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E. H. Carr and political realism: vision and revision*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

William T. R. Fox
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Extract

With undue and perhaps false modesty, E. H. Carr described his brilliant contribution to what he called ‘the infant science of international polities’, The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, as ‘already a period piece’ in 1946 when a second edition appeared.1 Teachers of the subject have not accepted Carr's ‘period piece’ characterization. For more than forty years it has been prescribed reading for many of their students and has had to be reprinted many times.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , January 1985 , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1985

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References

1. First edition, London, 1939; second edition, 1946; reprinted with new preface to the second edition, 1981. The quoted phrase is from the 1981 new preface. The first edition is hereafter cited as ‘Carr, 1939’.

2. Another student of world politics with a formidable grasp of the works of Marx, Weber, and Mannheim was Harold D. Lasswell. Carr does not refer to Lasswell's difficult but elegant World Politics and Personal Insecurity (New York and London, 1935)Google Scholar, a work then better known in North America than in Britain.

3. An Introduction to Contemporary History (London, 1964), pp. 97Google Scholar and 100.

4. Ibid. To at least three American observers writing in 1944, Carl Becker, Walter Lippmann, and myself, it appeared that the post-World War II world would be a world dominated by the ‘Big Three’, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. See Fox, William T. R., The Super-Powers (New York, 1944)Google Scholar. As to why as late as 1944 it still seemed plausible to believe that the hopes of Seeley and Joseph Chamberlain had been realized at least to the extent that Britain could be perceived as one of the three truly world powers, see my article, ‘The Super-Powers Then and Now’, International Journal, XXXV, No. 3 (Summer, 1980), pp. 417–36.Google Scholar

5. In quoting Chamberlain, C. P. Stacey emphasizes the failure of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, along with the other colonial Prime Ministers, to respond affirmatively; Canada and the Age of Conflict, I, 1867–1921 (Toronto, 1977), p. 75Google Scholar.

6. The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London, 1919)Google Scholar.

7. London, 1942, p. xviii.

8. Where Carr parted company with the British and American voluntarists, who also saw that a new order world order was in the making, was in his skepticism that the big chance then under way could be significantly directed. On Anglo-American voluntarist thought generally, see Wolfers, Arnold and Martin, Laurence (eds), The Anglo-American Tradition in Foreign Affairs (New Haven, Conn., 1956)Google Scholar. Carr's running debate with voluntarist social scientists and policy-oriented analysts about the extent to which the future can be deliberately shaped (‘choice’versus ‘chance’ or ‘necessity’) is a different one from his debate with fellow historians (‘chance’ versus ‘necessity’). On this latter debate see Mehta, Ved, Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (London, 1962), pp. 106ffGoogle Scholar. Utopians of the grand design or ‘international government’ persuasion, who were Carr's particular objects of scorn, need to be distinguished from the Utopians of science and reason about whom Carr was no doubt deeply but not truculently skeptical. On these Utopians with their belief that a better mobilization of the world's intellectual resources will help point the way to a better world future, in which group I would include Lasswell and the so called ‘Chicago school’ of political science, see Fox, William T. R., ‘Pluralism, the Science of Politics, and the World System’, World Politics, XXVII, No. 4 (July, 1975), pp. 597–611CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. ‘Western Values in International Relations’ in Butterfield, H. and Wight, M. (eds), Diplomatic Investigations (London, 1966), p. 121Google Scholar.

10. It is possible that more battleships were scuttled in the long diplomatic naval battle that began in Paris in 1919 and ended in Washington in 1922 than were sunk at Scapa Flow.

11. The sorry history of mal-coordination of British and French foreign policy-making is well told in both Wolfers, Arnold, Britain and France Between Two Wars (New York, 1940)Google Scholar and Jordan, W. M., Britain, France, and the German Problem (London, 1944)Google Scholar.

12. When Lord Hankey was sent to Canada in 1934 to discover the answer ‘to the brutal question of whether Canada would come to our assistance in another war’, he found important people whose ‘considered view (was) that, if our cause was just, if every effort to maintain peace had been exhausted, and it was clear to the world that war had been forced upon us, Canada would come along’ (Stacey, op. cit., II, Toronto, 1981, p. 165).

13. Bull, Hedley, ‘The Twenty Years’ Crisis Thirty Years , International Journal, XXIV, No. 4 (Autumn, 1969), p. 627Google Scholar.

14. Carr, 1946, preface to second edition. Since the changes and deletions though few and small were not unimportant, Carr appears to have been somewhat disingenuous in concluding the preface to the second (1946) edition with the statement that he had left ‘the present work substantially as it was completed in 1939’.

15. Carr, 1939, p. 278.

16. Carr, 1939, p. x.

17. Spykman, like Carr, was influenced by German sociology. Georg Simmel, the sociologist of conflict, was as important for Spykman as Karl Mannheim, the sociologist of knowledge, was for Carr. See Thompson, Kenneth W., Political Realism and the Crisis of World Politics (Princeton, NJ, 1960)CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a discussion of political realism in terms of the works of these two men and of two other main figures in realist thinking, Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau.

18. New York, 1942.

19. Can, 1939, chapter 13.

20. See, e.g., Carr, 1939, p. 107.

21. Pfaff, William, ‘Grand Design for Futility’, New Yorker, 21 11 1983, p. 218Google Scholar. Isaiah Berlin in a similar vein speaks of Carr's ‘big battalion view of history’ (Mehta, op. cit., p. 112).

22. The first quoted phrase is Bertrand Russeli's in his Power: A New Social Analysis (London, 1938)Google Scholar; the second is Karl Deutsch's in Politics and Government: How People Decide Their Fate (New York, 1970), p. 34Google Scholar. It is from Russell that Carr took his three-fold classification of the forms of power (Carr, 1939, p. 139, n. 2). Although Carr's ‘power’ seems to me vastly different from Russell's, Carr characterizes the Russell book as ‘an able and stimulating analysis of power as the fundamental concept in social science’.

23. It was the ‘power relations of Europe (emphasis supplied) ’ which presumably led E. H. Carr to write of the ‘peaceful change’ imposed on Czechoslovakia in terms of its inevitability (Carr, 1939, p. 278). Only if Nazi Germany could have been victorious in a short war would the power of the non-European parts of the world have been irrelevant in the matter of the so-called ‘inevitable’ change.

24. Thompson, Kenneth W., Masters of International Thought (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), p. 67Google Scholar.

25. Mehta, op. cit., p. 116.

26. The latter notion is labelled ‘American imperialism’ in Franz Schurmann's The Logic of World Power (New York, 1974).Google Scholar

27. Carr, 1939, pp. 106 and 107. These passages were also deleted from the second edition.

28. Princeton, NJ, 1979, pp. 4–5.

29. See, however, Herz, John, Political Realism and Political Idealism (Chicago, 1951)Google Scholar, which demonstrates the author's central concern to develop ‘a sense of critical discrimination between what is possible and what is impossible’. (The book is so described on its dust jacket.)

30. The quoted phrase is that of Millis, Walter in The Martial Spirit (Boston, 1951)Google Scholar.

31. See Herbert Butterfield's and Martin Wight's joint preface to Diplomatic Investigations, in which the ‘styles’ of British and American scholarship in international relations are contrasted.

32. ‘Why Is There No International Theory?’ in Butterfield and Wight (eds), Diplomatic Investigations, p. 33.

33. Cf. Morgan, Roger, ‘E. H. Carr and the Study of International Relations’, in Abramsky, C. (ed.), Essays in Honour of E. H. Carr (London, 1974), p. 172Google Scholar, who comments that Carr's ‘main concern is to destroy the illusion of the 1930s that moral consensus could achieve anything without effective power’.

34. Cf. Ashley, Richard K., ‘Political Realism and Human Interests’, International Studies Quarterly, XXV, No. 2 (June, 1981), pp. 204–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in which Ashley asserts a distinction between ‘practical realism’ and ‘technical realism’. At first sight his ‘technical’ and my ‘empirical’ realism may appear to be the same thing, but Ashley is referring to two assertedly incompatible strands of thinking in doctrinal realism.

35. I am indebted to Professor Debra Miller of Barnard College for the suggestion that neo-realism is best thought of as ‘modified structuralism’.

36. Ernst Haas, ‘Words can hurt you; or, who said what to whom about regimes’, International Organization, symposium issue on ‘International Regimes’, Stephen B. Krasner (ed.), XXXVI, No. 2 (Spring, 1982), p. 207.

37. ‘Structural causes and regime consequences: regimes as intervening variables’, loc. cit., p. 185.

38. In making this half-serious comment I am not ranging myself alongside Richard Ashley in the debate over the alleged wrong-headedness of neo-realists provoked by his self-styled polemic, ‘The Poverty of Neorealism’, International Organization, XXXVIII, No. 2 (Spring, 1984), pp. 225–86Google Scholar, and the clarifying responses (pp. 287–328) by Robert Gilpin, Friedrich Kratochwil, and Bruce Andrews.

39. New York, 1966; originally published as Paix et Guerre (Paris, 1962)Google Scholar.

40. The Anarchical Society (London, 1977), p. 264Google Scholar.

41. Quoted in Peter Scott, ‘Revolution Without the Passion: Peter Scott talks to E. H. Carr’, Times Education Suppement, 7 July 1978; cited by Thompson, Masters of International Thought, p. 78.

42. Power Politics (London, 1946), p. 68Google Scholar (emphasis added).