Russell, Bertrand. Sceptical essays. London: Routledge, 2004 (first published in 1928 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd.).

Summary: Seventeen essays on philosophy, psychology, and politics, by a clever and once-persuasive intellectual. A few of the essays live up to the title of the collection by advocating or exemplifying skepticism, and these are still worth reading. As a teacher, I particularly admired “Freedom versus authority in education”:

No man is fit to educate unless he feels each pupil an end in himself, with his own rights and his own personality, not merely a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, or a soldier in a regiment, or a citizen in a State.

On the other hand, most of the political essays are dated at best and frequently unbelievable, primarily because Russell loved to speculate about future political trends and, when prophesying, ignored his own sage advice about accommodating the strength of one's beliefs to the evidence available for them. The failure of Routledge's editors to supply the date of original composition or publication after each essay contributes to the impression that Russell must have been naive, floating in a cloud of abstraction, when he wrote some of these pieces. The patronizing preface by John Gray (John Gray! what were the editors thinking?) only reinforces this impression.