Bertrand Russell and the Dimensions of Edwardian Liberalism

Abstract

My life before 1910 and my life after 1914 were as sharply separated as Faust's life before and after he met Mephistopheles. So Russell wrote in commencing the second volume of his autobiography. A process of rejuvenation, begun with his affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell, brought about a reorientation of his work and his thought, of which he became strongly self-conscious. I have therefore got into the habit of thinking of myself as a non-supernatural Faust for whom Mephistopheles was represented by the Great War.1 The war was a political watershed as well as a personal turning-point. Before 1914 Russell had been a member of the Liberal Party. Indeed, as the grandson of Lord John Russell, he was not so much in it as of it. He put himself forward for the Liberal nomination at Bedford in 1910, with rather the same sort of prescriptive claims which, a generation earlier, Lord Randolph Churchill had asserted at Woodstock. If Bedford did not, like Woodstock, lie literally at the gates of a ducal palace, nonetheless any scion of the Russell family had innate advantages as a prospective candidate and it took the peculiar genius of Bertrand Russell himself to cancel them out by a display of atheistic principle and provocative candour. Russell, like many of his generation, was thus axiomatically a Libera'!. in party allegiance during the Edwardian period, only to find an equally inevitable home in the Labour Party after the war. The commitment in each case was clear and straightforward, albeit tempered with some reserve. If Bedford had not been worth a mass in 191o-nor even the undertaking to attend church occasionally, which was all that the Liberal Association had asked-Russell was similarly dispassionate in his later attitude towards the Labour Party. I do not like them, he wrote in 1930, but an Englishman