Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell was born in 1872 into one of Britain’s great Whig families; his grandfather, Lord John Russell, had twice been prime minister. Orphaned in early childhood, he was raised by his grandmother at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park, in an atmosphere of strict piety against which his inquiring mind soon chafed. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he studied mathematics and philosophy, and found in the certainty of mathematics a substitute for lost religious faith.

His early ambition was to show that mathematics could be derived from logic. The Principles of Mathematics and the three-volume Principia Mathematica, written with Alfred North Whitehead, made him a founder of analytic philosophy, and The Problems of Philosophy remains a classic introduction to the discipline. The First World War turned him into a public dissenter: his pacifism cost him his Trinity lectureship and, in 1918, six months in prison. Thereafter he wrote prolifically for a general readership — on marriage, education, religion, happiness and power — in a prose of lucid irony. A History of Western Philosophy (1945) became his most widely read book and a lasting source of income.

The Swedish Academy honoured him in 1950, a year after he had received the Order of Merit, citing his defence of humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought. Old age only sharpened his activism. He drafted the Russell–Einstein Manifesto against nuclear weapons in 1955, became the first president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and was briefly jailed again in 1961, at the age of eighty-nine. His three-volume Autobiography appeared in the late 1960s. He died at his home in Wales in 1970.