Russell’s Aborted Book on Fascism

Abstract

In December 1933 Russell initiated a new project that by late 1934 was under the working title “The Revolt Against Reason”. It was to be a book that analyzed the intellectual and cultural ancestry of fascism. It was never completed, yet Russell left us many fascinating textual artifacts that give us some sense of what he intended to do. Three documents of special importance are presented in their full form in this paper. These documents, together with the work he did publish on fascism and also the books Power and A History of Western Philosophy, demonstrate that Russell was an insightful thinker on the topic. His analysis placed him outside the major interpretations of fascism in the interwar period.