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A. C. Grayling, Ideas that Matter: The Concepts that Shape the 21st Century (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 448 pp., $29.95.

SEEING THEMSELVES as fiercely independent thinkers, bien-pensants are remarkable chiefly for the fervor with which they propagate the prevailing beliefs of their time. Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill’s godson and a scion of one of England’s great political dynasties, exemplified this contradiction throughout most of his life. British philosopher A. C. Grayling can now be counted amongst his number.
Though Russell, born in 1872, may seem a faintly archaic figure today, the type of thinking he embodied has not disappeared, and there are many who follow him in promoting a militant version of liberal conventional wisdom as the all-purpose solution for human ills. George Santayana, a thinker of insight and subtlety (these days much neglected), summed up Russell’s predilections perfectly: “His radical solutions were rendered vain by the conventionality of his problems. His outlook was universal, but his presuppositions were insular.”





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