Next Up: New Hopes for a Changing World

The Plan Must Be Obeyed. So, Reading Bertrand Russell turns to New Hopes for a Changing World. My copy is a black hardback published by Simon and Schuster. I do not recall how I came about my copy, but I am honored to see that it apparently was originally(?) the property of the distinguished scholar Milton B. Singer.

The only date I can find in the text is in the copyright information section; that date is 1951, but perhaps the reference is to the British edition published in 1951 by George Allen & Unwin, with this US edition printed the following year. New Hopes for a Changing World is 213 pages long, followed by a page containing a one-paragraph “About the Author” section. This “About the Author” addendum pretty clearly served as the basis for the five-years-later “About the Author” paragraph that closes Portraits From Memory. There is no index in New Hopes for a Changing World, but an index compiled later is available online (18-page pdf here); the introductory material to this index is what makes me believe that the Simon and Schuster edition was published in 1952, not 1951. This supplemental, helpful index, like that for Portraits From Memory, was prepared by Roma Hutchinson.

New Hopes for a Changing World contains 21 chapters, divided into three parts: Part One, “Man and Nature”; Part Two, “Man and Man”; and Part Three, “Man and Himself.” Here are the chapter titles and divisions into parts:

Part One, “Man and Nature”
Chapter I. Current Perplexities
Chapter II. Three Kinds of Conflict
Chapter III. Mastery over Physical Nature
Chapter IV. The Limits of Human Power
Chapter V. Population

Part Two: Man and Man
Chapter VI. Social Units
Chapter VII. The Size of Social Units
Chapter VIII. The Rule of Force
Chapter IX. Law
Chapter X. Conflicts of Manners of Life
Chapter XI. World Government
Chapter XII. Racial Antagonism
Chapter XIII. Creeds and Ideologies
Chapter XIV. Economic Co-operation and Competition
Chapter XV. The Next Half-Century

Part Three: Man and Himself
Chapter XVI. Ideas Which Have Become Obsolete
Chapter XVII. Fear
Chapter XVIII. Fortitude
Chapter XIX. Life Without Fear
Chapter XX. The Happy Man
Chapter XXI. The Happy World

Onwards, then. As Stalin did not say, there are no fortresses, and almost no Russell texts, that Reading Bertrand Russell cannot storm.