In writing about one of the most urgent problems of our time, Bertrand Russell declined to be called a philosopher. He refused to draw any connection between his campaigning journalism against nuclear weapons and philosophy. I shall argue that this was a mistake.

Rather than writing as a philosopher, Russell claimed to write solely as a journalist and a spokesperson for common sense.¹ Admittedly, in metaphysics and epistemology, he was prepared to leave common sense far behind. For, as he says in The Problems of Philosophy (1912):

“The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason.”

However, in his campaigning journalism, Russell was prepared to leave philosophy far behind and to embrace common sense. Thus, for example, in Common Sense and Nuclear Weapons (1959), Russell positioned himself unequivocally on the side of common sense.

But what exactly did he mean by common sense? To the best of my knowledge, Russell himself never subjected the concept to any sharply focussed analysis, but it is usually taken to mean something like folk wisdom. More specifically, it is thought that the dictates of common sense are universal, transcending the conventions of a particular time and place. This is usually assumed implicitly, although in the philosophy of Thomas Reid it is an explicit claim.

However, common sense, at least as it is appealed to in political arguments, is never, in fact, universal.

In politics, the authority of common sense proclamations is derived from two elements: (1) they are known with confidence; and (2) it is believed that all other right-thinking people also know them with confidence. Thus, typically, if I ask why I believe something with confidence, the answer is that all others whom I think of as right-thinking people also seem to know it with confidence. And why do I think they are right-thinking people? Well, they seem to be confident of the same things as me.

But, of course, although by this reasoning we wave what Kant called “the magic wand of common sense,” and although we ourselves may thereby be convinced of the universality of our common sense pronouncements, we have not transcended the conventional wisdom of our particular society.

Little wonder then that Russell’s biographer, Ray Monk, describes Russell’s journalistic work as (with a few exceptions): glib; over-polemical; over-confident; utopian; wilfully shallow (playing to the gallery); concentrating on offering instant solutions; ignoring questions of policy; and with a tendency to malign those of different opinions. One is prone to write this way when one aims to speak on behalf of common sense. That is not to say that his journalism was ineffective – for his …

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