Important Nonsense: Norman Brown

To an audience of Parisians, in 1950, Bertrand Russell insisted that the philosophy of Hegel (which he had always said he could not understand) was responsible for German fascism: it was Hegel, not Gobineau, Haeckel, or Stewart Chamberlain who had fathered Hitler. The French, among whom there were not a few philosophers, were by no means delighted— the works of Hippolyte and Kojeve on Hegel were then enjoying a vogue in Paris—and when the time for questioning Russell came, Aimee Patri asked him: “Aren’t you making philosophy much too important?” To which Russell responded: “No, for I’ve been talking about bad philosophy. One can’t overrate the power of nonsense.”

The incident is intere...