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Bertrand Russell

Are People Rational?

John Ongley investigates what Bertrand Russell thought about human reason.

The economist John Maynard Keynes once said of his Cambridge friends in the years before World War I – including the philosophers Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore – that while their conversations were all bright, amusing and clever, there was “no solid diagnosis of human nature underlying them.” His friends, he claimed, had believed that the human race “consists of reliable, rational, decent people, influenced by truth and objective standards,” failing to see that there were “insane and irrational springs of wickedness” in people. Keynes thought this view was naïve.

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