The Impact of Science on Society — Chapter-by-Chapter Outline

Author: Bertrand Russell First published: 1952 (based on the Charles Beard lectures given at Ruskin College, Oxford, 17 January – 21 February 1950, with the final chapter first delivered as the Lloyd Roberts Lecture at the Royal Society of Medicine, London, on 29 November 1949; sometimes misattributed to the 1948 Reith Lectures, which became a different book, Authority and the Individual) Edition covered: Routledge Classics edition (Routledge, 2016; 1st ed., 120 pp., ISBN 978-1-138-64115-0, with a foreword by Tim Sluckin) — the current standard edition, reproducing the text first published in 1952 by George Allen & Unwin (London) and Simon & Schuster (New York). Chapter titles, order, and quotations below follow the book's own table of contents as printed in the 1952/1953 text and confirmed against the Routledge, Google Books, and Open Library records.

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Central thesis

The book asks what science, understood as both a way of knowing and a source of technique, has done and will do to human society. Russell opens by fixing the time-scale: science "as a dominant factor in determining the beliefs of educated men, has existed for about 300 years; as a source of economic technique, for about 150 years," yet in that brief period it "has proved itself an incredibly powerful revolutionary force." The book's subject is therefore not the content of scientific discoveries but their effects — intellectual (the dissolving of traditional beliefs), technical (industrial and military), social (changes in organization and politics), and philosophical (a new conception of man's place in the universe).

The argument proceeds from description to prescription. Chapters 1–2 describe the effects of science as philosophy and as technique. Chapters 3–4 ask who will control scientific technique and how — the choice, as Russell frames it, between a scientific oligarchy and a scientific democracy. Chapters 5–6 confront war and values, the two places where technique outruns human wisdom. Chapter 7 poses the book's organizing question directly: can a scientific society be stable at all, given the physical, biological, and psychological forces that scientific development sets in motion? The answer is conditional: a scientific society can be stable, but only under conditions that no existing society meets — a world government with a monopoly of armed force, a general diffusion of prosperity, a stationary world population, and provision for individual initiative. Russell calls this "a moderate optimism": the obstacles are not technical but moral and psychological.

Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, as, for example, ancient Egypt persisted, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?

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Chapter 1 — Science and Tradition

Central question

What has science, considered as a philosophy and a way of acquiring beliefs, done to the traditional beliefs that previously governed human life?

Main argument

The four effects of science

Russell sets out his program in the opening pages: science has (1) direct intellectual effects — "the dispelling of many traditional beliefs, and the adoption of others suggested by the success of scientific method"; (2) effects on technique in industry and war; (3) profound changes in social organization that bring corresponding political changes; and (4) as a result of the new control over the environment, "a new philosophy ... involving a changed conception of man's place in the universe." This chapter confines itself to the first and last of these — science as philosophy — leaving technique to the following chapter. Its conclusion is double-edged: science as a method is the great solvent of unfounded belief, but science as a source of power is generating "a form of unwisdom from which disastrous consequences may result."

Science as solvent of superstition

Russell begins with the mass of unfounded beliefs that science has destroyed. Anthropology shows savages attributing illness to sorcery, crop failure to angry gods, and practicing human sacrifice for victory and fertility. Eclipses were the first natural phenomena to escape superstition: the Babylonians could predict them but kept the knowledge as priestly power; the Greeks — Thucydides, the Pythagoreans — brought them within science, yet Milton could still speak of the sun "in dim eclipse" as a portent that "perplexes monarchs." Comets took longer, becoming scientific only with Newton and Halley; the Venerable Bede and John Knox read them as portents, and the belief died only when comets "were found to obey the law of gravitation." Witchcraft followed: the last English witchcraft trial was in 1664, the laws were repealed in 1736, and the victory "was almost entirely due to the spread of the scientific outlook — not to any definite argument, but to the impossibility of the whole way of thinking that had been natural before." Scientific medicine had to fight the same battle — Vesalius's dissections horrified the Church; insanity was treated by torturing out the demons; "it is hardly till the time of Lister and Pasteur that medicine can be said to have become scientific."

The three ingredients of the mechanistic outlook

Russell identifies the three convictions that made up the eighteenth-century scientific outlook, the outlook he calls the "mechanistic outlook":

• (1) Observation versus authority — "Statements of fact should be based on observation, not on unsupported authority." Aristotle held that women have fewer teeth than men, yet "although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths." Russell's own inherited lore — "ostriches eat nails" — turns out to come from Pliny and to be false. "Respect for observation as opposed to tradition is difficult and (one might almost say) contrary to human nature. Science insists upon it, and this insistence was the source of the most desperate battles between science and authority."
• (2) The autonomy of the physical world — "The inanimate world is a self-acting, self-perpetuating system, in which all changes conform to natural laws." Galileo's first law of motion showed that a body in motion continues until something stops it — no soul needed to push it. Once the physical world is causally self-contained, physics becomes possible; Descartes extended the law even to animal bodies. The eighteenth-century materialists took the further step of making mind an "inoperative by-product."
• (3) The dethronement of purpose — Aristotle's four causes are reduced by modern science to the efficient cause alone; the "final" cause (purpose) survives only where human volition is involved. "We are told in the Bible that the moon was made to give light by night. But men of science, however pious, do not regard this as a scientific explanation of the origin of the moon." Darwin's work was decisive: random variation and natural selection "use only efficient causes," and this is why men who accept evolution — Samuel Butler, Bergson, Shaw, even Lysenko — still resist Darwin's mechanism. The point of Russell's aside about Lysenko is that when purpose is reintroduced into science, it is not God's purpose but the dictator's.

Man's place in the universe: degraded and exalted

The effect of science on man's cosmic status "has been of two opposite kinds; it has at once degraded and exalted him. It has degraded him from the standpoint of contemplation, and exalted him from that of action." Contemplatively, the modern universe dwarfs man: Russell contrasts Dante's tidy cosmos, "like a child's doll's house, with people as the dolls," with Hubble's realm of the nebulae — the Milky Way one assemblage of about 300,000 million stars among some 30 million known galaxies, all hurrying apart at up to 14,000 miles a second. "It is not easy to maintain a belief in one's own cosmic importance in view of such overwhelming statistics." Practically, however, the same science confers limitless power: "In the pre-scientific world, power was God's," to be solicited by humility and prayer; now "the power of science has no known limits. We were told that faith could remove mountains, but no one believed it; we are now told that the atomic bomb can remove mountains, and everyone believes it." The chapter ends on the danger: "in this godless universe, we shall become gods."

Darwinism and the dangers of misinterpretation

Darwinism did more than extrude purpose: it blurred the line between men and apes (Piltdown Man, Pithecanthropus, "Homo Pekiniensis" — "Did Piltdown Man go to heaven?"), and it threatened the eighteenth-century liberal creed of equal natural rights. Russell's deft handling of the "Rights of Man": if you push equal endowment back through the Piltdown Man to the anthropoid apes, "you can be driven back ultimately on to the amoeba, which is absurd (to quote Euclid)." Men are not congenitally equal; political equality must rest on political grounds, not biology. But Darwinism, "crudely misinterpreted," has also been used to proclaim the superiority of races and the virtue of letting the weak perish — a creed that leads to slavery or war, and back to Heraclitus, "the first of fascists," for whom war is "the father of all and king of all." This is science as philosophy generating unwisdom; technique, which magnifies the same impulses, is the subject of the next chapter.

Key ideas

• Science as philosophy has, since the seventeenth century, dissolved unfounded traditional beliefs — eclipses, comets, witchcraft, demoniacal possession — not by specific arguments but by making a whole way of thinking impossible.
• The scientific or "mechanistic" outlook has three ingredients: observation over authority, the causal autonomy of the physical world, and the banishment of purpose (final causes) from scientific explanation.
• Science degraded man contemplatively (Dante vs. Hubble) while exalting him practically: power has passed from God to technique, and "we shall become gods."
• Darwinism completed the dethronement of purpose and unsettled the theological and liberal doctrines of man, including the claim of congenital equality.
• Darwinism, misinterpreted, licenses racism, war-worship, and the cult of the strong — a revival of Heraclitus in modern dress.
• The philosophical effect of science — the sense of unlimited human power — is, in Russell's judgment, "very dangerous," and the book will return to it.

Key takeaway

Science as a method is the great solvent of unfounded certainty, but science as a source of power has bred a philosophy of unlimited human dominance that Russell regards as dangerous and unwise.

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Chapter 2 — General Effects of Scientific Technique

Central question

What happens to society when science is applied as technique — to industry, war, agriculture, communications, medicine, and propaganda — regardless of the political system that employs it?

Main argument

From knowledge to power

Russell opens with a distinction that structures the book: "Science, ever since the time of the Arabs, has had two functions: (1) to enable us to know things, and (2) to enable us to do things." The Greeks, except Archimedes, cared only for knowing; interest in doing came through magic — the Arabs' pursuit of the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, and the transmutation of metals. The first great technical discoveries were gunpowder and the mariner's compass. Gunpowder destroyed feudalism: castles could not stand against guns, which is why the Tudors — and Henry VII, Louis XI, Ferdinand and Isabella elsewhere — could subdue rebellious barons; "Magna Carta would have never been won if John had possessed artillery." The compass made the age of discovery, sea power, and the domination of the world by Western Europe.

Cotton and the first industrial misery

The industrial revolution's first fruits were disastrous. In the Lancashire cotton mills, children worked twelve to sixteen hours a day from age six or seven, beaten to stay awake, "rolled into the machinery, by which they were mutilated or killed." Enclosure Acts made peasants destitute; trade unions were illegal until 1824; the government used agents provocateurs whose catch was "deported or hanged." In America, Eli Whitney's cotton gin (1793) revived slavery just as the South was preparing to abolish it: "laborsaving" devices gave slaves a life of toil far more severe than before, breeding slaves became a profitable business in the upper South, and "the ultimate outcome was the Civil War, which would almost certainly not have occurred if the cotton industry had remained unscientific." Russell's point: "evils due to a new scientific technique are no new thing" — and, on the other side, the evils eventually ceased, because of "the abolition of slavery and the growth of democracy."

The telegraph, the power station, and centralization

Steam opened the Middle West and fed England; then came electricity, oil, and the internal-combustion engine. The telegraph had two consequences: messages outran people, and central control became possible. Its effects were mixed: it strengthened the police (though "the men whom the police wish to catch are frequently benefactors of mankind" — Polycrates would have caught Pythagoras, the Pope would have caught William of Occam, Pitt would have caught Tom Paine), and it concentrated power: "The effect of the telegraph was to increase the power of the central government and diminish the initiative of distant subordinates." Broadcasting completed what the telegraph began; the power station extends it — Laputa's philosophers interposed their floating island between rebels and the sun, and "something very analogous can be done by those who control power stations." Flying increased the power of governments and the disproportion between great and small Powers; only great Powers can afford air forces.

War, cohesion, and the trend to a single government

"War has been, throughout history, the chief source of social cohesion; and since science began, it has been the strongest incentive to technical progress." Communications have been the chief factor limiting the size of empires — the Roman Empire was stopped by German forests, Napoleon by the Russian winter — but railways, the telegraph, and the long-range bomber have removed the limit: "There would now be no technical difficulty about a single world-wide Empire." Russell immediately notes the psychological difficulty: the chief source of social cohesion is war, and the passions that inspire unity are "hate and fear," so a world government "could only be kept in being by force, not by the spontaneous loyalty that now inspires a nation at war." He defers the problem to a later chapter.

Food, population, and biology

The population of the globe was increasing at about 20 million a year (as of 1950), concentrated in Russia and Southeast Asia, while the world's food supply threatened to diminish through unwise cultivation and deforestation — "an explosive situation" that, left to itself, "must lead to a food shortage and thence to a world war." In the West, medicine and birth control have made the population nearly stationary but increasingly old. Biology will matter as much as physics: genetics will improve plants and animals, "scientific breeding of human beings must be expected to come about" once its advantages in war become obvious, and physiology and psychology — "Pavlov and Freud" — will transform politics.

Mass psychology and the snow-is-black argument

The most important political science will be mass psychology, whose professors so far "have not been in universities: they have been advertisers, politicians, and, above all, dictators." The essential art is persuasion: "We now know that limelight and a brass band do more to persuade than can be done by the most elegant train of syllogisms," and "anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment." The chapter's most famous passage: "Anaxagoras maintained that snow is black, but no one believed him. The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black." The results will show that the influence of home is obstructive, indoctrination must begin before the age of ten, "verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective," and disbelief must be held "to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. ... Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated." "As yet there is only one country which has succeeded in creating this politician's paradise."

Society becomes organic: the power of officials

"The most obvious and inescapable effect of scientific technique is that it makes society more organic, in the sense of increasing the interdependence of its various parts." The self-sufficient peasant gives way to the town dweller whose life is mediated by organizations — factory, trade union, party, building society, school, press, cinema, and above all the State. "The increase of organization has brought into existence new positions of power. Every body has to have executive officials, in whom, at any moment, its power is concentrated." Russell's discussion of the power of officials is a centerpiece: from the post-office clerk to the Prime Minister, every official holds some part of the State's power; officials are "apt to be irresponsible, behind-the-scenes, power, like that of emperors' eunuchs and kings' mistresses"; and "unless the power of officials can be kept within bounds, socialism will mean little more than the substitution of one set of masters for another." He adds the "yes-men" and "no-men" of bureaucracy, and the union secretary's salary story as "a little story ... illustrat[ing] the helplessness of the public against its own officials, even where there is nominally complete democracy."

Tyranny within and conflict without

Organizations are of two kinds — those that aim at getting something done and those that aim at preventing something — and combatant organizations breed the "war mentality": loyalty to one's own officials is confused with patriotism, criticism becomes treachery, and "it is the war mentality that gives officials and governments their opportunity. It is therefore only natural that officials and governments are prone to foster war mentality." The chapter's moral geography: "Tyranny within and conflict without are each other's counterpart. Both spring from the same source: the lust for power." The only escape is to extend the domain of law — "The only escape is to have the greatest possible number of disputes settled by legal process, and not by a trial of strength" — and, with it, "the extension of the domain of law and of the public force necessary for its enforcement." Where liberty is harmful, "it is to law that we must look."

The balance sheet

Russell insists he has not emphasized the gains enough: the average American is far richer than the eighteenth-century Englishman; health, security, education, light, travel, and amusements are all improved; "On the whole, I think, this age is an improvement on all its predecessors except for the rich and privileged." "Our advantages are due entirely, or almost entirely, to the fact that a given amount of labor is more productive than it was in pre-scientific days" — Russell's firewood parable: picking up sticks on his own hilltop cost more labor than coal brought across half England. The large-scale disadvantages of the age "arise from failure to extend the domain of law to the settlement of disputes which, when left to the arbitrament of force, have become, through our very efficiency, more harmful than in previous centuries."

Key ideas

• Science has two functions — to know and to do; its practical function begins with magic and ends by transforming industry, war, and government.
• Gunpowder and the compass shaped the modern State and the European domination of the world; the telegraph, broadcasting, the power station, flying, and atomic energy each concentrated power further.
• Industrialism's first fruits were misery (Lancashire child labor, the revival of slavery by the cotton gin); its later gains were secured by democracy, trade unions, and abolition.
• War is the chief source of social cohesion, and the technical possibility of one world-wide Empire is now real, but a world government could only rest on force, not loyalty.
• The coming sciences are biology, physiology, and psychology; mass psychology, already practiced by "advertisers, politicians, and, above all, dictators," will enable any State to control conviction — the "snow is black" program.
• Scientific technique makes society more organic, concentrating power in officials; the resulting "tyranny within and conflict without" both spring from the lust for power.
• The cure is not less technique but more law: disputes must be settled by legal process rather than trial of strength, up to and including the relations of nations.

Key takeaway

Scientific technique is a net material gain that has made society more interdependent, concentrated power in officials and governments, and made war incomparably more dangerous — and the remedy is the extension of law, not the abolition of science.

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Chapter 3 — Scientific Technique in an Oligarchy

Central question

What happens when scientific technique is controlled by an oligarchy — a system in which ultimate power is confined to a section of the community?

Main argument

Oligarchy defined

"By 'oligarchy' I mean any system in which ultimate power is confined to a section of the community: the rich to the exclusion of the poor, Protestants to the exclusion of Catholics, aristocrats to the exclusion of plebeians, white men to the exclusion of colored men, males to the exclusion of females, or members of one political party to the exclusion of the rest." Past oligarchies rested on birth, wealth, or race. The Puritan "Rule of the Saints" — confining arms to adherents of one creed — was a new kind: revived in Russia in 1918, Italy in 1922, Germany in 1933, it is now "the only vital form of oligarchy." Since scientific technique increases the power of organizations, "a scientific oligarchy has more power than any oligarchy could have in pre-scientific times," and its natural end is totalitarianism — all important forms of power merged in the State. Russell notes the "power of labels": many people like this system "when it is Russian but disliked the very same system when it was German."

Dogma, terror, and the new tyrants

Because the new oligarchs base their claim on the rightness of a creed, their system "depends essentially upon dogma": heresy is treason, rival creeds must be suppressed by force, and there must be an organ of government to pronounce orthodoxy — "The history of the Inquisition shows what such an organ of government must inevitably become." Scientific technique perfects the control of opinion: all schools are government schools; "printing is impossible without paper, and all paper belongs to the State"; broadcasting and cinema are public monopolies; the art of spying makes secret whispering "appallingly dangerous"; children are taught to denounce their parents. Russell's historical comparison is deliberately jarring: "People still shudder at the enormities of men like Caligula and Nero, but their misdeeds fade into insignificance beside those of modern tyrants. ... Caligula wished his enemies had but a single head; how he would have envied Hitler the scientific lethal chambers of Auschwitz!"

The economics of oligarchy: forced labor

Russell's account of the economics of a scientific oligarchy is built on the Soviet example: the economic system "appropriate to an oligarchy" is one in which the rulers enjoy the surplus — while ordinary employees suffer as in England 150 years ago, and beneath "free" labor lies "the system of forced labor and concentration camps": men seized at night, no trial, no charge, death in northeast Siberia from cold, overwork, and undernourishment. Forced labor is "economical," grows by competition with free labor, and "must grow until no one is outside it except the army, the police, and government officials." It has built the Baltic–White Sea canal, freed labor for war production, and — by terror — diminished disaffection; and "the very evils of the system help to give it stability." The rulers, comfortably placed, have no reason to improve the lot of their serfs: "So long as the rulers are comfortable, what reason have they to improve the lot of their serfs?" Russell's generalization: "the evils that have grown up in Soviet Russia will exist, in a greater or less degree, wherever there is a scientific government which is securely established and is not dependent upon popular support."

The scientific horror-story: breeding and the biological abyss

Advances in physiology and psychology will give governments control over mentality itself. Fichte's ideal — education that destroys free will — was unattainable in his day ("what he regarded as the best system in existence produced Karl Marx"); in a dictatorship "diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable," and "even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so." Then comes selective breeding: all but 5 per cent of males and 30 per cent of females sterilized; the unsterilized women reproducing from eighteen to forty for "adequate cannon fodder"; children reared by professional nurses as in Plato's Republic; "gradually, by selective breeding, the congenital differences between rulers and ruled will increase until they become almost different species. A revolt of the plebs would become as unthinkable as an organized insurrection of sheep against the practice of eating mutton." Russell insists this is not fantasy: "I firmly believe that, if the Nazis had won the last war, and if in the end they had acquired world supremacy they would, before long, have established just such a system."

Why democracy is necessary but not sufficient

"To prevent these scientific horrors, democracy is necessary but not sufficient. There must be also that kind of respect for the individual that inspired the doctrine of the Rights of Man." Russell concedes Bentham's gibe — "'Rights of man, nonsense; imprescriptible rights of man, nonsense on stilts'" — and admits that great community gains can justify individual injustice (the city delivering hostages). But he insists the doctrine matters because power-holders "will be much too prone, on each occasion, to think that this is one of those cases" where the individual may be sacrificed.

The theory of totalitarianism and its refutation

Totalitarianism has a theory as well as a practice: the doctrine, especially associated with Hegel, that "the State, or the nation, or the community is capable of a good different from that of individuals." Russell refutes it by extending an analogy illegitimately: "The government, as opposed to its individual members, is not sentient; it does not rejoice at a victory or suffer at a defeat. When the body politic is injured, whatever pain is to be felt must be felt by its members, not by it as a whole." Therefore "The good of a multitude is a sum of the goods of the individuals composing it, not a new and separate good"; when a separate State-good is pretended, what is really meant is that "the good of the government or of the ruling class is more important than that of other people. Such a view can have no basis except in arbitrary power."

Can a scientific dictatorship last?

Internally, yes: "Apart from the danger of war, I see no reason why such a regime should be unstable," since slavery and serfdom have been the norm of history, and a government that controls food, police, and armed forces "has absolute power" — "I do not see how any internal movement of revolt can ever bring freedom to the oppressed in a modern scientific dictatorship." Externally, no: "Given two countries with equal natural resources, one a dictatorship and the other allowing individual liberty, the one allowing liberty is almost certain to become superior to the other in war technique in no very long time," because "freedom in scientific research is incompatible with dictatorship." The two proofs are Hitler and Stalin: "Germany might well have won the war if Hitler could have endured Jewish physicists. Russia will have less grain than if Stalin had not insisted upon the adoption of Lysenko's theories." Hence the chapter's famous verdict: "Scientific dictatorships will perish through not being sufficiently scientific" — and Russell's "moderate optimism as to the future."

Key ideas

• An oligarchy is any system confining ultimate power to a section of the community; the only vital modern form is the creed-based oligarchy descended from the Puritan "Rule of the Saints."
• A scientific oligarchy has unprecedented power: dogma enforced by an inquisition-like organ, monopoly of education and paper, spies, and the denunciation of parents by children.
• Its economics is forced labor, which is economical, self-expanding, and stabilizing precisely because its evils are used to justify more terror.
• Physiology and psychology will let rulers shape character and belief from infancy, and selective breeding will divide rulers from ruled "until they become almost different species."
• Democracy is necessary but not sufficient: something like the Rights of Man — with Bentham's caveats — is also required.
• The Hegelian theory of the organic State fails because the government is not sentient: only individuals feel, so the good of a multitude is the sum of individual goods.
• A scientific dictatorship is internally stable but externally doomed: it lags in science and war technique because research requires freedom — "scientific dictatorships will perish through not being sufficiently scientific."

Key takeaway

A scientific oligarchy can be appallingly effective and internally stable, but it corrodes science itself, and in any contest with free societies it will lose the war of technique.

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Chapter 4 — Democracy and Scientific Technique

Central question

What must democracy become if it is to survive and deserve to survive in a society whose technique increases the power of organizations over the individual?

Main argument

Democracy as a matter of degree

Russell begins by noting that "the word 'democracy' has become ambiguous": east of the Elbe it means "military dictatorship of a minority enforced by arbitrary police power"; west of it, roughly, "even distribution of ultimate political power among all adults except lunatics, criminals, and peers." The essence is "approach to equality of power," and "democracy is a matter of degree." Democracy has disappointed its enthusiasts — the French Revolution cut off the king's head and "still they failed to enjoy celestial bliss" — but its sober advocates (Bentham and his school) "proved right." Its disappointments produced the cult of the hero: "And the cult of the hero, in practice, is fascism." The opposite, antidemocratic tendency — communism — attaches importance neither to heroes nor to common men "but to organizations."

The common man, the hero, and the cog

The chapter's central analytical device is Russell's threefold view of the individual:

• (a) as a common man — leads to old-fashioned democracy;
• (b) as a hero — leads to fascism;
• (c) as a cog in the machine — leads to communism.

Everybody exemplifies all three: the greatest poet is a common man at the ration book and the polling booth; anyone may have his moment of heroism; and everyone who works in an organized group is a cog. "What science has done is to increase the proportion of your life in which you are a cog, to the extent of endangering what is due to you as a hero or as a common man." The cog theory is humanly the most devastating: it can only be justified by making "the machine an end in itself" — men will come to pray to it: "Almighty and most merciful Machine, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost screws." Russell's verdict is blunt: "The idolatry of the machine is an abomination. The Machine as an object of adoration is the modern form of Satan, and its worship is the modern diabolism." But he is not an Erewhonian prohibitionist: "Whatever else may be mechanical, values are not, and this is something which no political philosopher must forget." The ideal is balance: "In a good social system, every man will be at once a hero, a common man, and a cog, to the greatest possible extent."

The main problem: preserving initiative in spite of organization

"Scientific technique, by making society more organic, increases the extent to which an individual is a cog; if this is not to be an evil, ways must be found of preventing him from being a mere cog. This means that initiative must be preserved in spite of organization." Most initiative will be "political" in a broad sense — advice about what organizations should do — so organizations must be democratically governed, and "the federal principle must be carried so far that every energetic person can hope to influence the government of some social group of which he is a member." Russell illustrates the failure of mass democracy with the American voter: "I do not think there has ever been a Presidential election where one man's abstention would have altered the result. And so you feel as powerless as if you lived under a dictatorship. You are, of course, committing the classical fallacy of the heap, but most people's minds work that way." In England the 1945 election he worked in turned on forty-six votes — "if my work converted twenty-four people the result would have been different if I had been idle."

Federalism, vocational devolution, and the good society

The remedy is federalism — geographic and vocational: local bodies control home affairs, higher bodies foreign affairs, "and so on until we reach the world government, which, for the present, would have no foreign affairs." Industries should be semi-independent bodies with democratic internal government (nationalization "needs to be supplemented by a measure of limited self-government"); bodies like the universities, the Royal Society, and the BBC should keep "a very considerable degree of independence." Russell's three requisites of a good society: every man should "(1) be useful, (2) be as far as possible secure from undeserved misfortune, (3) have opportunity for initiative in all ways not positively harmful to others." None is absolute: "Our three requisites are general directives, not absolute imperatives." Usefulness is judged by the community (the great poet must earn his living at work whose value is obvious, and write verses in his leisure); security means no punishment for unemployment, illness, or old age, no arbitrary arrest or confiscation; initiative is the hardest — Plato's Republic and More's Utopia, "both socialist works," would drive you "to suicide or rebellion" from boredom.

Mental goods, liberty, and the rebels

"Liberty, in the old-fashioned sense, is much more important in regard to mental than to material goods," because "in regard to mental goods what one man possesses is not taken from other men." For material goods, the principle is justice — "to each according to his needs" — and Russell even sketches a reformed "collective profit motive" for coal mining. For mental goods, neither justice nor incentive matters; opportunity matters. "No society can be progressive without a leaven of rebels, and modern technique makes it more and more difficult to be a rebel." Science itself has the problem: you cannot work at nuclear physics in America unless politically orthodox, nor at any science in Russia unless orthodox in science itself — the difficulty is the "vast expense of scientific apparatus." Russell concedes governments cannot be blamed for demanding political orthodoxy of nuclear physicists ("If Guy Fawkes had demanded gunpowder on the ground that it was one of the tools of his trade, I think James I's government would have viewed the request somewhat coldly"), but "there is no justification whatever for demanding scientific orthodoxy": ability, not orthodoxy, should determine a scientist's opportunity. For art and literature, the community cannot judge merit (the French Academy and Royal Academy are "useless, if not harmful"), so the artist must keep his creative work outside the economic machine and seek "ill-paid half-time employment" while he is young.

Utopia and the philosophy-king

"The construction of Utopias used to be despised as the foolish refuge of those who could not face the real world. But in our time social change has been so rapid, and so largely inspired by utopian aspirations, that it is more necessary than it used to be to consider the wisdom or unwisdom of dominant aspirations." Marx and Lenin were utopians; "Lenin had the almost unique privilege of actually constructing his Utopia in a great and powerful State; he was the nearest approach known to history to Plato's philosopher king," and the unsatisfactory result "is, I think, mainly due to intellectual errors on the part of Marx and Lenin." Against communism's charge that the West has no inspiring doctrine, Russell repeats his conception: the good society is a democratic socialism in which every man is useful, secure, and free to initiate. The final note is psychological: security alone is a "base camp," for "the impulse to danger and adventure is deeply ingrained in human nature" — Vanderbilt and Jay Gould's six-hour battle over the Erie Railroad was enjoyed "hugely" by all concerned — and "if the world is ever to have peace, it must find ways of combining peace with the possibility of adventures that are not destructive." Democracy's great merit is precisely that it provides such contests: "If you hate socialism or capitalism, you are not reduced to assassinating Mr. Attlee or Mr. Churchill; you can make election speeches."

Key ideas

• Democracy is a matter of degree, defined by approach to equality of power; its enthusiasts' disappointments bred the cult of the hero, "which, in practice, is fascism."
• Every individual is a common man, a hero, and a cog; science enlarges the cog-role, and the cog theory, taken alone, ends in worship of the Machine.
• The main problem of a scientific society is preserving initiative in spite of organization — through democratic organizations, federalism geographic and vocational, and devolution to universities and similar bodies.
• The good society gives every man usefulness, security from undeserved misfortune, and opportunity for initiative; none is absolute.
• Liberty matters most for mental goods, where one man's possession does not deprive another; material distribution follows justice.
• A progressive society needs "a leaven of rebels"; scientific orthodoxy is never justified, though political orthodoxy for nuclear physicists is conceded with the Guy Fawkes example.
• Values are not mechanical — "whatever else may be mechanical, values are not" — and peace must provide non-destructive adventures for the deep-rooted impulse to danger.

Key takeaway

Democracy in a scientific society must be rebuilt as a federation of self-governing organizations in which every man can be a hero, a common man, and a cog at once — or the organization-ideals of fascism and communism will absorb it.

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Chapter 5 — Science and War

Central question

What is the relation of science to war, and what choice does the new destructiveness of weapons force upon mankind?

Main argument

The long alliance of science and war

"The connection of science with war has grown gradually more and more intimate." It began with Archimedes, who helped his cousin the tyrant of Syracuse defend the city against the Romans in 212 B.C.; Russell quotes Plutarch's (via North) account of his engines — ships "lifted clean out of the water" and flung against the rocks. "In spite of all this scientific technique, however, the Romans were victorious, and Archimedes was killed by a plain infantry soldier." Science nevertheless kept deciding wars: Greek fire sustained the Byzantine Empire; artillery destroyed the feudal system and "by making English archery obsolete created the myth of Joan of Arc"; Leonardo sought the Duke of Milan's employment with a letter about fortification, mentioning in the last sentence "that he could also paint a bit"; Galileo owed his Tuscan employment to "his calculations of the trajectories of cannon-balls"; in the French Revolution, "such men of science as were not guillotined owed their immunity to their contributions to the war effort." The one counter-example: Faraday, consulted about poison gas in the Crimean War, replied that it was feasible "but was to be condemned on grounds of humanity. In those inefficient days his opinion prevailed. But that was long ago."

What wins modern wars

"One nuclear physicist is worth more than many divisions of infantry. And apart from applications of the latest science, what secures success in war is not heroic armies but heavy industry." Japan's heroism at Pearl Harbor was defeated by American industrial productivity: "It is to steel and oil and uranium, not to martial ardor, that modern nations must look for victory in war."

Science has not yet made war more destructive

Russell's deliberately counter-intuitive claim: "Modern warfare, so far, has not been more destructive of life than the warfare of less scientific ages, for the increased deadliness of weapons has been offset by the improvement in medicine and hygiene." Until recent times pestilence killed more soldiers than the enemy: Sennacherib's army lost 185,000 in one night ("and when they arose early in the morning, behold they were all dead corpses"); the plague in Athens decided the Peloponnesian War; disease destroyed Barbarossa's army after victory; the mortality of such campaigns "was far greater than in the two great wars of our own century." But the evils of war have increased in other respects: defeat is now more disorganizing and demoralizing for the whole population — a modern nation at war is "more organized, more disciplined, and more completely concentrated on the effort to secure victory," so the aftermath of defeat ("throughout Central Europe since 1945") is incomparably worse than after Napoleon's wars. And some ancient wars were as destructive as the Second World War: "North Africa has never regained the level of prosperity that it enjoyed under the Romans."

The atom bomb and the choice within fifty years

"The atom bomb, and still more the hydrogen bomb, have caused new fears, involving new doubts as to the effects of science on human life. Some eminent authorities, including Einstein, have pointed out that there is a danger of the extinction of all life on this planet." Russell does not think this will happen in the next war, "but I think it may well happen in the next but one, if that is allowed to occur." Hence the forced choice: "Either we must allow the human race to exterminate itself, or we must forgo certain liberties which are very dear to us, more especially the liberty to kill foreigners whenever we feel so disposed." He thinks mankind may well choose extermination — "The choice will be made, of course, by persuading ourselves that it is not being made" — and with it "we are perhaps living in the last age of man, and, if so, it is to science that he will owe his extinction."

The discipline of the passions and the international authority

If the human race is to continue, "mankind will have to learn a discipline of the passions which, in the past, has not been necessary. Men will have to submit to the law, even when they think the law unjust and iniquitous. ... We must learn not to say: 'Never! Better death than dishonor.'" Russell tests an international authority against the concrete disputes of 1950: Jews and Arabs and the President's dependence on the Jewish vote in New York State; Eire and the Protestants of Ulster; India and Pakistan over Kashmir, "therefore one of them must support Russia and the other the United States." "It will be obvious to anyone who is an interested party in one of these disputes that the issue is far more important than the continuance of life on our planet. The hope that the human race will allow itself to survive is therefore somewhat slender." The chapter ends with the book's starkest formulation: "A clear choice must be made within fifty years, the choice between Reason and Death. And by 'Reason' I mean willingness to submit to law as declared by an international authority. I fear that mankind may choose Death. I hope I am mistaken."

Key ideas

• Science and war have been intimately connected since Archimedes at Syracuse; every epoch of science has been an epoch of war technique.
• In modern war, victory goes to heavy industry and nuclear physics, not heroism — "One nuclear physicist is worth more than many divisions of infantry."
• Up to 1950 science had not made war more deadly overall, because medicine offset weapons; what had changed was the depth of disorganization after defeat.
• The atom and hydrogen bombs create a new possibility: extinction of life on the planet, perhaps "in the next but one" war.
• Survival requires forgoing "the liberty to kill foreigners whenever we feel so disposed" and submitting to law — even law imposed by aliens we hate.
• An international authority must arbitrate the concrete disputes of the day (Palestine, Ulster, Kashmir), and each interested party believes its issue outweighs the survival of the human race.
• The choice within fifty years is "between Reason and Death," where Reason means submission to an international authority.

Key takeaway

Science has armed mankind to the point where its quarrels can end the species, so the only rational course is to surrender national sovereignty over war to an international authority — the choice "between Reason and Death" within fifty years.

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Chapter 6 — Science and Values

Central question

Can science determine values — what is good and what we ought to do — or only the means by which chosen ends are achieved, and what dispositions must a good society cultivate?

Main argument

The philosophy appropriate to science has changed

"The philosophy which has seemed appropriate to science has varied from time to time." To Newton and his English contemporaries, science proved the existence of "God as the Almighty Lawgiver." The radical French philosophes, politically in conflict with the Church, drew the opposite conclusion: laws need no lawgiver, physical laws explain human behavior, and materialism follows. Russell quotes Leopardi's poem of the "interminable vastnesses of space" and remarks that it expresses "more nearly than any other known to me, my own feeling about the universe and human passions." But "this has become an old-fashioned way of feeling": "Science used to be valued as a means of getting to know the world; now, owing to the triumph of technique, it is conceived as showing how to change the world."

The philosophy of the new outlook: pragmatism

The new view — "adopted in practice throughout America and Russia, and in theory by many modern philosophers" — was proclaimed by Marx in 1845 in his Theses on Feuerbach: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, but the real task is to alter it." Its best theoretical development is John Dewey's pragmatism. Russell analyzes its two aspects:

• Theoretical: it "analyzes away the concept 'truth,' for which it substitutes 'utility.'" A belief is "true" when it is profitable, and "a belief may be 'true' at one time and 'false' at another" — Trotsky was a hero of the revolution in 1920 and a traitor in 1930. "The results of this view have been admirably worked out in George Orwell's '1984.'" Dewey's preferred phrase is "warranted assertibility."
• Ethical and psychological: the theory's deepest attraction is "love of power." "If power is all you want from science, the pragmatist theory gives you just what you want," and more: "if you control the police it gives you the godlike power of making truth. You cannot make the sun cold, but you can confer pragmatic 'truth' on the proposition 'the sun is cold' if you can ensure that everyone who denies it is liquidated. I doubt whether Zeus could do more."

Russell quotes his own 1907 words against the theory: "The pragmatic theory of truth is inherently connected with the appeal to force. If there is a non-human truth, which one man may know while another does not, there is a standard outside the disputants, to which, we may urge, the dispute ought to be submitted." A standard of justice independent of the community's wishes is the only possible basis of peaceful arbitration; pragmatism "develops, by inherent necessity, into the appeal to force and the arbitrament of the big battalions." The new philosophy's insanity appears in the denial of fact itself: "To forget that we are hemmed in by facts which are for the most part independent of our desires is a form of insane megalomania. This kind of insanity has grown up as a result of the triumph of scientific technique. Its latest manifestation is Stalin's refusal to believe that heredity can have the temerity to ignore Soviet decrees, which is like Xerxes whipping the Hellespont to teach Poseidon a lesson."

The ancient evils science may intensify

"Science can confer two kinds of benefits: it can diminish bad things, and it can increase good things." The two ancient evils science may intensify are "tyranny and war." Russell's balance sheet:

• Poverty and excessive hours: science can abolish both, but only if population does not increase too fast. Agriculture, "a technical advance of the same kind of importance as attaches to modern machine industry," was used disastrously — "it introduced slavery and serfdom, human sacrifice, absolute monarchy and large wars" — and "It is not impossible that industrialism may take the same course." Industrialism's benefits have depended on "democracy, trade unionism, and birth control. All three, of course, have incurred hostility from the rich." "If these three things can be extended to the rest of the world ... and if the danger of great wars can be eliminated, poverty can be abolished throughout the whole world."
• Medicine: infant mortality in England and Wales fell from 80 per thousand in 1920 to 34 in 1948; the death rate in 1948 was the lowest ever recorded. "The sum of human suffering has also been much diminished by the discovery of anesthetics."
• Order: street lighting, telephones, finger-printing, and penal psychology have made "lawlessness and crimes of violence" far rarer than eighteenth-century London's footpads and highwaymen.
• Education and opportunity: free university education in America ("If I took a taxi in New York, I would often find that the driver was a Ph.D."), the end of "mute inglorious Miltons," and "more diffused happiness than ever before," which "if the fear of war were removed ... would be very much greater than it is."

The intellectual temper required

What dispositions must be widely diffused if a good world is to be sustained? "There must be in many a desire to know the important facts, and in most an unwillingness to give assent to pleasant illusions." Russell confronts the two great dogmas — "Catholicism and Communism" — and the question he is constantly asked: what can cold rationalism offer compared with "the cozy homelike comfort of a fenced-in dogmatic creed?" His answers:

• He does not claim to offer as much happiness as the abdication of reason: "It is not the happiness of the individual convert that concerns me; it is the happiness of mankind." The parent who accepts a doubtful medical diagnosis for his child rather than the quack's cheerfulness is the model of civic honesty.
• "All fanatical creeds do harm" — they cannot allow free inquiry, they vest power in a priesthood "professionally devoted to maintenance of the intellectual status quo and to a pretense of certainty where in fact there is no certainty." The Esperantist who preferred Ido shows "the element of hatred in a fanatical doctrine." "Not only the Bible, but even the works of Marx and Engels, contain demonstrably false statements."
• "The triumphs of science are due to the substitution of observation and inference for authority. Every attempt to revive authority in intellectual matters is a retrograde step." Scientific statements "do not claim to be certain, but only to be the most probable on present evidence." Hence: "One of the greatest benefits that science confers upon those who understand its spirit is that it enables them to live without the delusive support of subjective certainty. That is why science cannot favor persecution."

Love, the death wish, and hope

The chapter — and the argument of the book — culminates in the most personal passage: "The root of the matter is a very simple and old-fashioned thing, a thing so simple that I am almost ashamed to mention it, for fear of the derisive smile with which wise cynics will greet my words. The thing I mean ... is love, Christian love, or compassion." Without it, intellectual honesty and courage are motiveless. Russell warns against the "death wish" — "the most disquieting psychological feature of our time" — the listlessness of primitives who die when brought into contact with white civilization, the shrug of "Oh well, if we are exterminated by hydrogen bombs, it will save a lot of trouble." "Our age needs compassion and a wish that mankind should be happy; it needs the desire for knowledge and the determination to eschew pleasant myths; it needs, above all, courageous hope and the impulse to creativeness. The things that it must avoid, and that have brought it to the brink of catastrophe, are cruelty, envy, greed, competitiveness, search for irrational subjective certainty, and what Freudians call the death wish." The chapter ends with the climber on the precipice: exhaustion wants rest, "Hope calls: 'One more effort — perhaps it will be the last effort needed.'" "In a few years those of us who are still alive will know the answer."

Key ideas

• The philosophy of science has moved from God-as-lawgiver (Newton) through materialism (the philosophes) to the view that science is for changing the world (Marx, Dewey).
• Pragmatism, reducing truth to utility, is "inherently connected with the appeal to force" and ends in the arbitrament of the big battalions; the denial of fact is "insane megalomania."
• Science can diminish evils (poverty, overwork, disease, crime) and increase goods (education, opportunity, diffused happiness), provided population, democracy, and peace are handled rightly.
• Agriculture's misuse — slavery, human sacrifice, absolute monarchy, large wars — is the historical warning that industrialism could be similarly misused.
• The two ancient evils science may intensify are tyranny and war; the three things that have made industrialism humane are democracy, trade unionism, and birth control.
• Fanatical creeds are harmful because they substitute authority for inquiry; science offers the ability "to live without the delusive support of subjective certainty," and "that is why science cannot favor persecution."
• The root of the matter is compassion — "love, Christian love, or compassion" — and the chief psychological disease of the age is the death wish.

Key takeaway

Science can tell us the means but not the ends; the ends must come from compassion and the refusal of pleasant myths, and only these can defeat the tyranny, war, and despair that technique alone cannot cure.

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Chapter 7 — Can a Scientific Society be Stable?

Central question

Can a society in which thought and technique are scientific persist for a long period, or does it necessarily contain within itself forces which must bring either decay or explosion?

Main argument

The question stated as a purely factual one

Russell is careful to state the question as one of fact, not value: "I am not considering whether it is better to be stable or to be unstable; that is a question of values, and lies outside the scope of scientific discussion." He defines his terms. A society is scientific "in the degree to which scientific knowledge, and technique based upon that knowledge, affects its daily life, its economics, and its political organization." "Stable" is used "as it is used in physics": a top is stable so long as it rotates above a certain speed, an atom until a physicist splits it, a star for millions of years "and then one day it explodes." If a scientific society persists it will grow progressively more scientific; if not, it may decay gradually "like the cooling of the sun by radiation" — exhaustion — or transform violently, "like those that cause novae to appear in the heavens" — revolution or unsuccessful war. The time-scale matters: the earth will remain habitable for many millions of years, man has existed about a million, "therefore if all goes well his future should be immeasurably longer than his past." The chapter's organizing statement — the book's most-quoted line — follows: "Broadly speaking, we are in the middle of a race between human skill as to means and human folly as to ends. Given sufficient folly as to ends, every increase in the skill required to achieve them is to the bad. ... Knowledge is power, but it is power for evil just as much as for good. It follows that, unless men increase in wisdom as much as in knowledge, increase of knowledge will be increase of sorrow."

Physical causes of instability

"Both industry and agriculture, to a continually increasing degree, are carried on in ways that waste the world's capital of natural resources." Soil exhaustion has gone on since the first tillage — the transition from corpses-as-fertilizer through human sacrifice to war — and "at last the creation of the Dust Bowl in the United States compelled attention to the problem." Raw materials are finite: Cornwall's tin is exhausted, Malaya's will follow, "the most pressing, at the moment, is oil." "The indisputable fact is that industry — and agriculture in so far as it uses artificial fertilizers — depends upon irreplaceable materials and sources of energy." "The world has been living on capital, and so long as it remains industrial it must continue to do so."

Biological causes of instability

Man's biological success has been spectacular — the taming of animals, agriculture, the industrial revolution made him "enormously more numerous than any species of large wild animals." But Russell's next thesis is deliberately blunt: "Medicine cannot, except over a short period, increase the population of the world," because "except where the birth rate is low the population in the long run depends upon the food supply and upon nothing else." Medical missions in China reduce infant mortality; "more children die painfully of famine at the age of five or six. The benefit to mankind is very questionable." Malthus has been "falsified" in the West only by the fall in the birth rate; in the East his doctrine still holds. The world population was increasing "at about 58,000 per diem," and war "has had no very great effect on this increase." Industry is a luxury: "in bad times its products will be unsalable, and only force directed against food-producers can keep industrial workers alive" — as in Russia after the First World War and in the famine of the early thirties, when "millions of peasants died of starvation."

If population growth is not checked, there must be "a very general lowering of the standard of life," Detroit reduced to lorries, books and pianos the luxuries of the powerful, "and the Malthusian law will reign unchecked." The three ways of securing a society stable as regards population: "The first is that of birth control, the second that of infanticide or really destructive wars, and the third that of general misery except for a powerful minority." All have been practiced — birth control by the Australian aborigines, infanticide and war by the Aztecs, Spartans, and the rulers of Plato's Republic, general misery "in Soviet Russia." "Of these three, only birth control avoids extreme cruelty and unhappiness for the majority of human beings." Russell adds his grim satire: bacteriological war could do the work of a Black Death "once in every generation" — "The state of affairs might be somewhat unpleasant, but what of that? Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people's." And the Darwinian conclusion: "Given two groups, of which one has an increasing and the other a stationary population, the one with the increasing population will (other things being equal) in time become the stronger," and after victory will cut the vanquished's food supply. "That is the explanation of the victory of communism in China." "These considerations prove that a scientific world society cannot be stable unless there is a world government."

Psychological causes of instability

The old rationalist psychology assumed that "if you showed a man quite clearly that a certain course of action would lead to disaster for himself he would probably avoid it" — a Benthamite belief "chiefly as a result of psychoanalysis" no longer credible. The two opposite maladies dominant in politics are "rage" and "listlessness": the Nazis exemplify rage, France before the war listlessness. Russell's illustration is the argument with the ordinary man about the drift to a third world war: he enjoys having his flesh made to creep; he thinks "anyhow, I shan't have to go to the office every morning"; a whisper in a deeper layer says "Perhaps I shall become a widower, and that might not be so bad." The malaise has causes: the rapidity of change (Russell's own life — telephones new, no motorcars on his first American visit, first airplane at thirty-nine, Gladstone and Disraeli to atom bombs — so that "experience ... is now a positive hindrance"), and "the increasing subordination of individuals to organizations." "War, if it comes, offers an escape" from the groove: "I should like a Gallup poll on the question: 'Are you more or less happy now than during the war?'" "It is hopeless to construct schemes for preserving peace if most people would rather not preserve it." Stability requires steering between Scylla and Charybdis — between holders of power who face successful revolution and holders of power who "embark upon rash adventures, such as those of the Kaiser and Hitler." "Adventure, yes; but not adventure inspired by destructive passions."

The four conditions of stability

Russell's conclusion brings the argument together. "A scientific society can be stable given certain conditions":

1. A single government of the whole world, possessing a monopoly of armed force and therefore able to enforce peace — the only humane way to solve the population problem, since a world of competing sovereign states must renew the struggle for existence.
2. A general diffusion of prosperity, so that "there is no occasion for envy of one part of the world by another."
3. A low birth rate everywhere, so that world population becomes stationary or nearly so — with an international authority rationing food by population at a fixed date, leaving each State to choose its methods.
4. The provision for individual initiative both in work and in play, and the greatest diffusion of power compatible with maintaining the necessary political and economic framework — devolution, federalism, and "keeping alive the kind of semi-independence that now exists in English universities" (which, Russell notes in passing, he has discussed "in my Reith lectures on 'Authority and the Individual'").

None of the conditions is met; the rational solution of rationing by population is "obviously at present totally impracticable," because the West would see even-handed rationing as starvation and the fast-growing poor nations would suffer most from a constant allocation — "all the world would oppose the logical solution." Yet the long view offers hope: "Prosperous industrial countries have low birth rates"; if Russia, China, and India reached American levels of well-being, "their surplus population might cease to be a menace to the world." "The world is a long way from realizing these conditions, and therefore we must expect vast upheavals and appalling suffering before stability is attained. But, while upheavals and suffering have hitherto been the lot of man, we can now see, however dimly and uncertainly, a possible future culmination in which poverty and war will have been overcome, and fear, where it survives, will have become pathological. The road, I fear, is long, but that is no reason for losing sight of the ultimate hope."

Key ideas

• The question of stability is purely factual: scientific societies must either persist and grow more scientific, or decay or explode.
• Physical instability: industry and agriculture waste the world's capital of soil, oil, and irreplaceable raw materials; scientific progress is a condition of merely maintaining prosperity.
• Biological instability: population depends on food supply in the long run, and the world population was growing by 58,000 a day — medicine alone cannot save a species whose birth rate outruns its food.
• Only birth control among the three methods of population stability "avoids extreme cruelty and unhappiness"; the other two are infanticide/war and general misery.
• A scientific world society cannot be stable without a world government; Darwinian competition between growing and stationary populations explains communist victory in China.
• Psychological instability: rage and listlessness, the escape offered by war, and the subordination of individuals to organizations undermine any rational scheme of peace.
• Stability requires four conditions: world government with a monopoly of armed force; diffused prosperity; a low birth rate everywhere; and provision for individual initiative with the greatest diffusion of power possible.
• The race is between "human skill as to means and human folly as to ends": knowledge is power for evil as much as for good, so "unless men increase in wisdom as much as in knowledge, increase of knowledge will be increase of sorrow."

Key takeaway

A scientific society can be stable, but only under four conditions that no contemporary society meets — world government, diffused prosperity, stationary population, and individual initiative — and the race between skill and folly will decide whether the road ends in catastrophe or in the first humane civilization.

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The book's overall argument

1. Chapter 1 (Science and Tradition) — establishes that science as a philosophy dissolves unfounded traditional belief through observation, the causal autonomy of the physical world, and the extrusion of purpose, while exalting man's practical power into a dangerous philosophy of godlike dominance.
2. Chapter 2 (General Effects of Scientific Technique) — establishes that technique, from gunpowder and the compass to the telegraph, power stations, and the atom bomb, has made society more organic, concentrated power in officials and governments, made war the chief source of social cohesion, and rendered a single world-wide government technically possible.
3. Chapter 3 (Scientific Technique in an Oligarchy) — establishes that a scientific oligarchy can be internally stable and terrifyingly effective — controlling dogma, labor, breeding, and belief — but is doomed externally because science requires freedom, so "scientific dictatorships will perish through not being sufficiently scientific."
4. Chapter 4 (Democracy and Scientific Technique) — establishes what democracy must become to survive: a federation of self-governing organizations in which every man is at once a hero, a common man, and a cog, with usefulness, security, and opportunity for initiative as the three requisites of a good society.
5. Chapter 5 (Science and War) — establishes that science has made war the arbiter of history and now offers mankind a forced choice within fifty years between submission to an international authority ("Reason") and extinction ("Death").
6. Chapter 6 (Science and Values) — establishes that science determines means, not ends; that the pragmatic philosophy of power ends in the appeal to force; and that only compassion, intellectual honesty, and the refusal of pleasant myths can supply the values technique cannot.
7. Chapter 7 (Can a Scientific Society be Stable?) — establishes the book's conclusion: a scientific society can be stable only given world government with a monopoly of armed force, diffused prosperity, a low birth rate everywhere, and provision for individual initiative — while the race between "human skill as to means and human folly as to ends" proceeds.

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Common misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: The book is based on Russell's 1948 Reith Lectures. The 1948 Reith Lectures were a different series, broadcast by the BBC as "Authority and the Individual" and published as that book in 1949. The Impact of Science on Society is based on the Charles Beard lectures given at Ruskin College, Oxford, between 17 January and 21 February 1950 (three of which were repeated at Columbia University and published by Columbia University Press), with the final chapter delivered as the Lloyd Roberts Lecture on 29 November 1949. The book itself says so in its prefatory note, and in chapter 7 Russell refers the reader to "my Reith lectures on 'Authority and the Individual'" for the topic of devolution.

Misunderstanding: The book has eight or nine chapters, including one on "The Scientist's Place in Society." The book has exactly seven chapters, in this order: Science and Tradition; General Effects of Scientific Technique; Scientific Technique in an Oligarchy; Democracy and Scientific Technique; Science and War; Science and Values; Can a Scientific Society be Stable? The scientist's social role is discussed inside chapters 4 and 6, but no chapter bears that title.

Misunderstanding: Russell is anti-science. The book argues the opposite of a Luddite position: Russell calls scientific technique a net material gain ("this age is an improvement on all its predecessors"), credits science with abolishing superstition and persecution, and says science "offers the possibility of far greater well-being for the human race than has ever been known before." His targets are the use of science — war, tyranny, overpopulation, fanaticism — and a philosophy of unlimited power, not science itself.

Misunderstanding: Russell is a technocratic pessimist. The closing movements of the book are deliberately hopeful: "Scientific dictatorships will perish through not being sufficiently scientific," democracy will in the long run be victorious, and the book ends with "the ultimate hope" of a world without poverty and war. Russell's "moderate optimism" coexists with his warning that the choice between Reason and Death must be made within fifty years.

Misunderstanding: Russell advocates rule by scientists — a "scientific oligarchy." Chapter 3 is a sustained warning against exactly that. Russell defines the scientific oligarchy, shows its internal logic (dogma, terror, forced labor, selective breeding), and concludes that it is both a moral horror and a self-defeating system. Democracy is "necessary but not sufficient"; the missing ingredient is a respect for the individual and for the leaven of rebels.

Misunderstanding: "Scientific society" means a society governed by scientists. For Russell it means a society whose daily life, economics, and political organization are shaped by scientific knowledge and technique — that is, the modern industrial world as such, whatever its form of government. Whether such a society can persist is a question about the modern world, not about technocracy.

Misunderstanding: Russell claims science has made war more destructive of life. He explicitly denies this — "up to the present science has not made war more destructive" — because medicine and hygiene have offset the deadliness of weapons. What has changed is the depth of disorganization after defeat and, with the hydrogen bomb, the new possibility of the extinction of all life.

Misunderstanding: The "race between human skill as to means and human folly as to ends" is the book's preface or motto. The famous sentence appears in the body of the final chapter ("Broadly speaking, we are in the middle of a race between human skill as to means and human folly as to ends"), where it introduces Russell's discussion of stability — though publishers' blurbs have rightly used it as a summary of the book's argument.

Misunderstanding: Chapter 7 asks whether stability is desirable. Russell is explicit that the question is purely factual: "I am not considering whether it is better to be stable or to be unstable; that is a question of values, and lies outside the scope of scientific discussion." He asks whether, in fact, society will persist in being scientific.

Misunderstanding: Russell's population argument is a minor aside. The population problem is one of the book's three pillars of instability (physical, biological, psychological) and the reason a world government is unavoidable. Russell calls opposition to birth control — if successful — certain to inflict "the most appalling depth of misery and degradation" within fifty years.

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Central paradox / key insight

The book's most counterintuitive idea is that science — the very instrument by which mankind has gained unprecedented power — supplies no wisdom about how to use that power, and that the two grow at unequal rates: "Knowledge is power, but it is power for evil just as much as for good." Russell's diagnosis is that the triumph of science as technique has produced a philosophy of power — pragmatism, in his account — which denies any standard of truth or justice outside the wishes of the powerful, and therefore ends "by inherent necessity, into the appeal to force and the arbitrament of the big battalions." The same power that abolished witchcraft and smallpox can abolish the human race; the same organization that abolished starvation can breed men like cattle. The only resources that can direct power to good ends — compassion, intellectual honesty, courage — are not produced by science at all.

Broadly speaking, we are in the middle of a race between human skill as to means and human folly as to ends. Given sufficient folly as to ends, every increase in the skill required to achieve them is to the bad. The human race has survived hitherto owing to ignorance and incompetence; but, given knowledge and competence combined with folly, there can be no certainty of survival. Knowledge is power, but it is power for evil just as much as for good.

The deepest consequence: mankind's survival now depends on political and moral inventions — a world government, a stationary population, a diffused prosperity, a place for the rebel and the artist — that no technical invention can supply. Russell calls this "a race," and he is not certain which side will win.

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Important concepts

Scientific technique — The second function of science, "to enable us to do things" (as opposed to knowing things). Russell's subject throughout the book; its inevitable effect is to make society "more organic" — more interdependent, more organized, more centralized.

Mechanistic outlook — The eighteenth-century scientific outlook with three ingredients: observation over authority, the self-acting physical world, and the uselessness of "purpose" in scientific explanation. It ended persecution and created a humane attitude, but has bred a dangerous philosophy of power.

Observation versus authority — The first principle of the scientific outlook: "Statements of fact should be based on observation, not on unsupported authority" — the source of "the most desperate battles between science and authority."

Autonomy of the physical world — The doctrine, grounded in Galileo's first law of motion, that inanimate matter is causally self-contained; the precondition of physics as an independent science.

Dethronement of purpose — The reduction of Aristotle's four causes to the efficient cause; Darwin's natural selection completed it by explaining adaptation without design. "Final" causes survive only where human volition is involved.

The power of officials — The inevitable concentration of power in the executive officials of large organizations; Russell's term for the new, irresponsible, behind-the-scenes power ("like that of emperors' eunuchs and kings' mistresses") that scientific technique creates.

War mentality — The psychology that makes criticism of one's own combatant organization (army, union, party) look like treachery; the condition that gives officials and governments their opportunity and that they therefore "are prone to foster."

The lust for power — The source of both "tyranny within and conflict without"; the psychological engine behind oligarchy, totalitarianism, and war in Russell's account.

Oligarchy — "Any system in which ultimate power is confined to a section of the community." The only vital modern form is the creed-based oligarchy descended from the Puritan "Rule of the Saints" — Russia 1918, Italy 1922, Germany 1933.

Totalitarianism — The end-state of scientific oligarchy, in which "all important forms of power" become a State monopoly; its theory, the Hegelian doctrine of the organic State, fails because "the government, as opposed to its individual members, is not sentient."

Mass psychology — The science of persuasion, whose practitioners "have been advertisers, politicians, and, above all, dictators"; perfected, it will allow any government to make children "believe that snow is black."

Education (in scare quotes) — Russell's name for the most influential modern method of propaganda — the molding of conviction by the State before the age of ten.

Democracy — "Approach to equality of power," a matter of degree; east of the Elbe the word is abused to mean "military dictatorship of a minority enforced by arbitrary police power."

Common man / hero / cog — Russell's three ways of viewing the individual, leading respectively to old-fashioned democracy, fascism, and communism; a good society lets every man be all three "to the greatest possible extent."

"Opportunity for initiative" — Russell's proposed replacement for eighteenth-century "liberty": the freedom that matters in a scientific society, requiring democratic organizations and federal devolution rather than mere non-interference.

The three requisites of a good society — Usefulness, security from undeserved misfortune, and opportunity for initiative; "general directives, not absolute imperatives."

International authority / world government — The indispensable institution of Russell's political solution: a single world government with a monopoly of armed force, to which nations submit their disputes; the alternative is the choice "between Reason and Death."

Pragmatism — The philosophy, in Russell's account Marx's and Dewey's, that reduces truth to utility; "inherently connected with the appeal to force," it ends in the arbitrament of the big battalions and in the "insane megalomania" of denying fact.

Warranted assertibility — Dewey's phrase for what pragmatism puts in the place of "truth"; under it, a belief may be "true" at one time and "false" at another, and history becomes an instrument of the police.

Values — What science cannot determine: "Whatever else may be mechanical, values are not." Ends come from desires and emotions; science supplies only means.

Fanatical creed — Catholicism and Communism are Russell's examples of systems of dogma that substitute authority for inquiry and "pretense of certainty where in fact there is no certainty"; all fanatical creeds involve hatred and do harm.

Subjective certainty — The delusive support that fanatical creeds offer; science's great benefit is that it enables people "to live without" it, and for that reason "science cannot favor persecution."

Death wish — The Freudian term Russell adopts for the listlessness and despair of a civilization that prefers extinction to effort — "Oh well, if we are exterminated by hydrogen bombs, it will save a lot of trouble."

Stability (physical, biological, psychological) — The three kinds of conditions a scientific society must meet to persist: not exhausting soil and raw materials; a population in balance with food; and a psychology that offers outlet for initiative and adventure without destructive rage or listlessness.

Malthusian law — The doctrine that population, unless checked by the birth rate, presses on the food supply; falsified for the moment in the West, still true in the East, and the biological core of the argument for birth control and a world government.

The race between skill and folly — Russell's summary of the human condition: "human skill as to means" advances while "human folly as to ends" decides how the skill is used; the race is the book's central image of the future.

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References and Web Links

Publisher and editions

• Routledge (Taylor & Francis) product page for the Routledge Classics edition (2016, 120 pp., ISBN 978-1-138-64115-0, foreword by Tim Sluckin), including the table of contents — https://www.routledge.com/The-Impact-of-Science-on-Society/Russell/p/book/9781138641150
• Official preview PDF of the Routledge Classics edition (front matter, foreword, and contents) hosted by the distributor — https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781317230021_A26682944/preview-9781317230021_A26682944.pdf
• Google Books record for the Routledge Classics edition (2016, ISBN 9781317230021), with the printed table of contents and page numbers — https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Impact_of_Science_on_Society.html?id=vEv7CwAAQBAJ
• Google Books record for the earlier Routledge reprint (2012, "first published 1985"), with the same seven-chapter table of contents — https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Impact_of_Science_on_Society.html?id=1yEuHVVL4lgC

Primary text (1952 edition)

• Internet Archive scan of the 1952 first US edition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 114 pp.), lending-restricted but with full catalog metadata (LCCN 52014878; Open Library work OL1088569W) — https://archive.org/details/impactofscienceo00russ
• Open Library work page for the book (17 recorded editions; first published 1951–52) — https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1088569W/The_impact_of_science_on_society

Origin and context

• Stanford Libraries catalog record (SearchWorks), quoting the book's prefatory note on the Ruskin College lectures and the Lloyd Roberts Lecture — https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/1324353
• Wikipedia: "Reith Lectures" — the 1948 lectures by Bertrand Russell are listed as "Authority and the Individual" (the source of the common misattribution of this book to the Reith Lectures) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reith_Lectures
• BBC programme page for Bertrand Russell's 1948 Reith Lectures, "Authority and the Individual" — https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00h9lz3
• Wikipedia: "Bertrand Russell" — bibliography and biography (the bibliography lists The Impact of Science on Society, London: George Allen & Unwin; the article quotes the book's "snow is black" passage) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell

Supplementary commentary (secondary sources)

• Tim Sluckin's foreword to the Routledge Classics edition is the best short study of the book's genesis and context (Charles Beard lectures at Ruskin College, 1950; the six lectures became chapters; published 1952 by George Allen & Unwin). The foreword is included in the Routledge page and the preview PDF linked above.
• The book has no standalone Wikipedia article at the time of writing; the records above (publisher, Google Books, Internet Archive, Open Library, Stanford catalog) together fix the chapter list and edition facts. Reader reviews on sites such as Goodreads can be found by searching the ISBN 9781138641150, but they are supplements, not substitutes, for the primary text.