Bertrand Russell

In 1940 Russell was appointed to teach logic and mathematics at the City College of New York. A taxpayer brought suit to have the appointment revoked on the grounds that his published views on marriage and sexual morality made him unfit, and in March 1940 a New York state judge annulled the appointment, describing the chair as one of indecency and characterising Russell's work as lecherous, libidinous and narrow-minded. The city declined to appeal. Russell was left without the post and, with wartime travel restricted, without much means of earning.

Two details are usually omitted. The judgement concerned his writings on sex, not his atheism, and he was never permitted to be a party to the case or to answer it in court, he was the subject of the proceedings rather than a defendant in them. John Dewey and others organised in his defence and lost.

He had drawn the distinction he is quoted for well before this: that he would call himself an agnostic among philosophers, because he could not prove there is no God any more than he could prove there is no Homeric Olympus, and an atheist in ordinary company, because in practice he regarded the Christian God as no more probable than the Olympian ones. It is a distinction about audience rather than about the state of his belief, and it is regularly quoted as though it were only the first half.

Brixton prison received Russell twice, in 1918 and 1961, and the two terms bracket his public life. The first came for an article in a pacifist weekly during the last winter of the Great War, judged likely to prejudice relations with an ally; six months in the first division, where a prisoner of means furnished his own cell, and where Russell wrote his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy and read enormously, remarking that he found prison in many ways quite agreeable. He had already lost his Trinity College lectureship over his agitation against conscription. The second term, seven days in 1961 after a sentence commuted on grounds of age, followed a Committee of 100 demonstration against nuclear weapons; the magistrate offered to excuse him on a promise of good behaviour, and the mathematician, then eighty nine, declined to give it.

Between the two imprisonments lay the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, awarded to a man whom a New York court had declared morally unfit to teach a decade earlier, and the essays, Why I Am Not a Christian above all, in which he made unbelief a matter of plain prose rather than defiance. His celestial teapot, offered in a 1952 essay that its commissioning magazine never printed, gave the argument about burden of proof its permanent image. The consistency across four decades was the point: the same man, the same courtesies, the same refusal, whether the objectionable war was in progress or merely in preparation.