear protests, his social and political philosophy, and his contributions to logic and analytic philosophy. Highly recommended for academic and public library collections. Leon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Management Lib., Washington, DC
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

One of the great logicians of modern times, Bertrand Russell lived a life that defies all syllogisms. In the second volume of what is sure to establish itself as the definitive biography, Monk lays bare the strange paradoxes that bedeviled the great philosopher during the last six decades of his very long life. Careful scholarship shreds the illusion of success created by Russell's elevation to the Order of Merit and by his surprising selection for a Nobel Prize in literature. What then stands exposed is the conceptual confusion that increasingly clogged Russell's public pronouncements in his later years, as well as the personal betrayals that poisoned his private life. It is thus a figure of tragedy not triumph that Monk limns in this nuanced chronicle, recounting how Russell lost his grip on serious philosophy, squandered his literary gifts in hack journalism, repeatedly failed in his marital and parental relationships, and embarrassed himself in his politics. To be sure, it is still a modern titan that Monk shows his readers--one who deflected the lives of Einstein, Eliot, and Trotsky. But it is a titan who ascended to the pantheon shrouded in shadows of pathos. Sure to endure as a standard reference for decades. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 592 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 1st Free Press Ed edition (March 20, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743212150
• ISBN-13: 978-0743212151
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,270,785 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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96 of 103 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting: but a hostile caricature, not a Life, April 21, 2001

By 

Laon (moon-lit Surry Hills) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bertrand Russell: 1921-1970, The Ghost of Madness (Hardcover)

When great and important people merge productively, then fall out bitterly, the reverberations often last for generations. Their admirers continue the quarrel long after the original protagonists are dead, often with more passion than the protagonists themselves. Plato and Aristotle?s respective followers engaged in passionate mutual denunciation from medieval times to the C19th, though they couldn?t raise much heat now. Wagner and Nietzsche provide a 19th century example, Lennon and McCartney a twentieth century one. The Wittgenstein-Russell break-up has to date bubbled under with fewer publicly noticeable manifestations (an example before Monk's book is the portrayal of Russell in Derek Jarman's entertaining film "Wittgenstein"), but we will hear more of it.

The breakup was really not that dramatic. Russell recognised Wittgenstein's brilliance and persuaded him to take up philosophy, treating him with considerable and apparently typical generosity at both a material and intellectual level. For a while the two men were colleagues and friends, until Wittgenstein broke away on finding his own philosophical direction. Russell admired Wittgenstein's early work but was dismayed by the rest, considering it a journey into mysticism. (And indeed Wittgenstein is one pavingstone on the road that led to Derrida, though fortunately he is much more than that.)

Their friendship ended with some anger and mutual disappointment but no real scenes, no dramatic denunciations. Wittgenstein and Russell attended the same social events long after the breakup, including the famous incident where Wittgenstein waved a poker, threateningly in some accounts, at Karl Popper. (Russell's stern, "Wittgenstein, put that poker down!" was easily the most sensible and ethically incisive remark made during that infamous meeting of minds, and Wittgenstein?s acquiescence suggests some lingering respect for Russell.)

The relative lack of heat between the actual protagonists has not prevented their followers from carrying on the dispute, though more on the Wittgensteinian than the Russellian side. Wittgenstein founded a cult based around himself, and to some extent that cult-like aura remains, while Russell's style and fortunes were different. Russell was the world's best-known philosopher and a leader of the world peace movement. His reputation and renown were vast in the 1950s and 1960s until his death in 1970. As a result, by the 1980s Russell was as unfashionable as flared trousers. Russell had no "cult" except in the different sense that mass phenomena like U2 or Madonna were "cult figures". Instead, Russell inspired one generation and was forgotten by the next. Russell's philosophical reputation is only recovering now from that late-twentieth century nadir (as are flared trousers). Meanwhile Wittgenstein's cult grew steadily, while remaining in many respects cult-like.

Monk?s book appears to be part of the Wittgenstein-Russell fall-out. Monk is the author of a very good and sympathetic biography of Wittgenstein, which does all the things that his two-volume biography of Russell (of which this is the second volume) fails to do. Wittgenstein was an impossible man who caused enormous damage to many of his followers. But Monk's biography rightly shows that Wittgenstein's worst is balanced by his best, and tries to reveal the human beneath the sometimes arrogant or vindictive or destructive behaviour. Similarly, Monk gives a sympathetic account of Wittgenstein's philosophy, showing why it is of enduring value.

His biography of Russell has none of these merits, and of the two volumes the second ("The Ghost of Madness") is far the worse. Monk presents us with Russell's vices (his vanity, his failures to see or sometimes sympathise with the human feelings of those around him, including his lovers and his family, who he on occasion treated appallingly badly), but with little or no attempt at understanding, or placing these faults in perspective. This is not to say that I think that any of the facts Monk has chosen to present are incorrect, or that there are not incidents here that make me think less of Russell. But I have read other accounts of what Russell was like, and it is clear that Monk has selected fiercely, avoiding stories that show Russell as funny, or decent, or kind. Monk's Russell is simply a monster with none of the roundness of a human being: not a portrait but a caricature.

Monk's antipathy to Russell is so strong that he even despises Russell's virtues, inviting us to do the same. Russell turned to popular writing partly because he had given his money away to various good causes, from women's suffrage to the peace movement. He lost his Cambridge post after being jailed for speaking against the First World War. Monk tries to present Russell's courage in the cause of peace (he went to jail again, in that cause, in old age the 1960s), the generosity that made him poor, and his response to financial privation by writing, as faults: not merely valueless but actually disgraceful. That won't do.

Similarly, Monk's account of Russell's philosophical work, after the split with Wittgenstein, is not explication but dismissal. To Monk, Russell did some interesting but failed work in _Principia Mathematica_ and _The Principles of Mathematics_, which Monk presents rather as half-blind precursors to Wittgenstein. Monk's Russell, unlike the real one, soon abandoned serious philosophical work. In reality Russell's later work, on epistemology rather than mathematics, on the resigned compromises we must engage in when we say we "know" something, is (I observe and predict) leading the revival of interest in and appreciation of Russell. Monk sees no value in this work, and indeed from a Wittgensteinian point of view it _has_ no value.

AJ Ayer concludes his own book on Russell as person and philosopher (recommended) by describing Russell as "not a saint, but a good man". With all his faults and weaknesses, Russell deserved better than this book, in which Monk descends from biography to partisan hatchet job. We still need a good, balanced, life of Russell using material that couldn't be used while key people were alive. The time for hagiography is past; but there is no real need for demonography either.

Cheers!

Laon

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Book easily rates 5 stars, but needs serious health warning, November 24, 2001

By 

ericross (UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bertrand Russell: 1921-1970, The Ghost of Madness (Hardcover)

Don't get me wrong, I am a serious Ray Monk fan, and a serious Russell devotee, but that's just the problem.

Ray Monk, although he puts Russell's mathematical achievements at the pinnacle of human endeavour, finds everything else about Russell to be pathetic and disgusting.

This book, which is about the second half of Russell's life (and Ray Monk has written a biography of the first half called 'The Spirit Of Solitude' which is equally compulsive reading, but suffers from the same love-hate relationship with Russell) has much more biographical material than any previous book on Russell BUT almost every new fact is framed from Ray Monk's perspective of disdain and contempt.

Russell had a traumatic childhood, with the death of his sister (diphtheria) then that of his mother and father coming in rapid succession at about the age of four, followed by a mostly isolated upbringing by his grandparents.

Instead of finding this tragic early influence a basis for sympathy and understanding, Monk uses it as a basis for finding a river of underlying insanity and evil flowing beneath the actions and writings of what he considers to be a monster who should not have lived past the completion of his mathematical masterpiece.

Just as it is important to have a biography written by someone who is not blind to the faults of their subject, it is also important to have the biographer not hate their subject, or have some kind of grudge against them or some aspect of their lives.

Monk cannot bear the fact that Russell does not live up to Monk's lofty expectations, that a god of mathematics, a subject of absolute moral purity, has human frailties and imperfections.

Consequently, despite the fact that Russell did an enormous number of interesting things in the second five decades of his life, in literature, philosophy, politics, science, mathematics, logic, education and psychology, this is all not good enough for Monk, who sees anything short of the stature of Russell's greatest work as being an example of Russell's decline.

There is so much detail in Russell's life, and so much analysis by Monk, that even if you question Monk's almost exclusively unfavourable conclusions, you will find this book an extraordinarily mesmerising helter-skelter ride through humanity's most dramatic period of change, as seen through the life of one of its most active and influential participants, even if that life is itself viewed through exceptionally unsympathetic eyes.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Painful revelations for Russell lovers, May 22, 2002

By 

L. B. Clark (Swampscott, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bertrand Russell: 1921-1970, The Ghost of Madness (Hardcover)

I wanted to name my son "Russell" (if I had a son), at one point. In college and (philosophy) grad school I was a tremendous admirer of Russell, in particular his "On Denoting" and other explications of how language and logic works. As a college student in the late '60s I was also impressed and influenced by his staunch (and early) opposition to the Viet Nam war.

So reading The Ghost of Madness was a sad revelation. I had already read, with great enjoyment, Monk's Duty of Genius and Spirit of Solitude, but this volume took me quite a while to get through, cause on nearly every page there was another revelation of Russell's pettiness, and just-plain-meanness, especially to his schizophrenic son and granddaughter, Lucy.

Monk's other 2 main works deserve 5 stars, this one one less cause he lost any semblance of an "objective" biographer's stance (I know I know "objectivity" is problematic...), starting with the preface and acknowledgements.