The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush

Dagobert D. Runes

Open Road Media, May 26, 2015 - Social Science - 853 pages

Benjamin Rush was a Founding Father of the United States. He lived in Pennsylvania and was a physician, writer, educator, humanitarian and devout Christian, as well as the founder of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Rush was a signatory of the Declaration of Independence and attended the Continental Congress. Later in life, he became a professor of medical theory and clinical practice at the University of Pennsylvania. Despite having a wide influence on the development of American government, he is not as widely known as many of his American contemporaries. Rush was also an early opponent of slavery and capital punishment. Despite his great contributions to early American society, Rush may be more famous today as the man who, in 1812, helped reconcile the friendship of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams by encouraging the two former Presidents to resume writing to each other. The editor of the preface of this book gives an in-depth look into Benjamin Rush’s life. The writings of Rush, which are contained in this book, show a wide range of interest and knowledge embracing agriculture and the mechanical arts, chemistry and medicine, political science, and theology. Included are letters he wrote in an effort to dispel prejudice, to fight oppression, and to elevate the lot of the lowly.

About the author

Born in 1903 in Czernowitz, Bukowina, Romania, Dagobert D. Runes obtained a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Vienna and immigrated to New York City in 1926. He brought with him a strong bond to many of Europe’s most notable German-speaking scholars, including Albert Einstein.
 
By 1930, he published many diverse periodicals. These included Modern Psychologist, whose godfather was Alfred Adler, with whom Runes had a lifelong friendship. There followed Better English:A Monthly Guide for the Improvement of Speech and Writing (with contributions from Dale Carnegie, H.L. Menken, W.H. Auden and Emily Post); and The Modern Thinker and Authors’ Review (with articles by Julian Huxley, Upton Sinclair, Bertrand Russell, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky and Thomas Mann). His magazine, The New Current Digest, was purchased by Reader’s Digest; with that money, in 1941, he founded Philosophical Library, which published the work of brilliant European intellectuals and Nobel Prize winners with whom he had been friends. He authored the Dictionary of Philosophy, which became a treasured possession of every student of philosophy. Translated into numerous languages, it sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Philosophical Library was so respected that it had blanket orders from most libraries for every book that it published. War Medicine, Modern Methods of Amputation, and Rehabilitation of the War Injured, for instance, were bought by every military library and doctor’s office.
 
In the late 1940s, Runes introduced French Existentialism to the English-speaking world, and translated and published the works of, among others, Jean-Paul Sartre (including his seminal Being and Nothingness), Simone de Beauvoir, Andre Gide and Francois Mauriac. Throughout his life, Dagobert D. Runes was deeply concerned with human and civil rights, man’s inhumanity to man and, as he wrote in one of his poems, “the deep beauty of the human mind.” Until his death in 1982, directing Philosophical Library and Wisdom Library (his paperback house) and publishing his own as well as other thought- provoking philosophical works were his life’s work. 

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush
• Author: Dagobert D. Runes
• Publisher: Open Road Media, 2015
• ISBN: 1504013069, 9781504013062
• Length: 853 pages
• Subjects: History / Social History; Law / Civil Procedure; Social Science / Slavery; Social Science / Social Classes & Economic Disparity