Social Cohesion and Government
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 2 January 1949
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The inaugural Reith Lecturer is the philosopher, mathematician, and social reformer Bertrand Russell. One of the founders of analytic philosophy and a Nobel Laureate, he is the author of Principia Mathematica, and the bestselling History of Western Philosophy, written in 1946. His Reith lecture series is entitled 'Authority and the Individual'.
In his second lecture, entitled 'Social Cohesion and Government', he examines how forms of social cohesion have developed throughout history and considers the effects of increasing state control, as exemplified by Soviet Russia.
Transcript
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| 0:41.8 | This lecture in the series Authority and the Individual, given by Bertrand Russell, was originally broadcast in 1949. |
| 0:51.6 | The Reith Lectures. Bertrand Russell is giving the second of six broadcasts on authority and the individual. |
| 0:59.5 | His second lecture is entitled Social Cohesion and Government. |
| 1:04.9 | Bertrand Russell. |
| 1:07.3 | The original mechanism of social cohesion, as it is still to be found among the most primitive races, |
| 1:14.6 | was one which operated through individual psychology without the need of anything that could be called government. |
| 1:21.6 | There were no doubt tribal customs which all had to obey. |
| 1:26.6 | But one must suppose that there was no impulse to |
| 1:29.6 | disobedience of these customs, and no need of magistrates or policemen to enforce them. |
| 1:36.6 | In old stone age times, so far as authority was concerned, the tribe lived in a state |
| 1:43.0 | which we should now describe as anarchy. |
| 1:45.8 | But it differed from what anarchy would be in a modern community, |
| 1:50.0 | owing to the fact that social impulses sufficiently controlled the acts of individuals. |
| 1:57.4 | Men of the new Stone Age were already quite different. |
| 2:03.6 | They had government, authorities capable of exacting obedience and large scale enforced cooperation. This is evident from |
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