Project Gutenberg #55610
Why Men Fight
Bertrand Russell
1916Russell's wartime lectures on the impulses behind war and how the state, property, education, marriage, and religion could be rebuilt; published in Britain as Principles of Social Reconstruction.
Project Gutenberg #55610 Public domain in the United States Cover source Local typographic cover created for The Missing Workbook from public-domain source metadata
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and women are to have the strong happiness and organic seriousness which belonged to the best marriages in the past. The new system must be based upon the fact that to produce children is a service to the State, and ought not to expose parents to heavy pecuniary penalties. It will have to recognize that neither the law nor public opinion should concern itself with the private relations of men and women, except where children are concerned. It ought to remove the inducements to make relations clandestine and childless. It ought to admit that, although lifelong monogamy is best when it is successful, the increasing complexity of our needs makes it increasingly often a failure for which divorce is the best preventive. Here, as elsewhere, liberty is the basis of political wisdom.214 And when liberty has been won, what remains to be desired must be left to the conscience and religion of individual men and women.
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