Russell - The Prospects of Industrial Civilization

London and New York

This edition first published in 1959
by George Allen & Unwin Ltd.

First published in the Routledge Classics in 2010
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2010 The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation Ltd

Introduction 1996 Louis Greenspan

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ISBN13: 978-1-135-21057-1 ePub ISBN

ISBN 10: 0415487366

ISBN 10: 0203864719 (ebk)

ISBN 13: 9780415487368

ISBN 13: 9780203864715 (ebk)

First published in 1923, this study of the effects of industrialism on human destiny may perhaps claim to be one of the pioneer works on a subject which increasingly occupies the attention of those concerned with the social sciences.

Though some of the examples cited to support the conclusions drawn belong to the period in which the book was written, the trends which they illustrate are even more apparent today than they were thirty years ago.

Events have confirmed some of the forecasts made by the writers as to the inter-action of industrialism and nationalism, the spread of socialist industrialism in undeveloped countries, and the tendencies inherent in an industrial society itself.

The conflict between capitalist and socialist direction of industry, formerly regarded as an internal struggle within each nation, and now relegated to the background by many politicians in the highly industrialized nations, has in fact assumed tremendous and dangerous importance in the international sphere, in that the world now stands divided between the communist block and the block of nations still committed in greater or lesser degree to the methods of free enterprise.

Especially relevant to present-day problems is the books contention that industrial organisation, by its very nature, gives rise to oligarchy or dictatorship, thus tending to destroy democracy as traditionally understood, and to impose upon the individual pressures and restraints that prevent his full life as a human being, thus leading to trivial pursuits and passivity combined with collective rage and hysteria.

The full picture of this development was seen in Germany under Hitler; varying aspects of it are also apparent in other industrialised nations.

Men and women cannot live every moment of their lives at the rational and disciplined level required in modern industrial societies. Psychiatry has revealed the wider and deeper aspects of human personality which seek expression in human relations, through the free adventuring of the imagination in the arts and sciences, the creative use of the senses. An interesting development of this theme can be found in Lewis Mumfords The Transformations of Man (1957).

The ultimate concentration of industrial power in the H-bomb and the nuclear pile places squarely on the shoulders of the present generation the responsibility of answering the question posed in this book: what are the Prospects of Industrial Civilization?

D.R.

1959