In 1927, Bertrand Rus­sell deliv­ered a lec­ture titled “Why I Am Not a Chris­t­ian.” At the time, such a dec­la­ra­tion was still fair­ly bold, as was the rea­son­ing he pro­vid­ed for it. Near­ly three decades there­after, he includ­ed in his col­lec­tion Por­traits from Mem­o­ry anoth­er, short­er piece, “Why I Am Not a Com­mu­nist.” That descrip­tion was safe to apply to one­self in 1954, at least in the main­stream of the Eng­lish-speak­ing world. It would have been riski­er for those who moved in intel­lec­tu­al cir­cles, as a cel­e­brat­ed philoso­pher like Rus­sell most cer­tain­ly did. What’s more, his crit­i­cism extend­ed not just to com­mu­nism as then instan­ti­at­ed by cer­tain soci­eties in the world, but to the thought of Karl Marx him­self.

Rus­sell makes two charges against Marx: “one, that he was mud­dle-head­ed; and the oth­er, that his think­ing was almost entire­ly inspired by hatred.” In his view, the author of Cap­i­tal com­mits intel­lec­tu­al fraud by oppor­tunis­ti­cal­ly accept­ing Thomas Malthus’ dire pre­dic­tion of pop­u­la­tion growth (while reject­ing it at oth­er times), as well as apply­ing David Ricar­do’s the­o­ry of val­ue, which describes it as a kind of embod­ied labor, to wages but not the prices of man­u­fac­tured goods.

“He is entire­ly sat­is­fied with the result, not because it is in accor­dance with the facts or because it is log­i­cal­ly coher­ent, but because it is cal­cu­lat­ed to rouse fury in wage-earn­ers.” Marx sees their upris­ing against cap­i­tal­ists as inevitable due to his “exten­sion to world his­to­ry of cer­tain fea­tures promi­nent in Eng­land and France a hun­dred years ago” and belief in “a cos­mic force called Dialec­ti­cal Mate­ri­al­ism which gov­erns human his­to­ry inde­pen­dent­ly of human voli­tions.”

This dis­missal of Marx’s world­view as “mere mythol­o­gy” has some­thing in com­mon with Rus­sel­l’s cri­tique of Chris­tian­i­ty, and not coin­ci­den­tal­ly so. “I think one of the trou­bles of the world has been the habit of dog­mat­i­cal­ly believ­ing some­thing or oth­er,” he says in the clip above. “I think we ought always to enter­tain our opin­ions with some mea­sure of doubt.” And “if a phi­los­o­phy is to bring hap­pi­ness, it should be inspired by kind­ly feel­ing. Now, Marx is not inspired by kind­ly feel­ing. Marx pre­tend­ed that he want­ed the hap­pi­ness of the pro­le­tari­at, but he real­ly want­ed is the unhap­pi­ness of the bour­geois. And it was because of that neg­a­tive ele­ment, because of that hate ele­ment that his phi­los­o­phy pro­duced dis­as­ter.” There are, per­haps, argu­ments to be made that com­mu­nism, as prac­ticed in, for exam­ple, the Sovi­et Union, took the form it did pre­cise­ly because it depart­ed from Marx­ist lines. Whether that was bet­ter or worse than the alter­na­tive is a mat­ter no philoso­pher can set­tle.

The clip above comes from the 1952 TV episode A Con­ver­sa­tion with Bertrand Rus­sell. Watch it in full here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Short Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Karl Marx

Bertrand Russell’s 10 Com­mand­ments for Liv­ing in a Healthy Democ­ra­cy

How to Spot a Com­mu­nist by Using Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism: A 1955 Man­u­al from the U.S. Mil­i­tary

Karl Marx & the Flaws of Cap­i­tal­ism: Lex Frid­man Talks with Pro­fes­sor Richard Wolff

A Free Course on Karl Marx’s Cap­i­tal, Vol­ume 1 from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Bertrand Russell’s Advice to Peo­ple Liv­ing 1,000 Years in the Future: “Love is Wise, Hatred is Fool­ish”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

When Eich­mann in Jerusalem—Han­nah Arendt’s book about Nazi offi­cer Adolf Eichmann’s trial—came out in 1963, it con­tributed one of the most famous of post-war ideas to the dis­course, the “banal­i­ty of evil.” And the con­cept at first caused a crit­i­cal furor. “Enor­mous con­tro­ver­sy cen­tered on what Arendt had writ­ten about the con­duct of the tri­al, her depic­tion of Eich­mann, and her dis­cus­sion of the role of the Jew­ish Coun­cils,” writes Michael Ezra at Dis­sent mag­a­zine, “Eich­mann, she claimed, was not a ‘mon­ster’; instead, she sus­pect­ed, he was a ‘clown.’”

Arendt blamed vic­tims who were forced to col­lab­o­rate, crit­ics charged, and made the Nazi offi­cer seem ordi­nary and unre­mark­able, reliev­ing him of the extreme moral weight of his respon­si­bil­i­ty. She answered these charges in an essay titled “Per­son­al Respon­si­bil­i­ty Under Dic­ta­tor­ship,” pub­lished in 1964. Here, she aims to clar­i­fy the ques­tion in her title by argu­ing that if Eich­mann were allowed to rep­re­sent a mon­strous and inhu­man sys­tem, rather than shock­ing­ly ordi­nary human beings, his con­vic­tion would make him a scape­goat and let oth­ers off the hook. Instead, she believes that every­one who worked for the regime, what­ev­er their motives, is com­plic­it and moral­ly cul­pa­ble.

But although most peo­ple are cul­pa­ble of great moral crimes, those who col­lab­o­rat­ed were not, in fact, crim­i­nals. On the con­trary, they chose to fol­low the rules in a demon­stra­bly crim­i­nal regime. It’s a nuance that becomes a stark moral chal­lenge. Arendt points out that every­one who served the regime agreed to degrees of vio­lence when they had oth­er options, even if those might be fatal. Quot­ing Mary McCarthy, she writes, “If some­body points a gun at you and says, ‘Kill your friend or I will kill you,’ he is tempt­ing you, that is all.”

While this cir­cum­stance may pro­vide a “legal excuse,” for killing, Arendt seeks to define a “moral issue,” a Socrat­ic prin­ci­ple she had “tak­en for grant­ed” that we all believed: “It is bet­ter to suf­fer than do wrong,” even when doing wrong is the law. Peo­ple like Eich­mann were not crim­i­nals and psy­chopaths, Arendt argued, but rule-fol­low­ers pro­tect­ed by social priv­i­lege. “It was pre­cise­ly the mem­bers of respectable soci­ety,” she writes, “who had not been touched by the intel­lec­tu­al and moral upheaval in the ear­ly stages of the Nazi peri­od, who were the first to yield. They sim­ply exchanged one sys­tem of val­ues against anoth­er,” with­out reflect­ing on the moral­i­ty of the entire new sys­tem.

Those who refused, on the oth­er hand, who even “chose to die,” rather than kill, did not have “high­ly devel­oped intel­li­gence or sophis­ti­ca­tion in moral mat­ters.” But they were crit­i­cal thinkers prac­tic­ing what Socrates called a “silent dia­logue between me and myself,” and they refused to face a future where they would have to live with them­selves after com­mit­ting or enabling atroc­i­ties. We must remem­ber, Arendt writes, that “what­ev­er else hap­pens, as long as we live we shall have to live togeth­er with our­selves.”

Such refusals to par­tic­i­pate might be small and pri­vate and seem­ing­ly inef­fec­tu­al, but in large enough num­bers, they would mat­ter. “All gov­ern­ments,” Arendt writes, quot­ing James Madi­son, “rest on con­sent,” rather than abject obe­di­ence. With­out the con­sent of gov­ern­ment and cor­po­rate employ­ees, the “leader… would be help­less.” Arendt admits the unlike­ly effec­tive­ness of active oppo­si­tion to a one-par­ty author­i­tar­i­an state. And yet when peo­ple feel most pow­er­less, most under duress, she writes, an hon­est “admis­sion of one’s own impo­tence” can give us “a last rem­nant of strength” to refuse.

We have only for a moment to imag­ine what would hap­pen to any of these forms of gov­ern­ment if enough peo­ple would act “irre­spon­si­bly” and refuse sup­port, even with­out active resis­tance and rebel­lion, to see how effec­tive a weapon this could be. It is in fact one of the many vari­a­tions of non­vi­o­lent action and resistance—for instance the pow­er that is poten­tial in civ­il dis­obe­di­ence.

We have exam­ple after exam­ple of these kinds of refusals to par­tic­i­pate in a mur­der­ous sys­tem or fur­ther its aims. Arendt was aware these actions can come at great cost. The alter­na­tives, she argues, may be far worse.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

Han­nah Arendt’s Orig­i­nal Arti­cles on “the Banal­i­ty of Evil” in the New York­er Archive

Hen­ry David Thore­au on When Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence and Resis­tance Are Jus­ti­fied (1849)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC.