Carr's Quest: Escaping the 'Rules' of International Relations?

The ability to uncover the motivations and interests of the individual positing an International Relations (IR) theory is an essential skill. Not only does it allow for greater awareness of how thought and action interpenetrate, but also helps one fully appreciate what a profoundly personal experience writing about IR was (and is) for some thinkers. One former British diplomat-cum-historian’s own fleeting, but monumental, involvement with the subject was an exemplar case of this phenomenon. The importance of Edward Hallett Carr’s (1892-1982) The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (1939) (the ‘Crisis’), beyond its attack on the utopianism of the period in which it was published, was the sophisticated dialectical structure he placed at its core. It is true that all of Carr’s works are laden with the ideas he hoped to press upon his government and fellow countrymen, but one must sort out the wheat from the chaff, as it were, by remembering that ‘it is the policy prescription rather than the mode of analysis that changes in Carr’s treatment of’ IR. Cutting away at such policy interests reveals an unfamiliar and strange landscape still of great significance.

The painter of this landscape was also of a rare pedigree. While he wore an establishment mantle – First Class in Classics from Trinity College, Cambridge, former diplomat at the Foreign Office (1916-1936) and lead writer for The Times (1941-1946) – he was quick to rip away this veil. Impatient of fools, reclusive and phobic of the tedium of social functions – although not unlikeable - Carr could be placed in a stern class of men more likely to laugh than cry at Chekhov. This thick-skin, alloyed with self- confidence, afforded Carr the same ruthlessness he had once admired in Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936), one that was the picture of self- discipline and was fearless in questioning the foundations of any idea. He also lived stoically with ‘little use for appearances and possessions and the other accoutrements of living as a high priest. Furthermore, Carr’s faith in history as constant change meant that he dared postulate a “bad idea” on the Monday, comfortable in the knowledge that it would be redeemed by the Friday. As he had remarked about his fourteen volume history of the Soviet Union: ‘my work was regarded by my critics as an apology for Soviet policies. This I took philosophically: the verdict 50 years or 100 years hence, if my work is still read then, will be more interesting.’
So why did it fall to someone who had been ‘uninterested in foreign countries’ as a child to give the world the ‘first coherent realist theory of international relations yet in print’, and insights into a far more complex reading of international politics? Many of his personal idiosyncrasies surely played a role and it was the manner in which Carr used the Crisis as a means of self-therapy – purging his system of the strongly held utopianism of his youth – that is interesting. Carr’s emotional outpouring found material form in his publications and most of his work was based on an admixture of emotion, wide-reading and personal experience. His work shows his personal battle to understand what key solved the problems of the period he found himself in. The Crisis is made even more interesting given that IR was not Carr’s major interest, and he would later distance himself from the field stating that he was not particularly proud of starting the whole business nor did he believe that any ‘science of international relations exists.’

Carr’ s Quest – 3rd ECPR Graduate Conference – Dublin, Summer 2010
Carr would also later stand at arm’s length from the Crisis on the grounds that it was ‘a study of the period’ and ‘must be treated on its merits as such.’ There is more to the Crisis than this, however, if anything because Carr taps into some quite exotic forms of thought. This is where the real currency of his work can be found: had the corpus been a simple collection of pet-hates it would not be studied much now. This paper wants to shed light on the rare version of dialecticism Carr embeds in the Crisis, and to appreciate him as a man who had ‘two hearts [both realist and utopian] beating in [his] breast’. This paper makes the case for understanding Carr’s dialectical construct in the Crisis in more fluid terms than a simple dichotomisation of realism and utopianism. This work challenges the critiques of Carr’s detractors by analysing the definitions and methodology associated with his IR theory through a close reading of the Crisis. The paper then paints Carr as an individual deeply infused with the ideas of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) and Karl Mannheim (1893-1947) and thus as a peculiar dialectical thinker. The work then concludes by showing how Carr’s niche thinking set him apart from other classical realists such as Hans Morgenthau (1904-1980), and from the widely held – and much taken for granted – “rules” of IR.