Political Ideals

Political Ideals was written during the upheaval of World War One. It is, in many ways, a statement, of Russell’s beliefs, a declaration of the ideas that influenced his thinking on the major events of the twentieth century. In this sense, it is essential reading for every student of this great philosopher. For it defines his principle that the only true aim of politics is to give free play to man’s natural creativity, and to deaden, whenever they manifest themselves, the forces of acquisition, power and convention that jeopardise individual responsibility and freedom.

[image and description taken from here]

... and to give you a flavour of the actual writing, here are a couple of nice quotes:

Political ideals must be based upon ideals for the individual life.The aim of politics should be to make the lives of individuals as good as possible. There is nothing for the politician to consider outside or above the various men, women, and children who compose the world. The problem of politics is to adjust the relations of human beings in such a way that each severally may have as much of good in his existence as possible. And this problem requires that we should first consider what it is that we think good in the individual life.

To begin with, we do not want all men to be alike. We do not want to lay down a pattern or type to which men of all sorts are to be made by some means or another to approximate. This is the ideal of the impatient administrator. A bad teacher will aim at imposing his opinion, and turning out a set of pupils all of whom will give the same definite answer on a doubtful point [...]
[above quotations taken from here]

Power

Even if it falls short of a general theory of human behaviour -- as nearly all books on similar themes do -- Power still makes fascinating reading. Readers of Hume or Gibbon will delight in a similar irony, which the author occasionally uses against himself. The very occasional digressions into political philosophy proper are always enlightening. For instance Russell believes that the doctrine of the Rights of Man is philosophically indefensible. But the doctrine was historically useful and helped to win many of our current freedoms. A utilitarian can restate it in the following terms: "The general happiness is increased if a certain sphere is defined in which each individual is free to act as he chooses without the interference of any external authority." This is not the last word, but at least it takes the discussion further.

An early 21st century reader has obviously to allow for the fact that Power was written in the late 1930s in the age of the great dictators, Hitler and Stalin, as well as smaller fry, such as Mussolini and Franco, and appeared a month after the now notorious 1938 Munich Agreement. Indeed part of the fascination for the modern reader is to assess for himself or herself how much the world has changed and how much it has essentially remained the same. [...]

Writing before the advent of political and religious correctness, Russell was able to say at the beginning of Chapter Ten that the classic example of power through fanaticism was the rise of Islam. When his followers were reluctant to march against the Byzantine empire, complaining among other things of the intolerable heat of the summer, Mohammed responded: "Hell is much hotter." Russell also manages a dig at German philosophical idealism. He states that Fichte was the first of the modern philosophers who veiled their own love of power beneath a garment of metaphysics. Fichte believed that the ego was the sole existing phenomenon in the world. But he also managed to argue that it was the duty of Germans to fight Napoleon. "Both the Germans and the French, of course, are only emanations of Fichte, but the Germans are a higher emanation, that is to say they are nearer to the one ultimate reality, which is Fichte's own." There is here a foretaste of the iconoclasm towards some revered thinkers which later so shocked the high minded in his History of Western Philosophy. [...]

A large part of this book is concerned with the classification of different sources of power:- such as priestly, kingly, revolutionary or economic power. Russell's aim is to investigate how we can enjoy the advantages of state power, to prevent the Hobbesian war of all against all, while taming its excesses. [outline credits go here, whereas the image was taken from here]

I personally found it so refreshing to read some common sense arguments, after a long time of gibberish speeches & prose being all that the world had to offer me; and, of course, I do enjoy Russell's writing style. It's a good reminder of the "debatablility" of all things political, economical, educational or propagandistic... which calls for all things surrounding us, for that matter. True, the argument might go that one needs not read Russell to be reminded of the above feature. Nonetheless, he manages to put it in a delighting historical perspective which many common viewpoints are missing out on currently; managing to get the strength to pause and ponder over what gets to be weighted against what is an attribute that many of us get to skip more and more often due to, mainly but not uniquely, time (or other type of resources) constraints. Put in this perspective, the history lessons that I've just been reminded of stand not only for a certain type of skepticism, but also for the discipline of reason.