A Little Learning

Via Dan Drezner and odd, though amusing, book review upon which I feel compelled to comment:

A graduate of the prestigious Dalton School in Manhattan and Brown University, Jacobs is a prime example of that curiously modern innovation: the pedigreed simpleton. . . . There's just no two ways about it -- people who read Marcel Proust and Bertrand Russell instead of Entertainment Weekly actually do learn stuff.

As a Dalton graduate, non-EW consumer, and someone who's read a good deal of Betrand Russell, I must warn you: Beware Bertrand Russell. His History of Western Philosophy is a well-written, admirably brief, engaging survey of a topic that a lot of generally educated people would like to learn a thing or two about. Thus, it seems ideal. But there's a problem:

As an encyclopaedia it is full of errors and omissions. It's unfortunate that many of these have passed (unchecked) into general use, ill-recalled opinions of Russell repeated as objective fact. Russell himself admits in the foreword to not being an expert on any of the philosophers with the possible exception (he slightly immodestly adds) of Leibniz. He excuses this in his attempt to unify the disparate specialisms, a task reflected in the History's lumping together of philosophers under various headings. So for instance, Descartes leads to liberalism, and Rousseau to Nazism, according to Russell.

I don't really know what can be done about this. It really is a well-written, engaging book, on a subject that a lot of people would like to read a well-written, engaging book about. Thus, I doubt it will just vanish from the market. But it's very misleading to people who don't know a lot about the history of philosophy -- in other words, just the sort of people who would want to read it. I read the thing in high school and was absolutely shocked when I started taking actual philosophy courses to learn that it didn't happen like that at all.

UPDATE: This is not to knock Russell in general, who wrote a great many things. Most of his philosophy isn't right, but then again no one else's is, and he's a major figure. It's just that when the subject comes to acquiring general "educated laymen"-type knowledge and Bertrand Russell we're presumably talking about The History of Western Philosophy and not, say, "On Denoting" or his other more substantive, non-historical work. I don't know of a good alternative to Russell, which is part of the problem. The history of philosophy is really hard to do well.