THE IDEA OF A WORLD GOVERNMENT IS FLAWED

THE IDEA OF A WORLD GOVERNMENT IS FLAWED

1. RUSSELL SUPPORTED GLOBAL HEGENOMY

Edward Skidelsky, writer, “The impossibility of love. Edward Skidelsky on the failure and despair of Bertrand Russell.” NEW STATESMAN, October 9, 2000, p. 55.

Russell changed his mind frequently on political questions, without ever acknowledging that he had done so. Still, a consistent theme emerges. Although he was famous as an advocate of pacifism - during the First World War, during the Thirties, and as a founder of CND in the Sixties - he was not, in truth, a pacifist. His pacifism was simply the local application of a more fundamental belief in world government. This is confirmed by a curious episode in 1945-48. In order to prevent the Soviet Union from developing the bomb, Russell advocated a policy of threatening - or actually waging - atomic war, writing: 'Communism must be wiped out and world government must be established.' Later on, after the Cuban missile crisis had convinced him that America, not Russia, was the greatest danger to world peace, he switched to the 'better red than dead' line of argument. He seems not to have cared much about the particular identity of the global hegemon, so long as one existed.

Edward Skidelsky, writer, “The impossibility of love. Edward Skidelsky on the failure and despair of Bertrand Russell.” NEW STATESMAN, October 9, 2000, p. 56.

A profound misanthropy underlay Russell's support for world government. He had a fixed belief that human beings were incapable of managing conflict in a civilized way, and that therefore peace could be established only through force. And while he often accused Kennedy, Khrushchev and Macmillan of desiring 'the massacre of the whole of mankind', his writings occasionally reveal a similar desire. 'Sometimes, in moments of horror, I have been tempted to doubt whether there is any reason to wish that such a creature as man should continue to exist.' The cataclysmic urges that Russell attributed to politicians and generals were his own.
3. RUSSELL’S IDEAL ‘WORLD GOVERNMENT’ WAS HOPELESSLY VAGUE AND IMRACTICAL

Alan Ryan, fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, BERTRAND RUSSELL: A POLITICAL LIFE, 1988. p. 79

The other obvious target for complaint is Russell’s extreme vagueness about the form of world government that he imagines we may set up. This vagueness persisted all his life; the only thing he was every clear about was that the likely first stage of the process of creating it would have to be the despotism of the United States over the rest of the world. What Russell never explains is why the powers that were willing to fight to the last drop of their soldiers’ blood during the first war would be able to reconcile themselves to the existence of this despotism or the subsequent world authority. G.D.H. Cole complained to Russell that he was too Platonic, too much the philosopher-king inventing solutions for the average man, and it is perfectly true that Russell was prone to the Platonic temptation to push all practical difficulties aside by mere fiat –as if to say, ‘Let there be an omnipotent world authority,’ what the first step in the argument, when its possibility was really what was at stake. And even if Russell may be excused the sketchiness if his account of what it would be like, he surely cannot be excused his optimism about how it would work.

PASSIVE RESISTANCE DOES NOT WORK

1. RUSSEL OVERESTIMATED EFFECTIVENESS OF PASSIVE RESISTANCE

Alan Ryan, fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, BERTRAND RUSSELL: A POLITICAL LIFE, 1988. p. 68.

[Russell] undoubtedly overestimated the readiness with which most people would passively resist their oppressors at the cost of death and injury to themselves or, more importantly, to their family and friends. In 1915 he underestimated the ingenuity with which invaders would set about the task of making people cooperate against their will; justified skepticism about the tales of German atrocities in Belgium and an unjustified faith in the civilized character of European nations even when they were at war hid from him the possibilities which Hitler’s rise to power belatedly revealed.

Andrew Brink, writer and philosopher, BERTRAND RUSSELL: THE PSYCHOBIOGRAPHY OR A MORALIST, 1989, p. 112-113.

So far historians lack the concepts to describe Russell’s attitude to war. In her study of Russell’s Part in the No Conscription Fellowship during the Great War, Jo Vellacott find insufficient “evidence of a positively pacifist outlook” developing between his conversion in 1901 and the outbreak of war in 1914. She recognizes Russell’s own violent streak, and notes the tendency through experience of war “towards an integration of the different sides of personality”; but there is no theory to explain what occurred. Thomas C. Kenny writes more bluntly that Russell “never a pacifist,” because his political stance was less due to personal faith than it was to a political strategy.
3. RUSSELL CONTRIBUTIONS INSIGNIFICANT, HIS VIEWS PERPETUATED WAR

Dennis O’Brien, President emeritus of the University of Rochester, “He Didn’t Add Up.” COMMONWEAL, September 28, 2001, p. 22.

Having noted intensive and extensive activity, one has to say that Russell's contributions to political or moral thought are minimal. No serious moral philosopher is likely to spend time with any of his writings on the subject. On political issues he was from time to time on the side of the angels--his advocacy of peace--but he missed the threat of Hitler and did not come to support the British war effort until some six months after the outbreak of hostilities. In the last two decades of his life a residual anti-Americanism, exacerbated by a sensational court case in 1940 when he was denied a teaching position at CCNY because of his "immoral" philosophy, he became virtually paranoid.