BR TO W.W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC. / WARDER NORTON, 12 DEC. 1932
BRACERS 47056. TLS. Norton papers, Columbia U.
Proofread by K. Blackwell

47, Emperor's Gate,
S.W.7.
12th December 1932

Dear Warder,

Thank you for your letter of November 21st. I have considered its contents carefully, and it seems clear that the best plan will be to delay all publication until the book is complete. I do not see how to make two independent volumes without somewhat spoiling them both, as the period from 1814 to 1914 has in my mind an essential unity which I wish to bring out. I think that by hard work I can get the whole finished in time for publication in the spring of 1934.

I find my plan for a biographical technique becoming somewhat modified, that is to say, I am presenting events from one man’s point of view at a time, but I shall try to give the whole of his society. What is essential, in my mind, is that a period should be given, not in one presentation, but in a number of presentations, each of which will set forth what some one man knew of the world.

I shall open with the Emperor Alexander, giving in connection with him portraits of Talleyrand, Metternich, the archimandrite Photius, the Baroness Krüdener, Arakcheev, and a whole world of celebrities and oddities. Then I shall pass to America, dealing with Jefferson and with the success of democracy in your country, and pointing out that until the twentieth century democrats only existed where there were subject populations whose subjection was unquestioned (e.g. women). Democracy among the Greeks, and in the Southern States, was rendered acceptable by a background of slavery. When it revived in the seventeenth century, it revived not as a result of Hellenism, but on religious grounds, owing to the anarchic principle of the supremacy of conscience. Milton’s Christ informed Satan that the Athenians did not understand “the solid rules of civil government”. Democracy in its modern form is thus derived not from Greece but from Protestant religion; it first became important in Cromwell’s army, where it was held that all men have equal rights, but that this does not apply to Papists or Episcopalians. This form of democracy was carried by Cromwell’s soldiers into New England, but Jeffersonian democracy is classical in its inspiration. From America democratic sentiment was brought back to France; from France it spread to the rest of Europe, but it had little effectiveness there until 1848.

As the third figure in my introductory trilogy, I shall take Robert Owen, the founder of socialism. Industrialism, in those days, was confined to a small part of England; it had a manner of life and a system of ideas, or rather two systems of ideas, totally alien to everything that existed elsewhere; governments and educated people knew nothing about it.

All that is peculiar to the nineteenth century is derived ultimately from science, which operated throughout in a blind unconscious way, while the prominent figures continued to play their silly parts before the public.

Is there any objection from your point of view to publication in the spring? If not, I think I can undertake that the book shall be finished by about this time next year. I do not want to delay it longer, as I shall be very hard up if do, nor do I wish to divide it into two separate books, as that, I think, would greatly diminish its value. I imagine it will run to between 150,000 and 200,000 words. I have great confidence that I can make a good book of it.

Best Christmas greetings to you both,

Yours sincerely,
Bertrand Russell.