SOURCE: Ryan, Alan. “Bertrand Russell's Politics: 1688 or 1968?” In Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics, and Culture in Britain, edited by William Roger Louis, pp. 93-107. London/Austin, England and United States: I. B. Tauris Publishers and Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, 1995.

In the following essay, Ryan recounts Bertrand Russell's views on American life, noting that while Russell detested many characteristic features of American life, he was also a proponent of the United States serving as the self-conscious, responsible leader of the Western world.

If Bertrand Russell is remembered in the United States by anyone other than formal logicians and analytical philosophers, it is almost certainly as the ferocious critic of America's role in the Vietnam War, and on account of the energetically anti-American stand he took at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. The violence of his rhetoric during those years opened wounds that have not since healed...