A sweeping survey of Western thought as a reflection of its social and political context
What the Work Is
A History of Western Philosophy is a 1945 book by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), surveying the entirety of Western philosophy from the pre-Socratic thinkers of ancient Greece to the early twentieth century. Written in English and first published in the United States in 1945, with a British edition following a year later, the work is a work of philosophical non-fiction that blends intellectual history with cultural commentary. Russell, already renowned as a logician and social reformer, wrote the book during the Second World War, drawing on lectures he delivered at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia in 1941 and 1942. The book’s success was considerable enough that when Russell received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, this work was cited among those that earned him the honour.
What the Book Is About
The book’s stated purpose, as Russell himself framed it, is to present philosophy not as the isolated speculations of remarkable individuals but as an integral part of social and political life. He conceived of the work as a history of culture, treating philosophical systems as both effects and causes of the character of the communities in which they arose. Each major division of the book opens with an account of the historical background necessary to understand the currents of thought it describes, situating philosophers within the wider intellectual, political, and social forces of their eras. Russell acknowledged that this framework became harder to sustain in the later portions of the book, where the growing importance of science made it more difficult to fit philosophical developments into a purely cultural narrative.
Key Ideas and Themes
Central to the book is the conviction that philosophy cannot be understood apart from its historical circumstances. Russell treats the great philosophers not as timeless thinkers working in isolation but as figures shaped by—and in turn shaping—the political and social worlds they inhabited. This approach gives the book its distinctive character: it is as much a history of civilisation as it is a history of philosophy.
The work is divided into three broad books. The first covers ancient philosophy, beginning with the pre-Socratics—Thales, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, Leucippus, Democritus, and Protagoras—before moving to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and concluding with the schools that followed Aristotle, including the Cynics, Sceptics, Epicureans, Stoics, and the later figure of Plotinus.
The second book addresses Catholic philosophy, spanning the Church Fathers—including developments in Jewish and Islamic philosophy, along with figures such as St Ambrose, St Jerome, St Augustine, St Benedict, and Pope Gregory the Great—and the medieval Schoolmen, among them John the Scot and St Thomas Aquinas. Russell’s terminology here reflects the conventions of his time, referring to Islamic philosophy as “Mohammedan.”
The third book treats modern philosophy, from the Renaissance through the empiricists and rationalists—Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume—and then from Rousseau to the twentieth century, covering Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Byron, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the Utilitarians, Marx, Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. The final chapter, on the philosophy of logical analysis, presents Russell’s own philosophical views at the time, making the book end with a statement of its author’s intellectual commitments rather than a neutral survey.
Structure and Approach
The book is organised into three books, each subdivided into chapters, with each chapter generally devoted to a single philosopher, school, or period. This structure allows Russell to move chronologically while pausing for extended treatments of the most significant thinkers. His method is deliberately interpretive rather than purely descriptive: he writes with a distinctive voice, offering judgments and evaluations alongside exposition. Russell himself defended this approach, arguing that a man without bias cannot write interesting history—if such a man exists at all. He was candid about the book’s nature, describing it as a work of social history and asking that it be judged on those terms.
Significance and Influence
The book’s reception was mixed from the outset, and this divided response has persisted. Contemporary reviewers were largely agreed on two points: the book is beautifully written, witty, clear, lucid, and magisterial; and it is not always accurate in its account of the thinkers it covers, nor always fair to them. Russell was dismayed by the criticism, particularly from academic reviewers, though he remained defensive of his approach.
Some critics were harsh. The philosopher George Boas wrote in 1947 that Russell never seemed able to make up his mind whether he was writing history or polemic, and that the book’s method conferred a false contemporaneity on dead philosophers. Leo Roberts, writing in 1948, considered it perhaps the worst of Russell’s books, finding his treatment of ancient and medieval doctrines nearly worthless, though he acknowledged Russell’s deftness and wit when dealing with contemporary philosophy. The Jesuit philosopher Frederick Copleston described the book as unusually lively and entertaining but judged Russell’s treatment of several important philosophers both inadequate and misleading, while crediting him with drawing attention to the logical side of Leibniz’s philosophy.
Later assessments have echoed these themes. George Steiner dismissed the book as vulgar, noting Russell’s omission of Martin Heidegger. Jon Stewart’s anthology on Hegel myths lists Russell’s work as a source of misconceptions about Hegel, and Stephen Houlgate criticises Russell’s claim that Hegel’s doctrine of the state justifies tyranny as ignorant. Roger Scruton, while praising the book as elegantly written and witty, faulted Russell’s concentration on pre-Cartesian philosophy, his lack of understanding of Kant, and his overgeneralisation and omissions.
Yet the book has also found sustained defenders. The physicists Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger praised it. A.C. Grayling, writing in 2002, acknowledged that parts of the book are sketchy but described it as a marvellously readable, magnificently sweeping survey of Western thought, distinctive for placing philosophy informatively into its historical context. He noted that Russell enjoyed writing it and that the enjoyment shows, while his later remarks equally show that he was conscious of its shortcomings. Grayling elaborated in 2004 that because of the partisan nature of its views and the quick, witty style of their presentation, the book has never been a staple as an academic textbook. Instead, it has belonged to the amateurs of philosophy—in the sense of both those who love the pursuit and those who read it in their own time for their own instruction. He called it a unique book, highly readable, very amusing, full of instruction even when it needs the correctives of closer scholarship, and one of the monuments of twentieth-century philosophy and literature.
The book’s commercial success was undeniable. It provided Russell with financial security for the last part of his life and has remained in print continuously since its first publication. A reset “new edition” appeared in 1961, though no new material was added; corrections were made to British printings, but the American edition retained errors, including even Spinoza’s birth year. Whatever its scholarly shortcomings, the book’s enduring popularity testifies to its power as a work of synthesis and interpretation, one that brought the history of philosophy to a wide readership and continues to shape how that history is popularly understood.
The book’s production involved contributions beyond Russell’s own writing. Much of the historical research for the volume was conducted by Russell’s third wife, Patricia. In 1943, Russell received an advance of $3000 from the publishers for the work. He wrote the book between 1940 and 1943, during which time he was living mainly in Pennsylvania. The text was reset as a “new edition” in 1961, but this edition contained no new material. While corrections and minor revisions were made to printings of the British first edition and for the 1961 edition, these corrections were not transferred to the American edition, which retained errors, including an incorrect birth year for Spinoza.
The Author’s Stated Intentions
Russell explicitly described the text as a work of social history and requested that it be treated as such. He elaborated on his approach, stating that he regarded the early part of the book as a history of culture, but acknowledged that in the later parts, where science becomes increasingly important, it was more difficult to fit philosophical developments into that framework. He admitted to doing his best but was not at all sure that he succeeded. Responding to reviewers who accused him of writing a biased account of arbitrarily chosen events, Russell defended his position, arguing that a man without bias cannot write interesting history—if, indeed, such a man exists.
The Book’s Opening
The book begins with the line: “IN all history, nothing is so surprising or so difficult to account for as the sudden rise of civilization in Greece.”
