Bertrand Russell 1921-70: The Ghost of Madness.(Review)

Bertrand Russell 1921-70: The Ghost of Madness, by Ray Monk; Jonathan Cape, 2000, $73.50.

BIOGRAPHY is no longer a service industry--according to Ray Monk, the widely applauded biographer of Wittgenstein. Not so long ago biographers were the caddies (A.D. Ho term) of the great writers and thinkers (when they were not their debunkers). But with Ellman's Joyce, Holroyd's Shaw and Ackroyd's T.S. Eliot among many others, biography has become a genre on its own. It is now "a celebration of human nature" (Richard Holmes) or the understanding of an interesting person (Monk). More like portraiture than criticism, it still adds little to our enjoyment of its subject's work, but it can be enjoyed as a work of its own.

Yet while we can read a philosopher without knowing his biography, a biographer cannot portray a philosopher without understanding the philosophising which has been the essence of his life. The biographer must have had some initiation into philosophy. He must also have the literary judgment and skill to incorporate it all in his portrait. This is a problem in the new life of Thomas Hobbes by Professor A.P. Martinich, a philosopher and Hobbes scholar of Texas.

Students of Hobbes have long felt the lack of a biography. We have had to turn back some 300 years to Hobbes' contemporary, John Aubrey and his Brief Lives. Most of the famous British philosophers from David Hume to A.J. Ayer have been written up, but not the most famous political philosopher of all--some would say the only great one the English have produced.

It is not altogether surprising. There are few records of Hobbes' life, especially of his early years, to sustain a biographer. Not many of his letters have survived and there are no diaries. (There are some autobiographical notes.)

Yet he lived in a turbulent time--from the Armada to the Popish Plot and through the English Civil War--and he wrote on a great range of subjects--from Biblical criticism and optics to mathematics and metaphysics. He translated Homer and Thucydides. Above all he wrote The Leviathan--that profound meditation on the barbarism that always awaits its chance to destroy civilisation.

Yet amazingly Martinich, for all his erudition, gives little attention to The Leviathan. Hobbes spent more time on other things, he says. He was famous before he published it in 1651 and famous later for things not connected with it. Some of his major controversies had little to do with its doctrines. So why concentrate on it?