Bertrand Russell and

the End of Nationalism

LOUIS GREENSPAN
McMaster University

This article argues that nationalism is an important topic in Bertrand Russell’s

thinking about politics and society and that his writings on this subject are
worthy of consideration by those who study nationalism today Russell antici-
pates contemporary "modernist" and "ethnicist" accounts of nationalism, pro-
viding, over a lifetime, the precedent of both of these theories struggling within
the bosom of one thinker. Russell’s theory is structurally closer to that of the
modernists. Like them, Russell believes that the growth of a modern global
economy has made all nationalisms, whether progressive or reactionary, obso-
lete. But after declaring the obsolescence of nationalism in 1917, Russell was
compelled to wrestle with the persistence and vitality of nationalist movements
and sentiment throughout the rest of the century. The author argues that Russell’s
experience suggests that this modernism, which dismissed all nationalisms, led
to political absurdities and compelled Russell to argue for the distinction be-
tween predatory and imperialist nationalisms—a distinction he had rejected in
the wake of World War I.

Bertrand Russell addresses the question of nationalism in almost

all of his books and articles on politics, social philosophy, and history.
His first book, German Social Democracy’ (published in 1895), provides
evidence of strong views on this subject, as do the articles on free trade
that he published during the first decade of this century2 After the
outbreak of World War I shook him into formulating the vision of a
new society that he put forward in Principles of Social Reconstruction,
he began to examine nationalism with greater seriousness and in
greater detail. By 1917, he had begun to compare his principles with
those of the contending &dquo;ism’s&dquo; of that period-socialism, anarchism,
Marxism-and found that he disagreed with all of his rivals’ views
on nationalism. In articles that he published in 1917 and after, in
intrawar works such as The Prospects of Industrial Civilization, Freedom

Received 21 November 1995

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 26 No. 3, September 1996 348-368

© 1996 Sage Publications, Inc.
348

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 349

and Organization, and even his best-selling History of Western Philoso-

phy, he engaged in extended discussions of different aspects of nation-
alism. These discussions include the psychology of nationalism, na-
tionalism and industrialism, nationalism and education, and the role
of nationalism in contemporary philosophy Together they constitute
one of the major themes in his political and social philosophy.
Russell’s most learned and most searching commentators have paid
scant attention to Russell’s discussions on this subject. One reason for
this is that nationalism did not seem as important a subject to Russell
scholars as it did to Russell. The conditions that aroused Russell to
put forward his specific doctrines about politics and society were not
the same as those that attracted scholars to Russell as a writer on poli-
tics. The shadow of World War I hovers over Russell’s writings on
politics as the supreme catastrophe of the twentieth century The war
remains throughout the mother of all subsequent catastrophes. Much
of Russell’s historical writing sets out to show that the war was
foreordained by the logic of nationalism after it began in earnest in
the mid-nineteenth century. Russell argued that figures such as Lord
Byron, Mazzini, and Bismarck had lit the fuses that caused the explo-
sion of 1914 and that these fuses had not yet been extinguished.’ Most
of the commentary on Russell’s work on politics, however, was writ-
ten in the aftermath of World War II in the shadow of the cold war and
is concerned with the global philosophic, military, and economic
contest between Soviet Russia and the United States. In such a world,
nationalism seemed a derivative phenomenon, and each national move-
ment interpreted as a front man for one or another of the superpow-
ers. During the Arab-Israel conflicts, for example, the contending

parties were judged mainly as surrogates for superpowers,-’ discus-

sions about Vietnamese or even Latin American movements of
national liberation were scrutinized as to whether they were ma-
nipulated by Marxists or in Eastern Europe whether they were
manipulated by capitalists. Scholars who have examined Russell’s
writings on politics and society through lenses that were focused on
the issues of the post-World War II period have concentrated on his
criticisms of traditional liberalism or of Marxism or on his warnings
concerning the danger of nuclear war, always assuming that nation-
alism had no significance in its own right.
In today’s world, the situation has changed. After the fall of com-
munism in 1989, we seem to have advanced into the past, into a world
that resembles that of post-World War I. We speak of the nationalism

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of the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union, when in reality
we are contending with the nationalism of the former czarist empire,
the former Austro-Hungarian empire, and the former Turkish empire.
Had Russell been alive, he would have experienced uncanny deja vu.
At the moment, Russell’s writings on nationalism are the ones that
connect him to our own world.
Another reason that commentators might have been reluctant to
subject his writings on nationalism to close critical scrutiny is that
nationalism is a subject in which Russell’s moral passions seem to
overwhelm his philosophical calm. For many readers of Russell’s
work, his views on nationalism are so straightforward, his abhorrence
for it so outspoken, that there seems to be little reason to include them
in any discussions about his philosophy or his science of society
Contemporary readers trained in the distinctions fostered in our
social sciences between fact and value might be taken aback by the
moral passion that Russell exhibits in almost all of his writing about
modem society but especially in his writing about nationalism. He
makes no attempt to observe the moral neutrality that so often is cited
as the sine qua non of the social scientist, and he has no compunction
about allowing the rhetoric of outrage to subvert any attempt at calm,
coolheaded analysis. Nationalism seems to be a topic set apart in
Russell’s mind in that it was the one subject that never seemed open
to further revision. Often he seemed to be in the grips of a personal
obsession as persistent as that which gripped the Elder Cato about the
menace of Carthage to Rome. Russell frequently alludes to national-
ism as a form of lunacy and to nationalists as a collection of homicidal
psychopaths. Even before the catastrophe of World War I, Russell
admitted that his opposition to nationalism and support for interna-
tionalism was rooted in fundamental ethical principles rather than in
observations concerning its empirical consequences. When in 1903 he
campaigned on behalf of the internationalist Free Traders against
Joseph Chamberlain’s scheme for an imperial tariff, he wrote to the
French historian Elie Hal6vy that free trade was an ethical issue and
that tariff reform, far from being a merely economic matter, &dquo;had
placed England morally on trial.&dquo;5 To his friend Lucy Donnelly, he
wrote, &dquo;We are wildly excited about free trade; it is to me the last piece
of sane internationalism left, and if it went I should feel inclined to
slit my throat.&dquo;6 In later years, he constantly wrote on nationalism as
if he were a prophet reviling idolatry rather than a coolheaded analyst
weighing the pros and cons of a particular ideology.’

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 351

There can be little question that Russell’s views on nationalism

have deep roots in his own personal view of the world and in his
personal psychology. Since early youth, Russell believed that he and
his contemporaries were possessed by a destructive hatred akin to
that described in Freud’s doctrine of aggression and thanatos.’ His
successive descriptions of nationalism bring him closer and closer to
projecting nationalism as the public embodiment of that psychology
of destruction. But, powerfully as the theme of nationalism as human-
ity’s death wish obsesses him, he casts a wide net. His views remain
complicated and nuanced. His views on psychology can be abstracted
from his sociology. They are views that allow him to call national-
ism an unmitigated evil but also to support nationalist struggles, to
call for globalization and for it to be dismantled. Russell at times
seems to be a prophet of bigness and at others a prophet of &dquo;small is
beautiful.&dquo; In the best of all possible worlds, Russell would be able to
go to sleep while a world government is establishing itself by the
threat, and by the ruthless employment, of force and would have
completed its job in time for him to arise and begin his denunciations
on behalf of the weak and powerless.
That Russell believed that the study of nationalism deserved the
highest priority for political philosophy and the social sciences is
evident not only in the amount that he wrote and the passion that he
expended but also in his claim, repeated again and again, that nation-
alism was the most powerful and least understood phenomenon of
the contemporary world. He claimed that every political philosophy
of his time could be judged by whether it had inspired nationalism or
whether it had been deluded into becoming a fellow traveler. In works
such as Power or &dquo;The Ancestry of Fascism,&dquo;9 he accused Romanticism
and German idealism of the former; in other works, he accused
liberalism and Marxism of the latter.
I argue that Russell’s views on nationalism are important for the
study of nationalism today. First I suggest an affinity between his
approach and that of a number of current theories of nationalism.
Second, I present a sketch of the development of Russell’s theory
from the end of World War I. My aim in so doing is not merely to
give Russell his proper place as one of the founding fathers of
certain approaches to this subject but primarily to present a critical
review of the reflections that emerged from Russell’s lifelong pre-
occupation with nationalism to lay bare the problems that he passed
on to his heirs.

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352

RUSSELL AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

There is much that links Russell’s approach to nationalism to

approaches that have emerged in recent years. Before I discuss the
connection between Russell and contemporary views on nationalism
issues substantively, it is useful to remind ourselves that there are a
number of differences between Russell as a writer on politics and
society and writers in the disciplines of politics and sociology today
First, it is obvious to any reader that Russell does not observe the
boundaries between the disciplines. Thus in his writings political
considerations concerning nationalism mingle easily with sociologi-
cal and economic ones. This is a great advantage in that in Russell’s
works, the sociological unfolding of nationalism and industrialism do
not occur in worlds that are conceptually and practically immune to
political intervention. Russell’s picture of the twentieth-century civi-
lization is made more realistic by the fact that he does not proclaim
the historical inevitability of an industrial age to be followed by a
postindustrial age that will be followed by an information age and so
on. Each one of these is under the threat of the politics of nationalism
and the contending forces of the international order. This combination
of disciplines, however, enhances the value of Russell’s writing to
today’s theorists.
This is not to say that there is a one-to-one correspondence between
Russell’s theories and those current today. The resemblances are more
like the affinities that some observers have noticed between Russell’s
concept of impulse and Freud’s concept of libido while acknow-
ledging not only the different vocabularies of the two thinkers but
also that Russell rarely mentions Freud. Alan Ryan has observed,
correctly in my opinion, that Russell’s views on industrialism situate
Russell squarely in the tradition of Durkheim and Weber. But Russell
never mentions either of these thinkers. There is the same kind of

affinity between Russell and a number of contemporary theorists of

nationalism, but although such affinities are most evident after wide-
ranging discussions of both rather than through word-by-word or
concept-by-concept translations of Russell into the language of the
1990s, the subject of nationalism reveals more of a common vocabulary
than do most of the other subjects with which Russell is connected.
Having discussed these preliminaries, we can turn to some of the
older and contemporary themes in sociology that appear in Russell’s
work. The first theme that connects Russell with the classical ap-
proaches of sociology is his emphasis on the interplay of nationalism

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 353

and industrialism. Russell’s corpus of work on nationalism is an

extended presentation of this theme in a number of variations-10
Russell’s discussions on this subject can be treated as a contribution
to one of the most important themes in the literature of sociology: the
theme of the impact of industrialism on social phenomena such as
religion and community.
Second, Russell is an internationalist-indeed, one of the most
eloquent advocates of liberal internationalism. His work combines
the sociology of industrialism with the politics of internationalism.
Russell believed in internationalism but did not, as do many contem-
porary internationalists, believe that we would transcend the world
of mutually hostile nations through irresistible and invisible stages of
progress.ll Russell believed that a world government had to be estab-
lished through a gigantic political effort to construct a new world
order and was very frank in stating that such an order would most
likely be imposed by force. This is a recurrent theme in his writing,
and on occasion he called for such force with nearly hysterical pleas.
Russell’s approach to nationalism can be found in contemporary
approaches to the social sciences, especially in the contending schools
of &dquo;modernists&dquo; and &dquo;ethnicists.&dquo; In his recent volume, Modern Na-
tionalism, Hutchison12 describes the controversy between modern-
ists and ethnicists as one where the modernists represented by Gellner
and Eric Hobsbawm’3 emphasize the artificiality of nationalism as
an invented tradition. According to Hutchison, both Gellner and
Hobsbawm &dquo;reject the notion that nations are primordial entities with
distinctive cultural attributes that shape modern societies.&dquo; They
argue instead that &dquo;modernization has given rise to nationalism and
national elites have invented nations&dquo; and indeed that &dquo;the distinctive
histories that nations and cultures prefer are mythic constructs of par-
venu social formations to justify their political existence in the modem
world.&dquo;14 Certainly, Gellner’s and Hobsbawm’s concepts describe a
world in which nations are slapped together by combining tribes and
oil wells. The ethnicists, represented by Hutchison and Smith, how-
ever, argue that, on the contrary, the nation is a substantial reality. &dquo;It
is an ethno-cultural community shaped by shared myth of origins, a
sense of common history and a way of life, and particular idea of

space, that endows its members with identity and purpose.&dquo;&dquo; Such
an approach is supported by the reality of ethnic entities, such as the
claim to national status of the nineteenth-century Poles. Russell’s
theories of the nation resemble those of Gellner and Hobsbawm in
important respects but still retain some of the claims of the ethnicists.

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Gellner’s theory is a functionalist theory that endeavors to explain

why nationalism arose as a response to industrialism. Industrialism,
he maintains, caused the erosion of tribal, peasant, and village groups,
which were dissolved into the &dquo;melting pot of industrialization.&dquo; Such
a melting pot required more comprehensive social formations and

loyalties than those of its predecessors. It required a workforce of

different groups from different regions within the borders of what is
now called a nation-state. Nationalism, Gellner maintains, is the product
of an intelligentsia that creates a society of &dquo;clerks,&dquo; or units that share
the same language and have the same history conferred on them.
The basic deception and self deception practised by nationalism is this:
nationalism is essentially the general imposition of a high culture on
society.... It is the establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society,
with mutually substitutable atomized individuals, held together by a
shared culture of this kind, in place of previous complex structure of
local groups. 16
Gellner’s theory, in contrast with a pure ethnicism, has the advantage
of showing the modernizing dynamic of nationalism. Russell’s writ-
ings are akin to those of Gellner in that Russell almost always empha-
sizes that nationalism is a construct, not an innate fact of human
identity. In almost every essay on nationalism, he writes that &dquo;people
whose imaginations are not much affected by history are apt to
suppose ... that nationalism is a fundamental and eternal fact of
human nature, no more temporary than love or envy or ambition.
This, however is a delusion.&dquo;17 For Russell, nationalism is rooted in
herd instinct, but herd instinct does not have only one object; herd
instinct can manifest itself in several different forms in loyalty to a
religion or even to a class. Nationalism, Russell argues, is not an
appropriate sentiment in a world such as ours.
But Russell would have been sympathetic as well to some of the
claims of the ethnicists. Within the spectrum of left-wing opinion on
nationalism in Russell’s time, there was a range that on one side
rejected nationalism totally and on the other accepted nationalism
totally. Russell adopted a complex position, which I discuss later, of
cultural nationalism, maintaining that there was a point at which
historical national identities were fundamental. He wrote,
Leonardo could not have been anything but an Italian, Voltaire could
not have been anything but a Frenchman, Goethe could not have been
anything but a German. If these great men had been ground down by
circumstances and early education to a dead level of uniformity, they
would not have been as great as indeed they really were. 18

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 355

This double vision, whereby Russell sometimes seems to defend

nationalism from the standpoint of the ethicists and sometimes from
the standpoint of the modernist, is, as I shall show, an important and
problematic part of his theory.
In the meantime, it is important to assume that Russell’s home base
is that of the modernists but with the following provisos. The mod-
ernists, Gellner and Hobsbawm, have offered a theory of the origins
of nationalism in the formation of the nation-state. Russell’s theory is
different; it is a theory of the end of nationalism. Indeed, Russell’s
views on the origins of nationalism are very obscure. He places it as
a psychological phenomenon that seems to appear ex nihilo around
the time of Joan of Arc for the purpose of mobilization against an
enemy Russell does have a more detailed theory in various places of
the origins not of nationalism but of the nation-state and its relation-
ship to industrialism. For Russell, the nation-state and the elites
controlling it are necessary to coerce a reluctant peasantry into the
modem world. The nation-state for Russell is an independent vari-
able. Russell, unlike Gellner, emphasizes the element of force rather
than the element of ideological molding that brings the masses to
industrialization. Indeed, he calls the Bolsheviks such an elite but
does not see them as nationalists. The true meeting ground between
Russell and the modernists, then, is in the belief shared by both that
the economic and cultural realities of the modem world have dictated
the end of nationalism.
To this point, we have addressed the question of the extent of
Russell’s interest in the question of nationalism and the degree to
which Russell’s work on this subject bears a relationship to contem-
porary work in the social sciences. Now it is advisable to give a sketch
of Russell’s own views on nationalism and to ask whether something
can be learned from Russell alone that can be applied to any of the
current positions on nationalism.

THE UNFOLDING OF RUSSELL’S DOCTRINE

Russell’s sociological views on nationalism and internationalism

can be traced through two sources in his work. The first source is the
Cobdenite radicalism that called for free trade and the dissolution of
all borders and that emphasized maximization of the happiness of
individuals rather than of groups. The latest expression of this strain
of thought was in Angell’s best-seller, The Great Illusion,199 a book that

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356

argued that no man or country was an island, that there may be

spiritual, tribal, or historical borders between people and people but
that in the current world economy there were no economic ones. The
most important conclusion that Angell urged on his readers was that
no country, especially in the advanced civilized world, could
go to
war without wounding itself. Countries would only defeat and de-

stroy trading partners, which they would have to reconstitute once

again. It is no accident that when World War I broke out, Russell turned
to Angell to lead his country back to sanity and away from war. Angell
stood for the economic and cultural reality of one world.
The other source was the philosophy that developed in the course
of the war and that remained for Russell for the rest of his life, namely
the philosophy of guild socialism. Guild socialism called for a decen-
tralized industrial world, one in which there would be a multiplicity
of self-owned and self-managed firms. Russell emphasized that guild
socialism was different from syndicalism, in which such units were
wholly independent. The scheme that he supported was one in which
there was a centralized, coordinating power that in some sense regu-
lated the arrangement between the groups. But for the most part, such
groups would be independent. Russell drew on this vision of the
world in all of his discussions on nationalism. Russell’s Cobdenite
radicalism can be interpreted as a call for the elimination of differ-
ence ; his guild socialism was a call for the celebration of difference.
He argued,
The differentiation of mankind into groups, not necessarily hostile but
distinct from one another in culture and proximate purpose, is a thing
of great importance for the diversity and progressiveness of human
society Without it life would have no richness in texture. It will become
boring and uneventful.... The welfare of the community as a whole is
promoted by the existence of many groups with diverse tastes and
interests. 20
Such an argument is a plea for a world of nations and echoes the
nationalists of the early nineteenth century who called for a tapestry
of nationalism to replace the dead empires that then governed the world.
Russell from time to time argued for each of these visions. Some-
times he rallied against nationalist separatism, but more often he
defended cultures and nations, as when he called for the Soviet Union
to grant cultural freedoms to its Jewish population.
Russell’s own definition of nationalism is simple, straightforward,
and uninformative: &dquo;what constitutes a nation is a sentiment and
instinct of belonging to the same group or herd.&dquo; Such a definition

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 357

does not give us much to work with. A better picture of Russell’s

view emerges if we adopt a Hegelian procedure of displaying how
Russell’s concept of nationalism unfolds over a period of time and
through various different concepts. If we do this, it will be easier to
come to grips with some of Russell’s most important contentions and

lay bare some of his most important problems.

I begin with an article that Russell wrote in 1917 titled &dquo;Is Nation-
alism Moribund?&dquo; for the American cultural journal The Seven Arts
and that is reprinted in volume 14 of the The Collected Papers of Bertrand
Russell. &dquo;Is Nationalism Moribund?&dquo; presents Russell’s dominant
thesis about the end of nationalism. Russell’s handling of this theme
is similar in its structure to the various theses that appeared after the
end of World War II concerning &dquo;the End of Ideology,&dquo; &dquo;the End of
Capitalism,&dquo; and finally, in the early 1990s, &dquo;the End of History.&dquo;&dquo;
There have been so many of these theories that it is possible to
construct a genre in the social sciences about &dquo;the end of&dquo; theories.
Since today there is a tradition of such theorizing, I call attention to
the problems that such theorizing provokes, namely that once it gives
persuasively a set of conditions that has brought about &dquo;the end of&dquo;
whatever has been proclaimed to be at an end, it must in subsequent
versions explain why that which was declared to be at an end still
persists. Thus partisans of Daniel Bell’s celebrated essay, &dquo;The End of
Ideology,&dquo; had to account for the explosions of ideology in the 1960s.
Russell was faced with a similar problem following World War I.
Having proclaimed the end of nationalism in 1917, he was compelled
in subsequent articles to explain the unnatural persistence of nation-
alism. That is, if nationalism no longer fills any rational historic func-
tion, why then does it persist and why does it grow? Russell’s position
was also analogous to that of the Marxist who must constantly explain
the unexpected continuation of capitalism.
&dquo;Is Nationalism Moribund?&dquo; was commissioned for the American
avant-garde cultural magazine The Seven Arts by its coeditor, Van
Wyck Brooks. One of Brooks’s aims was the cultural renewal of
America, a country that he had described as one that had raw energy
but an energy that was being dissipated in commerce. America,
Brooks pleaded, needed a vision of cultural renewal. He believed that
one part of the mission of the magazine was to have leading European
intellectuals pass the torch to the American writers and readers who
would be associated with The Seven Arts. His first issue then featured
Russell and the European writer Romain Rolland.

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Brooks’s commission and Russell’s response to it contained a num-

ber of ambiguities that were to attach themselves to much of Russell’s
writing on nationalism. On the one hand, Russell reiterated the Cob-
denite/Angell view that nationalism no longer was appropriate for
the modern world. On the other hand, he responded positively to
Brooks’s call for an American cultural mission in leading the way to
a postnationalist world.
Russell opens &dquo;Is Nationalism Moribund?&dquo; by arguing that the war
was &dquo;inspired wholly by the spirit of nationalism ... and is the ...

greatest in extent and one of the fiercest in the contending passions

which have ever been known to history.&dquo; In saying this, he acknow-
ledged that nationalism was still a virulent and all-powerful force in
modem life but offered hope that the very destruction and violence
with which it was ravaging Europe might well signal its last convul-
sion. He pointed out that in the sixteenth century, &dquo;Europe was ravaged
by wars of religion, indicating that religion was reaching a new
crescendo of influence and fervour, but when the wars ended religion
began its decline in public life, as the disillusioned public tumed to
the secular state to regulate its affairs.&dquo; 22 He believed that nationalism
was finally discrediting itself and that, after the passions of war

subsided, it would decline in influence.

In this work, Russell exposes his view of the roots of nationalism,
somewhat sympathetically, as the product of an atavistic psychology.
Nationalism, he declared, was a response to industrialism in that it
sought a good that the dynamism of the industrial world could not
provide-a sense of home. The yearning was understandable and
leaves &dquo;a certain deep malaise,&dquo; but it is futile because in industrial
society most &dquo;are exiles throughout their lives.&dquo;’ Such a yearning for
home is an emotion that gives rise to conservatism, but like all
conservatism it does nothing to check &dquo;the profound and intimate
changes in the lives of ordinary men and women since it does noth-
ing to check the growth of industrialism, militarism, exploitation
of inferior races, or war.,,24 The conservative &dquo;is like a grief stricken
man who has lost his wife&dquo; and &dquo;who has embalmed his wife’s

corpse and set it up at the dinner table to persuade himself that he

is not a widower.&dquo; 25
Russell argued that America, because of its dynamism and mobil-
ity, had done away with the need for roots. The America of today,
he wrote (following Horace Kallen), was a dynamic multicultural
society in which the persecuted had come from every comer of Europe.
The old stable America

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 359

had perished in the Civil War.... Now, however, a very large propor-
tion of the population of America consists of people whose nationalist
feelings are still European-Slavs, Italians, Germans, and even to a
large extent, the Irish. Such people cannot have towards the United
States the kind of intimate, passionate, narrow sentiment that they have
towards the nations from which they come.26

But neither has their sentiment for the old country remained strong.
America, Russell argued, is a country in which mobility and dyna-
mism have eroded the roots of nationalism; it was in effect a postna-
tionalist nation, a model of what the rest of the world would become.
One could easily argue that Russell must, at that time, have been
deliberately blind to the mounting xenophobia that was gripping
America as it was getting ready to enter the war. On the other hand,
it could be argued that Russell had anticipated the reality that so grips
America (and Canada, for that matter) of a multiethnic state whose
diversity has diluted any sense of common purpose.
In the years following the end of the war, Russell, among others,
came to the view that the European nations had learned nothing and
that the postwar world order had simply reconstituted the conditions
that had made the war inevitable. This had not been a war to end all
wars and certainly was not a war to end nationalism. The tinge of

utopianism that was so prominent in Russell’s writings during the

war did not disappear but was balanced by a grim realism. Russell
reconstituted his views so as to retain the program of reconstruction
that he had formulated in the first flush of the war but to establish a
sociological and political context that was more realistic, that could
be described as a liberalism or social democratic faith that was free of
illusions. Among the illusions that Russell discarded was the belief
that the end of nationalism was imminent.
Among the realities that convinced Russell of the staying power of
nationalism were the wave of xenophobia that had come over Amer-
ica during and after the war; the aggressive nationalism that was
thinly concealed in the expansion of the Soviet empire; and, most
sadly of all, the aggressive nationalism that was so evident in his view
when Poland, the darling of liberalism in the nineteenth century,
undertook to invade Russia upon receiving its place in the sun. All
this forced him to revise the prognosis concerning nationalism that he
put forward in &dquo;Is Nationalism Moribund?&dquo;
In The Prospects of Industrial Civilization, Russell launched an attack
on nationalism on all fronts. Alarmed by the postwar enthusiasm

among liberals and the left for a policy of support for national self-

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360

determination, he accused both of naivete concerning nationalism.

Marxistscontinually failed to assess the strength of nationalism be-
causethey maintained the mistaken belief that its roots were eco-
nomic and could thus be contained by economic programs. But &dquo;it
was not economic programmes that determined what nation a man
should belong to. This is determined by instinct or sentiment often in
opposition to economic self interest. The British have enriched Egypt,
yet Egyptian nationalists wish to be rid of them.,,27 On the political
front, he argued against the Wilsonian program of the right to self-
determination of all progressive nations. He rejected the assumption
so widespread within the left that a distinction could be made between
those nationalisms that were progressive and thus deserving of self-
determination and those that were imperialistic and thus had to be
restrained. Beginning in the 1920s, Russell adopted the view that
violent self-aggrandizement was the essence of all nationalism, that
today’s oppressed can become &dquo;the oppressors of tomorrow.&dquo; The
necessity to control nationalism &dquo;is at present the most important task
that the world has to face,&dquo; and &dquo;where large states exist they ought
not, in general, to be disrupted because some of their inhabitants wish
to be free to kill others without breaking the law. &dquo;21
Russell continued to assume &dquo;the End of Nationalism&dquo; in the sense
that nationalism served no progressive purpose, that it was in some
sense artificial and historically moribund. But, assuming the validity
of this analysis, Russell had to explain why nationalism persisted.
Faced by this challenge, at times he turned to conspiracy theories and
accusations of corrupt interventions by forces that were similarly
threatened by the advance of capitalism; at other times, he sought
explanations in the psychology of aggression. In the end, he argued
that the villain was that most sinister phenomenon of the modem
world, the nation-state, which maintained its position through edu-
cation and propaganda and kept nationalism alive. The modem
nation-state, according to Russell, could be compared with the states
that would be described by Orwell in 1984, which artificially main-
tained an atmosphere of perpetual national emergency so as to main-
tain their elites in power. In arguing for &dquo;the End of Nationalism,&dquo;
Russell had turned Gellner on his head by claiming that it was not
nationalism that was sustaining the nation-state but rather the nation-
state that was sustaining nationalism.
The continuing strength of nationalism thus forced on Russell an
interesting revision in his assessment of the relation between indus-
trialism and nationalism. Nationalism remained an atavistic yearning

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for the past but was sustained by a modem apparatus of mass

communication of education, standardization, and propaganda. This
in turn compelled him to make a more general assessment of the
relationship between nationalism and industrialism. Industrialism
not only bypasses nationalism but in some sense made it possible.
Industrialism in a sense collaborates in its undoing. Russell had come
to an arresting and profound conclusion, one whose implications
threatened his pronouncement of &dquo;the End of Nationalism.&dquo;
Industrialism has rendered [nationalism] no longer useful but has
immensely stimulated it.... Suppose some new diet were adopted
which simultaneously strengthened men’s sexual impulses and ren-
dered women capable of parthenogenesis, we should then have the
sexual instinct at once increased and rendered biologically useless.29

Russell’s argument had become more sophisticated yet more prob-

lematic. He had, on the one hand, shown that nationalism had em-
bedded itself more subtly and more dangerously into the midst of
modem culture but was, at the same time, hard-pressed to show how
the human race would in fact get beyond nationalism. Russell did not
believe that there was some invisible force of progress that would of
itself create a new postnationalist social and political formation. The
human race would have to reach this stage by a determined political
effort. There would not be a postnationalist world without a postna-
tionalist world government. But such a government could not be
established by nation-states that, by definition, sustained aggressive
and grasping nationalism. Russell pressed what he had been pressing
for some time: that the United States or a consortium of nations should
establish such a world government or international order by force,
either military or economic. In Prospects, he was blunt. &dquo;I fear I shall
incur the displeasure of most socialists if I say that high finance seems
to me, at this moment, in certain respects, the sanest and most con-
structive influence in the western world.,,30 In other passages, how-
ever, he alludes to a revolt by socialist powers against worldwide
debts that are owed to America. He envisaged both possibilities
because he had painted himself into a comer wherein Russell the
Guild Socialist sympathized with the smaller national units while
Russell the internationalist wanted them subdued and forced into a
larger order.
As Russell’s views matured, this conundrum became even more
dense and insoluble. The problems that Russell raised in Prospects
might, theoretically, be solved by an imperial world power, an up-
dated version of the British empire that would respect local culture

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362

but regulate external relations and military power. But in Russell’s

later works on nationalism, &dquo;The Ancestry of Fascism&dquo; and Freedom
and Organization, he came to see nationalism in the larger context of
the intellectual history of the industrial era. This history is too rich
and complex to summarize in an essay such as this one, but the most
important development in his reflections on nationalism since &dquo;Is
Nationalism Moribund?&dquo; is that his view that nationalism is simply a
survival that has no place in the age of progress has been replaced by
a more complex view that nationalism is part of a &dquo;revolt against reason&dquo;

that was initiated by Romanticism and given philosophical expres-

sion by Fichte and the German idealists. This revolt found its more
perfect expression in the philosophy of Nietzsche and other power
philosophies of the modem world (which included Dewey’s pragma-
tism) and claimed a new and limitless power over nature that knew
no bounds and no restraints. Nationalism, Russell argued, was the
social and political expression of this will to power; fascism was its
logical outcome. Russell once again reiterated, in even stronger terms,
the view that there was no difference between different forms of
nationalism. In his section on the roots of nationalism, Russell, con-
trary to the views of most historians, argued that the liberal nationalist
Mazzini is no different from the fascist Mussolini. In 1934, during the
height of the fascist era, Russell argued that &dquo;what Italy has become,
Mazzini’s doctrines have made it.&dquo;31 Given the cultural roots of na-
tionalism, a theme that Russell develops in great detail in his best-
selling History of Western Philosophy, it is difficult to see how any
political solution could be viable, especially one that presumes that a
nation that imposes a world government by force will be free of the
virus of power philosophies and of nationalism.
This confusion between nationalism as the product of a new psy-
chology of power and nationalism as the product of an inadequately
organized international order has some bearing on Russell’s hysteri-
cal policies after World War II, where he was prepared to countenance
nuclear threats and even nuclear wars to establish world govern-
ment.32 They also have some bearing on his almost unfathomable
range of attitudes to the United States, where he seemed to be arguing
that if the United States could act in a disinterested fashion as the
creator of world government, it could legitimately take over the world,
but that if it acted in its own interest, it would rightly be condemned
and censured.
The unfolding of the primary theme of the end of nationalism is an
interpretation of Russell as modernist. The other theme, Russell as

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 363

Guild Socialist and ethnicist, acts as a counterpoint in his writings on

nationalism. One excellent example of Russell as ethnicist, which
shows how he conceived the right combination of internationalism
and nationalism at work, is in an article he wrote in 1943 supporting
the establishment of a Jewish state after the end of the war. He began
his essay by stating, &dquo;The Nazi persecution of the Jews is one of the
most horrifying-and perhaps the most horrifying-of the large scale
cruelties that mark our age as one of retrogression towards barba-
rism.&dquo; He goes on to admit that he was not in favor of a Jewish state
at first, but &dquo;I have come gradually to see that, in a dangerous and
largely hostile world, it is essential to Jews to have some country
which is theirs, some region where they are not suspected aliens, a
state that embodies what is distinctive in their culture
The year 1943 was a crucial one in the history of Zionism because
by then Zionists had called for a Jewish state. But the Zionists called
for a Jewish state so that Jews of Palestine could control immigration
and could assume the responsibility of armed self-defense. Russell
agreed with the first aim but ignored the second. Addressing the right
to immigration, Russell proposed that the Jewish authorities in Pales-
tine be given the authority to allow unlimited immigration, that all
Jews should be eligible for citizenship of the Zionist state, and that
only Jews should be the judges of their fitness. Russell was an early
non-Jewish proponent of the right of return.
He did not, however, believe that a Jewish state should have control
over its external relations. Relations with the Arabs should be in the
hands of the victorious allies who, recognizing the disturbance that a
Jewish state would cause, should offer Syria and Iraq attractive con-
cessions. Still, he conceded, &dquo;The Moslem world will share the general
revival of fanaticism.&dquo;’ This would imply that the Jews of Palestine
need constant military protection, which will be provided by the
alliance of the British, Americans, and Russians that defeated the
Nazis. The Jewish state, he hoped, would become a consortium of
the victorious powers. &dquo;I do not think it Utopian to suppose that
one of the purposes for which they will cooperate will be protection
of the Jews not only from military aggression in Palestine, but from
discriminatory domestic legislation anywhere.&dquo;35
Here was Russell’s view of cultural self-determination. In an ideal
world, Russell saw national groups working in conjunction with an
international authority. This was a world that would have surren-
dered important powers to such international authorities. When in
fact the Jewish state was created five years later, the great powers did

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364

not act to establish a persuasive international authority; instead, they

acted out of their own interests, largely to undermine one another,
leaving the Jews and the Arabs to fend for themselves. But what is the
status of such self-determination if such an ideal world does not exist?
Russell left this question open.
Later, in the 1950s, at the time of the Suez Canal crisis when the
nationalist Egyptian President Nasser nationalized the canal, seizing
it from the British and French, Russell wrote an essay titled &dquo;The Pros
and Cons of Nationalism.&dquo; In this essay, he expressed his admiration
for those nationalisms that resist foreign domination. Some national-
ism, then, is valid. But he draws the line, anticipating the ethnicists,
that &dquo;from a cultural point of view there are very strong arguments
in favour of nationalism, but from a political or economic point of
view nationalism is usually harmful.&dquo;’ But the conflict that he was
analyzing at the time was not primarily a cultural one; it was over
who should control the Suez Canal. Russell saw that from the stand-
point of the interests of the human race, the Egyptian claim was no
worse than that of the British and French, but he insisted, &dquo;There

ought to be a body with international authority&dquo;&dquo; in such matters. As

there is none, he hoped that such a dispute could be settled by
reference to the Security Council, which acted on the advice of an
independent commission, and so on. Here again, the claims of a small
nation are designated as valid when they are cultural and are referred
to nonexistent world authorities. All the problems of nationalism and
internationalism are referred to a platonic world government that
ought to exist-a mathematician’s solution to nationalism.

CONCLUSIONS

Russell’s views on nationalism are more complex than is com-

monly supposed. Russell’s approach to this subject resembles that of
a person running for high office who in the course of his campaign
decides to make promises to a number of different people repre-
senting different interests and different points of view. When this
person comes to office, he is then compelled to sort out the promises
that he has made, trying to reconcile one set of promises with another,
and he discovers in the course of his investigation that there are
problems in fulfilling each promise.
Similarly, Russell seems to promise the modernists a coherent and
spirited account of the artificiality and end of nationalism. He runs

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 365

first into a problem that will plague this school constantly, namely that
declarations of &dquo;the End of Nationalism&dquo; are constantly rebutted by
spirited reappearances of movements of national independence. The
end of nationalism is a prophecy that is never fulfilled. Moreover, in
the course of his investigation, Russell found that the sources of
nationalism-sources that he originally found to be atavistic, mori-
bund remainders from previous forms of society-are bom in the
womb of modernity. This in itself indicates that the thesis of the
artificiality of nationalism must be restated.
Second, Russell promised to the internationalists that there is no
sense in waiting for nationalism to end in itself; rather, it can only
come when nationalism is subdued by force either economic, politi-

cal, or military. That nationalism should be subdued by a Hobbesian

awe for overwhelming power leaves internationalism with an insol-
uble problem. Russell’s portrait of nationalism as a manifestation of
psychopathic aggression makes it unlikely that the tyranny thus
established could be one that eventually can establish a sane world
order. As Russell pointed out in his chapter on Hobbes in the History
of Western Philosophy, those individuals who in the state of nature are
engaged in a war of every man against every man are rational so long
as the state of nature prevails. It is the system-the state of nature-
that makes them violent. Russell seems to believe that the violence of
nationalism is the product of civilized conditions-a manifestation of
mass madness-so that it is difficult to see how any Leviathan can
form a world order that will be rational.
Finally, as far as the ethnicists are concerned, Russell has in fact
made a distinction that he sometimes decries as invalid, namely a
distinction between acceptable and unacceptable nationalism. He
drew the line between cultural nationalism and political nationalism,
offering support for the one and remaining opposed to the other.
But this gives rise to two problems. First, cultural nationalism
remains in limbo unless there is a political structure or an interna-
tional government to sustain it. But in the absence of such a structure,
Russell is supporting ghosts somehow related to nonexistent interna-
tional structures. Second, surely a distinction can be made between
national cultures that foster democracy and liberal institutions and
those that do not. Such struggles within national movements are com-
mon and very important.
The result of Russell endeavoring to keep all his promises is that
he has uncovered a number of serious problems in these various
approaches to nationalism. In the end, however, the observer is not

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366

confident that he has uncovered the reasons for the continuing appeal
of nationalism.
Russell seems to have abandoned the quest for a resolution to these
various dialectics. In the 1960s, in the last decade of his life, he
supported the national uprisings of the Czechs (against the Soviets)
and the Vietnamese, calling for an understanding of the patriotism
behind both of these national movements.&dquo; He had returned to the
position of liberals of the mid-nineteenth century, of distinguishing
between progressive and reactionary nationalisms, the position that
he had rejected at the end of World War I.

NOTES

1. German Social Democracy is a study of the then largest Marxist party in the world.
Russell criticizes the party because its addiction to Marxist notions of class war and
revolution has isolated it from the masses, but he congratulates the party for its
resolute internationalism—its readiness to reject the nationalism and imperialism of
the Second Reich—not noticing that this too might have isolated the party from the
masses.
2. For an extended discussion of this important episode, see R. Rempel, "From
Imperialism to Free Trade: Couturat, Halévy, and Russell’s First Crusade," Journal of the
History of Ideas, 40 (July 1979): 423-43.
3. For Russell’s full discussion on this theme, see Bertrand Russell, Freedom and
Organization (London: Allen and Unwin, 1934), and Bertrand Russell, A History of
Western Philosophy (New York: Scribner, 1945). The latter is the only history of philoso-
phy that treats Byron as one of the key figures in the development of modem thought.
4. For example, the victories of the Israelis in 1967 created a crisis in Poland because
Polish officers indiscreetly celebrated the victories of "our Jews" against "their [the
Soviet] Arabs."
5. See Richard A. Rempel, Andrew Brink, and Margaret Moran, Collected Papers of
Bertrand Russell, vol. 12: Contemplation and Action, 1902-1914 (Allen and Unwin, 1985),
182.
6. Ibid., 182.
7. For an interesting discussion on the relationship between Russell’s ethical views
and his writings on politics and society, see Bart Schultz, "Bertrand Russell in Ethics
and Politics," Ethics 102 (April 1992): 594-634.
8. Russell’s fear of madness is one of the compelling themes in Ray Monk, Bertrand
Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), esp. 23ff.
9. Bertrand Russell, Power: ANew Social Analysis (London: Allen and Unwin, 1938),
contains an extended discussion of power philosophies, and Bertrand Russell, "Ances-
try of Fascism," in Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness (London: Allen and Unwin,
1935), traces the evolution of fascism from the idealism of Fichte through Hegel and
Nietzsche.
10. Alan Ryan has astutely pointed to Russell’s connection to the sociological
tradition in Alan Ryan, Russell: A Political Life (London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 1989), 98.

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 367

11. Russell weaves nationalism and internationalism, the struggle between global-
ism and global disintegration, in a manner that connects his work to works such as
Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. Mcworld (Toronto: Random House, 1995).
12. See John Hutchison, Modern Nationalism (London: Fontana, 1994), and the
collection John Hutchison and Anthony D. Smith, eds., Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994).
13. See Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), and Eric
Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism (London: Clarendon, 1990).
14. Hutchison, 8.
15. Ibid.
16. Ernest Gellner, "Nationalism and High Culture," in Gellner, Nations and Nation-
alism, 65.
17. See Bertrand Russell, "Is Nationalism Moribund?" in Richard Rempel, Louis
Greenspan, Beryl Haslam, Albert Lewis, and Mark Lippincott, The Collected Papers of
Bertrand Russell, vol. 14: Pacifism and Revolution (London: Routledge, 1995), 317. This is
the first time that Russell’s seminal essay on nationalism has been reproduced since it
was first published in The Seven Arts.
18. Bertrand Russell, "Pros and Cons of Nationalism," in Bertrand Russell, Fact and
Fiction (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962), 133.
19. Sir Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in
Nations to Their Economic and Social Advantage (Toronto: McLelland & Goodchild, 1911),
revised in 1933, was a runaway best-seller and was translated into many languages.
20. Russell, "Is Nationalism Moribund?" 322.
21. A recent volume, Jean-Marie Eliott, The End of the Nation State (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995). At the time of this writing, Eliott was France’s
ambassador to the European Union. The opening pages of this volume present an
argument that is very similar to Russell’s (although updated) in "Is Nationalism
Moribund?"
22. Russell, "Is Nationalism Moribund?" 316.
23. Ibid., 320.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid, 321.
26. Ibid., 318.
27. Ibid., 68.
28. Bertrand Russell in collaboration with Dora Russell, The Prospects of Industrial
Civilization (London: Allen and Unwin, 1923), 101-2.
29. Ibid., 65.
30. Ibid., 89-90.
31. Russell, Freedom and Organization, 403.
32. Ryan, Russell: A Political Life, 178-80, provides a lengthy discussion of Russell’s
proposals to threaten the Soviet Union with atomic war, providing evidence of Russell’s
seriousness in making this proposal, including readiness to absorb millions of casualties
in the event that Russia invaded Western Europe.
33. Bertrand Russell, "Zionism and the Peace Settlement," The New Palestine 33 (11
June 1943): 5.
34. Ibid., 6.
35. Ibid., 7.
36. Russell, "Pros and Cons," 127.
37. Ibid., 131.

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38. I have dealt with this subject in Louis Greenspan, The Incompatible Prophecies:
Bertrand Russell on Science and Liberty (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1978), 72-73.

Louis Greenspan is a professor of religious studies at McMaster University and the

director of the Bertrand Russell Editorial Project. He has published works on Russell
including The Incompatible Prophecies and on contemporary Jewish thought. His
latest work on Russell is a new introduction to The Prospects of Industrial Civilization.

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