The Role of Individuality
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 9 January 1949
⏱️ 29 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 third lecture, entitled 'The Role of Individuality', he considers the importance of individual initiative to a community, and argues for flexibility, local autonomy, and less centralisation in society. Modern organisations, he says, must be more flexible and less oppressive to the human spirit if life is to be saved from boredom.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures. |
| 0:05.0 | This lecture in the series Authority and the Individual, given by Bertrand Russell, was originally broadcast in 1949. |
| 0:15.4 | The Reith Lectures. |
| 0:19.0 | Bertrand Russell is giving the third of six broadcasts on authority and the individual. |
| 0:25.7 | His third lecture is entitled The Role of Individuality. |
| 0:31.3 | Bertrand Russell. |
| 0:33.4 | In this lecture, I propose to consider the importance both for good and evil, |
| 0:38.3 | of impulses and desires that belong to some members of a community, but not to all. |
| 0:44.3 | In a very primitive community, such impulses and desires play very little part. |
| 0:49.3 | Hunting and war are activities in which one man may be more successful than another, |
| 0:56.0 | but in which all share a common purpose. |
| 0:59.0 | So long as the man's spontaneous activities are such as all the tribe approves of and shares in, |
| 1:05.0 | his initiative is very little curbed by others within the tribe, |
| 1:09.0 | and even his most spontaneous actions conform |
| 1:12.3 | to the recognized pattern of behavior. |
| 1:15.9 | But as men grow more civilized, there comes to be an increasing difference between one |
| 1:20.7 | man's activities and another's, and a community needs, if it is to prosper, a certain |
| 1:26.5 | number of individuals who do not wholly conform to the general type. |
| 1:30.3 | Practically all progress, artistic, moral and intellectual, has depended upon such individuals |
| 1:38.3 | who have been a decisive factor in the transition from barbarism to civilization. |
| 1:43.3 | If a community is to make progress, it needs exceptional individuals in the transition from barbarism to civilization. |
| 1:53.7 | If a community is to make progress, it needs exceptional individuals whose activities, though useful, are not of a sort that ought to be general. |
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