A History of Western Philosophy was published by Simon & Schuster in 1945 and by Allen and Unwin in the UK. The book was the primary work cited by the Nobel Committee when awarding Russell the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, and it remains the bestselling one-volume history of philosophy ever published. It has never been out of print.
Russell surveys the entire tradition of Western philosophy from Thales to the logical positivists, organizing the material into three parts: “Ancient Philosophy” (the pre-Socratics through Plotinus), “Catholic Philosophy” (the Church Fathers through the scholastics), and “Modern Philosophy” (from the Renaissance to Russell’s own contemporaries). Each philosopher is situated within the social, political, and cultural conditions that shaped their thought — Russell insists, against the tradition of treating philosophy as a purely intellectual activity, that philosophers are products of their times and that their ideas cannot be understood apart from the societies that produced them.
The book’s greatest strength is Russell’s prose: lucid, witty, and capable of making genuinely difficult ideas accessible without dumbing them down. His account of Leibniz’s monadology, his explanation of Hume’s problem of induction, and his exposition of Hegel’s dialectic are models of philosophical clarity. His opinions are forceful and unapologetic: he admires the pre-Socratics, respects Aristotle, despises Hegel (whom he considers a fraud), is generous to Spinoza, harsh to Nietzsche, and devastatingly funny about the medieval scholastics.
Professional philosophers have long criticized the book’s inaccuracies and biases. Russell’s treatment of Hegel is widely considered unfair; his account of Marx is superficial; his dismissal of existentialism is perfunctory. Continental philosophers in particular have objected that Russell’s analytic commitments lead him to distort or ignore entire traditions of thought. These criticisms are largely justified — but they miss the book’s achievement, which is not scholarly comprehensiveness but the demonstration that philosophy matters, that its history is as dramatic and consequential as political history, and that it can be written about with the same literary skill as the best history or biography.
Collecting A History of Western Philosophy
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1945): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $400–$1,000
- Very good: $150–$400
- Signed: $1,000–$3,000
- UK first (Allen and Unwin, 1946): $200–$500