J. B. S. Haldane’s Daedalus had promised that science would make people happier. Russell, drawing on long experience of governments, fears it will instead strengthen dominant groups. He traces the effects of the physical sciences, the steady growth of large organisations, and the coming power of the anthropological sciences, and asks what would be needed to avoid Icarus’s fate.
A short, sharp essay whose warnings about technology and power still read as current. Download the free EPUB.