He did not share Dora’s gusto for left-wing politics or her genuine sympathy for the working class. In fact, Russell’s own marriage was falling apart. Since children were the sole purpose of marriage, occasional infidelities should not be grounds for divorce and the consequent break-up of the family. Widely regarded as a manifesto endorsing adultery, it was nothing of the sort. In 1932 Russell published Marriage and Morals as the New Philosophy’s manifesto on sexual morality. They set up a school that would bring up children according to its tenets. To cure John’s fear of the sea, Russell plunged him into it up to his neck this may have cured his irrational fear of the sea but it seems to have left the child with a rational fear of his parents.ĭora and Russell shared the ‘New Philosophy’ (cooked up by a gathering of progressives in, of all places, Lynton), which would free humanity from the crippling bonds of conventional, Christian morality. Irrational behaviour, Russell consistently maintained, was rooted in fear. Put crudely, a child could be ‘conditioned’ to become a free, rational adult if one denied his or her demands for attention. ‘I have found the happiness of parenthood greater than any other I have experienced.’ Unfortunately, Russell fell under the spell of the writings on childhood by the behaviourist J B Watson. John, born in 1921, became the centre of his life. Fluency can be a poisoned gift, especially if accompanied by a tendency to simplify complex issues and a conviction that those whose opinions differ from one’s own are either fools or knaves. Russell could dash off 2,000 words on any topic. In the process he had become, he confessed, ‘a species of mental male prostitute’.

But with no academic career in sight, he had needed the money earned by freelance journalism and lecture tours in America to support his second wife Dora and their son, John. If Russell had died in 1920, his work on logic and the philosophy of mathematics would have given him a secure place as one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century. But it is the history of the tragedy of a man haunted since childhood by a fear of the family madness and possessed of ‘a quite colossal vanity’. Yet Ray Monk has written a fine book, mastering a daunting mass of material it is written forcefully and with great clarity. This is the most distressing work that I have reviewed in the last half-century.

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