CHAPTER 3

E.H. Carr and the Complexity

of Power Politics

T
he current wave of interest in E.H. Carr has culminated in several
articles: a special edition of the Review of International Studies, two
biographies, and a critical reintroduction, providing evidence of
Carr’s enduring importance to a discipline, International Relations, that has
accorded him iconic status.1 This chapter tries to build on the achievements
of previous commentators on the works of Carr, not by seeking to rescue
Carr’s theory from the clutches of Realism or by making it serve as the
foundation for a more emancipatory discourse of IR, but by examining Carr’s
theory on its own terms as a highly complex and individualized dialectic of
power and morality. In doing so, one begins to develop an awareness that this
most foundational of Realists in IR theory creates a more nuanced political
philosophy of power than the paradigmatic Realism with which he is often
associated. The singularities of Carr’s approach mark the emergence of
Realism as a social theory of change in IR, something he shared in common
with Morgenthau; however, where Morgenthau feared the future, Carr
embraced it. Methodologically, Carr also introduced a dialogical element to
IR theory, which attempts to place theory in the context of a continuing
debate between utopianism and Realism. It is this methodology that consti-
tutes Carr’s positive theory of IR, a theory that is based not on being in inter-
national politics, but of becoming. As such, Carr’s theories are the antithesis
of static, modelized Realist theory that do not accept the notion of structural
change.
The chapter has four sections. In the first section, I examine the conceptual
apparatus of Carr’s theory of IR, uncovering the philosophical derivation and
structure of The Twenty Years’ Crisis, including the all-important synthesis of
S. Molloy, The Hidden History of Realism
© Seán Molloy 2006
52 ● The Hidden History of Realism

Realism and utopianism. The Twenty Years’ Crisis was not, of course, Carr’s
last word on IR. The second section of this chapter concentrates on Carr’s later
works—much of the richness of his insights into IR is lost if one neglects such
important works as The Future of Nations: Independence or Interdependence?,
Conditions of Peace, and Nationalism and After—in which Carr employed the
dialectic of power and morality to posit a theory of international transforma-
tion. In the third section, I examine reactions to Carr’s writings, ranging from
the immediate response of those criticized in The Twenty Years’ Crisis to
attempts to understand Carr’s contribution to international politics from a
wider, more historiographical perspective. The chapter concludes with a
section on relativism and reason and the condition of knowledge in interna-
tional theory as Carr conceived it. This section also examines Carr’s standing
as a progenitor of critical or post-positivist approaches to IR, and the opening
of the discipline of IR to new conceptual avenues and methods.
Delving into the works of Carr, one becomes more aware of the
inadequacy of textbook definitions of Realism when compared to the com-
plex theory presented by Carr in The Twenty Years’ Crisis and developed
throughout his later works. Far from creating a rigid, axiomatic theory of IR,
Carr’s primary aim in writing The Twenty Years’ Crisis was to demonstrate the
fatal shortcomings of the liberal worldview: it is perhaps the first book in IR
that works at an advanced critical level to attack modernity’s pretensions to
political understanding. With globalization and other theories of interdepen-
dence predominant in international discourse after the end of the cold war,
Carr’s exposure of the pretensions of rationalism, liberalism, and modern
international politics in general remain as relevant now as they were in 1939.

The Philosophical Derivation of The Twenty Years’ Crisis

It is Carr’s stated aim in the preface to the first edition to add a dimension to
the study of IR lacking in the many historical and descriptive works of the
period 1919–1939. His goal, he declares, “is to analyze the profounder causes
of the contemporary international crisis.” One of the most striking aspects of
The Twenty Years’ Crisis is Carr’s powerful, though unobtrusive, command of
modern philosophy. Carr had a double first in Classics from Cambridge, so
one would expect him to have a thorough knowledge of classical philosophy
and to develop an interest in political philosophy during his career as a diplo-
mat and academic. What is surprising about The Twenty Years’ Crisis is the
presence of other, more contemporary, philosophical concerns such as
Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, and the extent to which the book is an
empiricist polemic against a priori abstraction. In a sense, it is a paean to
induction and the value of practical over abstract reason. Another of the