Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell

Javier P?rez-Jara is a faculty fellow at Yale University's Center for Cultural Sociology and assistant professor of philosophy and sociology at Beijing Foreign Studies University. Lino Camprub? is a Ram?n y Cajal Researcher at the University of Seville and PI of ERC-CoG DEEPMED.

In this innovative new study, P?rez-Jara and Camprub? provide a powerful cultural sociological analysis of one of the 20th Century's most iconic public intellectuals. The book focuses not so much on Russell as an academic philosopher, but more on his evolving eschatological concern with how science and technology promise to pave the way to both paradise and hell. Through careful reconstruction and theoretical nous, the authors reveal how Russell attempted to forge a public morality that would help avoid humanity's drift toward apocalypse. This book is a significant contribution to Russell studies and is essential reading for historians of philosophy, as well as cultural sociologists and sociologists of ideas and intellectuals. --Marcus Morgan, University of Bristol P?rez-Jara and Camprub? have created a strikingly new and persuasive framework for understanding Bertrand Russell as a public figure. They show how the rhetoric of this seemingly most rational of philosophers was deeply affected by "primitive" experiences of social trauma and saturated by simplistic binaries about evil and apocalypse. The influence of public intellectuals, they demonstrate, comes less from the quality of their thought than the power of their cultural performances. Science and Apocalypse in Bertrand Russell sets a new standard for understanding the public life of intellectuals. --Jeffrey Alexander, Yale University