Early life

Carr was born in London to a middle-class family, and was educated at the Merchant Taylors' School in London, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a First Class Degree in Classics in 1916. Carr's parents were Francis Parker and Jesse (née Hallet) Carr. Carr's family had orginated in northern England, and the first mention of his ancestors was a George Carr who served as the Sheriff of Newcastle in 1450 Carr's parents were Francis Parker and Jesse (née Hallet) Carr. Carr's parents were initially Conservatives, but went over to supporting the Liberals in 1903 over the free trade issue. When Joseph Chamberlain proclaimed his opposition to free trade, and announced in favour of Imperial preference, Carr's father, for whom all tariffs were abhorrent, changed his political loyalties. Carr described the atmosphere at the Merchant Taylors School as:"...95% of my school fellows came from orthodox Conservative homes, and regarded Lloyd George as an incarnation of the devil. We Liberals were a tiny despised minority." From his parents, Carr inherited a strong belief in progress as an unstoppable force in world affairs, and throughout his life, a recurring theme in Carr's thinking was that the world was getting progressively a better place. With his belief in progress was a tendency on the part of Carr to decry pessimism as mere whining from those who could not appreciate the benefits of progress.In 1911, Carr won the Craven Scholarship to attend Trinity College at Cambridge. As an undergraduate at Cambridge, Carr was much impressed by hearing one of his professor's lecture on how the Peloponnesian War influenced Herodotus in the writing of the Histories. Carr found this to be a great discovery...the subjectivity of the historian's craft. This discovery was later to influence his 1961 book What is History?.

Diplomatic career

Like many of his generation, Carr found World War I to be a shattering experience as it destroyed the world he knew before 1914. Carr was later to write that the pre-1914 world was:

"...solid and stable. Prices did not change. Incomes, if they changed, went up...It was a good place, and it was getting better. This country was leading it by the right direction. There were no doubt, abuses, but they were being, or would be, dealt with".

He joined the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1916, resigning in 1936. Carr was excused from military service for medical reasons. Carr was at first assigned to the Contraband Department of the Foreign Office, which sought to enforce the blockade on Germany, and then in 1917 was assigned to the Northern Department, which amongst other areas dealt with relations with Russia. In 1918, Carr was involved in the negotiations to have the British diplomats imprisoned in Petrograd by the Bolsheviks released in exchange for the British releasing the Soviet diplomats imprisoned in London in retaliation. As a diplomat, Carr was later praised by the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax as someone who had "distinguished himself not only by sound learning and political understanding, but also in administrative ability". At first, Carr knew nothing about the Bolsheviks. Carr later recalled:

"I had some vague impression of the revolutionary views of Lenin and Trotsky, but knew nothing of Marxism; I'd probably never heard of Marx".

By 1919, Carr had become convinced that the Bolsheviks were destined to win the Russian Civil War, and approved of the Prime Minister David Lloyd George's opposition to the anti-Bolshevik ideas of the War Secretary Winston Churchill under the grounds of realpolitik. In Carr's opinion, Churchill's support of the White Russian movement was folly as Russia was destined to be a great power once more under the leadership of the Bolsheviks, and it was foolish for Britain to support the losing side of the Russian Civil War. Carr was to later to write that in the spring of 1919 he "was disappointed when he [Lloyd George] gave way (in part) on the Russian question in order to buy French consent to concessions to Germany on Upper Silesia, Danzig and reparations"

In 1919, Carr was part of the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference and was involved in the drafting of parts of the Treaty of Versailles relating to the League of Nations. During the peace conference, Carr was much offended at the Allied, especially French treatment of the Germans, writing that the German delegation at the peace conference were "cheated over the "Fourteen Points", and subjected to every petty humiliation" Beside working on the sections of the Versailles treaty relating to the League of Nations, Carr was also involved in working out the borders between Germany and the newly reborn state of Poland. Initially, Carr favoured Poland, urging in a memo in February 1919 that Britain recognize Poland at once, and that the German city of Danzig (modern Gda?sk, Poland) be ceded to Poland In March 1919, Carr fought against the idea of a Minorities Treaty for Poland, arguing that the rights of ethnic and religious minorities in Poland would be best guaranteed by not involving the international community in Polish internal affairs By the spring of 1919, Carr's relations with the Polish delegation had declined to a state of mutual hostility. Carr's tendency to favour the claims of the Germans at the expense of the Poles led the British historian Adam Zamoyski to note that Carr "held views of the most extraordinary racial arrogance on all of the nations of Eastern Europe". Carr's biographer, Jonathan Haslam wrote in a 2000 essay that Carr grew up in a Germanophile household, in which German culture was deeply appreciated, which in turn always coloured Carr's views towards Germany throughout his life. As a result of his Germanophile and anti-Polish views, Carr supported the territorial claims of the Reich against Poland. In a letter written in 1954 to his friend, Isaac Deutscher, Carr described his attitude to Poland at the time:

"This was the period of Korfanty, ?eligowski and the disputes over Teschen and Eastern Galicia, not mention the campaign of 1920. The picture of Poland that was universal in Eastern Europe right down to 1925 was of a strong and potentially predatory power".

After the peace conference, Carr was stationed at the British Embassy in Paris until 1921, and in 1920 was awarded a CBE. At first, Carr had great faith in the League, which he believed would prevent both another world war, and ensure a better post-war world. Carr later recalled:

"In those years, the League was rapidly becoming the focus of everything that mattered in international affairs; and each successive Assembly seemed to mark some progress in what has come to be known as the "organization of peace""

In the 1920s, Carr was assigned to the branch of the British Foreign Office that dealt with the League of Nations before being sent to the British Embassy in Riga, Latvia, where he served as Second Secretary between 1925—29. In 1925, Carr married Anne Ward Howe, by whom he had one son. During his time in Riga (which at that time possessed a substantial Russian émigré community), Carr became increasing fascinated with Russian literature and culture and wrote several works on various aspects of Russian life. Carr's interests in Russia and Russians were further increased by his boredom with life in Riga. Carr described Riga as "...an intellectual desert". Carr learnt Russian during his time in Riga in order to read Russian writers in the original. In 1927, Carr paid his first visit to Moscow. Carr was later to write that reading Alexander Herzen, Fyodor Dostoevsky and the work of other 19th century Russian intellectuals caused him to re-think his liberal views. Carr wrote under the impact of reading various Russian writers he found:

"that the liberal moralistic ideology in which I was brought up was not, as I had always assumed, an Absolute taken for granted by the modern world, but was sharply and convincingly attacked by very intelligent people living outside the charmed circle, who looked at the world through very different eyes...This left me in a very confused state of mind: I reacted more and more sharply against the Western ideology, but still from a point within it".

Starting in 1929, Carr started to review books relating to all things Russian and Soviet and to international relations in several British literary journals such as the Fortnightly Review, The Spectator, the Times Literary Supplement and later towards the end of his life, the London Review of Books.. In particular, Carr emerged as the Times Literary Supplement's Soviet expert in the early 1930s, a position he still held at the time of his death in 1982 Because of his status as a diplomat (until 1936), most of Carr's reviews in the period 1929—36 were published either anonymously or under the pseudonym "John Hallett". Between 1931 and 1937, Carr published many works on many historians and history, works that gave much fledgling discipline of international relations much vigour and discipline. In the summer of 1929, Carr began work on a biography of the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, during which the course of researching Dostoevsky's life, Carr befriended Prince D. S. Mirsky, a Russian émigré scholar living at that time in Britain.

Beside studies on international relations, Carr's writings in the 1930s included biographies of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1931), Karl Marx (1934), and Mikhail Bakunin (1937). An early sign of Carr's increasing admiration of the Soviet Union was a 1929 review of Baron Pyotr Wrangel's memoirs where Carr wrote:

"It is not longer possible for any sane man to regard the campaigns of Kolchak, Yudenich, Denikin and Wrangel otherwise than as tragic blunders of colossal dimensions. They were monuments of folly in conception and of incompetence in execution; they cost, directly and indirectly, hundreds of thousands of lives; and except in so far as they may have increased the bitterness of the Soviet rulers against the "White" Russians and the Allies who half-heartedly supported them, they did not deflect the course of history by a single hair's breadth".

In an article entitled "Age of Reason" published in the Spectator on April 26, 1930, Carr attacked what he regarded as the prevailing culture of pessimism within the West, which he blamed on the French writer Marcel Proust. Carr wrote:

"It was about the turn of the century that the trouble began. It did not come from the rebels or radicals...It came rather with men like Kipling and Rostand, men loyal to the core to the old traditions, men of genius-and yet who somehow did not quite pull it off...The great days of the glory of man and his achievements were numbered. The vein was petering out; in some strange way it no longer came off. It was, men said, the end of the Victorian Age...It was once the vulgar ambition of mankind to make something out of nothing; Proust brought perfection to the more genteel pastime of resolving everything into nothingness".

In the early 1930s, Carr found the Great Depression to be almost profoundly shocking as the First World War. In an article entitled "England Adrift" published in September 1930, Carr wrote:

"The prevailing state of mind in England to-day is one of defeatism or...skepticism, of disbelief in herself. England has ceased to have ideas, or if, she has them, to believe in the possibility of their fulfillment. Alone among the Great Powers she has ceased to have a mission...The government of the day has so little faith in its capacity to tackle the major problems of our generation that it invites the other parties to assist with their advice (imagine Mr Gladstone invoking the assistance of Lord Beaconsfield!), and the principle opposition party, knowing full well there is no solution, declines the invitation and keeps its hands free to wash them of the consequences...We have no convictions beyond a vague sort of fatalism".

Further increasing Carr's interest in a replacement ideology for liberalism was his reaction to hearing the debates in January 1931 at the General Assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, and especially the speeches on the merits of free trade between the Yugoslav Foreign Minister Vojislav Marinkovich and the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson. Carr wrote:

"At Geneva I followed some of the debates about the economic crisis, which seemed to spell the bankruptcy of capitalism. In particular I was stuck by the fact that everyone professed to believe that tariff barriers were a major cause of aggravation of the crisis, but that practically every country was busy erecting them. I happened to hear a speech by some minor delegate (Yugoslav, I think) which for the first time in my experience put the issue clearly and urgently. Free trade was the doctrine of economically powerful states, which flourished without protection, but would be fatal to weak states. This came as a revelation to me (like the revelation at Cambridge of the relativism of historiography), and was doubly significant because of the part played by free trade in my intellectual upbringing. If free trade went, the whole liberal outlook went with it."

It was at this time that Carr started to admire the Soviet Union. Carr wrote in a book review in February 1931:

"They [the Soviets] have discovered a new religion of the Kilowatt and the Machine, which may well be the creed for which modern civilization is waiting...This new religion is growing up on the fringes of a Europe which has lost faith in herself. Contemporary Europe is aimlessly drifting, refusing to face unpalatable facts, and looking for external remedies for her difficulties. The important question for Europe at the present time is...whether the steel production of the Soviet Union will overtake that of Great Britain and France...whether Europe can discover in herself a driving force, an intensity of faith comparable to that now being generated in Russia".

In a 1932 book review of Lancelot Lawton's Economic History of Soviet Russia, Carr dismissed Lawton's claim that the Soviet economy was a failure, and praised the British Marxist economist Maurice Dobb's extremely favourable assessment of the Soviet economy. Carr concluded that "as regards economic development, Professor Dobb is conclusive".

Beside writing on Soviet affairs, Carr also commented on other international events. In an essay published in February 1933 in the Fortnightly Review, Carr blamed what he regarded as a putative Versailles treaty for the recent accession to power of Adolf Hitler Carr wrote that in the 1920s, German leaders like Gustav Stresemann were unable to secure sufficient modifications of the Versailles treaty owning to the intractable attitude of the Western powers, especially France, and now the West had reaped what it had sowed in the form of the Nazi regime. However, despite some concerns about National Socialism, Carr ended his essay by writing that:

"The crucial point about Hitlerism is that its disciples not only believe in themselves, but believe in Germany. For the first time since the war a party appeared outside the narrow circles of the extreme Right which was not afraid to proclaim its pride in being German. It will perhaps one day be recognized as the greatest service of Hitlerism that, in a way quite unprecedented in German politics, it cut across all social distinctions, embracing in its ranks working men, bourgeoisie, intelligentsia and aristocrats. "Germany Awake!" became a living national faith".

Initially, Carr's political outlook was anti-Marxist and liberal. In his 1934 biography of Karl Marx, Carr presented his subject as highly intelligent man and a gifted writer, but one whose talents were devoted entirely for destruction. Carr argued that Marx's sole and only motivation was a mindless class hatred. Carr labelled dialectical materialism gibberish, and the labour theory of value doctrinal and derivative. Carr wrote that:

"The pseudo-Marxist is a pathetic figure. He knows that Marxism is moonshine, but he still nourishes the hope of finding in it a gleam to follow."

Speaking of the differences between the fascist regimes and the Soviet Union, Carr wrote:

"the only difference between the so-called "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the dictatorships which prefer to hoist other flags is that the one proclaims its Marxist paternity whereas the others deny it."

Despite his hostile appraisal of Marx, Carr ended his book by writing that recent developments in the Soviet Union meant that Marx had:

"...a claim to be regarded as the most far-seeing genius of the nineteenth century and one of the most successful prophets in history"

Carr went on to write:

"There are now few thinking man who will dismiss with confidence the Marxian assumption that capitalism, developed to its highest point, inevitably encompasses its own destruction."

Likewise, Carr praised Marx for emphasizing the importance of the collective over the individual. Carr wrote that:

"In a sense, Marx is the protagonist and forerunner of the whole twentieth century revolution of thought. The nineteenth century saw the end of the period of humanism which began with the Renaissance-the period which took as its ideal the highest development of the faculties and liberties of the individual...Marx understood that, in the new order, the individual would play a minor part. Individualism implies differentiation; everything that is undifferentiated does not count. The Industrial Revolution would place in power the undifferentiated mass. Not man, but mass-man, not the individual, but the class, not the political man, would be the unit of the coming dispensation. Not only industry, but the whole of civilization, would become a matter of mass-production."

In view of his later conversion to a sort of quasi-Marxism, Carr was to find the passages in Karl Marx: A Study in Fanaticism criticizing Marx to be highly embarrassing, and refused to allow the book to be republished. Carr was to later call his Marx biography his worst book, and complained that he had only written it because his publisher had made a Marx biography the precondition of publishing the biography of Mikhail Bakunin that he was writing. In his books such as The Romantic Exiles and Dostoevsky, Carr was noted for his highly ironical treatment of his subjects, implying that their lives were of interest, but not of great importance. In the mid-1930s, Carr was especially preoccupied with the life and ideas of Bakunin. During this period, Carr started writing a novel about the visit of a Bakunin-type Russian radical to Victorian Britain who proceeded to expose all of Carr regarded as the pretensions and hypocrisies of British bourgeois society. The novel was never finished or published.

As a diplomat in the 1930s, Carr took the view that great division of the world into rival trading blocs caused by the American Smoot Hawley Act of 1930 was the principal cause of German belligerence in foreign policy, as Germany was now unable to export finished goods or import raw materials cheaply. In Carr's opinion, if Germany could be given its own economic zone to dominate in Eastern Europe comparable to the British Imperial preference economic zone, the U.S. dollar zone in the Americas, the French gold bloc zone and the Japanese economic zone, then the peace of the would could be assured. In a memo written on January 30, 1936, Carr wrote:

"Since I think everyone is now agreed that it is dangerous to sit indefinitely on the safety-valve, and that Germany must expand somewhere, I feel that there is an overwhelming case for the view that the direction in which Germany can expand with a minimum of danger or inconvenience to British interests (whether political or economic) is in Central and South-Eastern Europe"

Carr's views on appeasement caused much tension with his superior, the Permanent Undersecetary Sir Robert Vansittart, and played a role in Carr's resignation from the Foreign Office later in 1936 In a article entitled "An English Nationalist Abroad" published in May 1936 in the Spectator, Carr wrote "The methods of the Tudor sovereigns, when they were making the English nation, invite many comparisons with those of the Nazi regime in Germany" In this way, Carr argued that it was hypocritical for people in Britain to criticize the Nazi regime's human rights record Because of Carr's strong antagonism to the Treaty of Versailles, which he viewed as unjust to Germany, Carr was very supportive of the Nazi regime's efforts to destroy Versailles through moves as the Remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936 Carr later wrote of his views in the 1930s that "No doubt, I was very blind".

International Relations Scholar

In 1936, Carr became the Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and is particularly known for his contribution on international relations theory. Carr's last words of advice as a diplomat was a memo urging that Britain accept the Balkans as an exclusive zone of influence for Germany. Additionally in articles published in the Christian Science Monitor on December 2, 1936 and in the January 1937 edition of Fortnightly Review, Carr argued that the Soviet Union and France were not working for collective security, but rather "...a division of the Great Powers into two armored camps", supported non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War, and asserted that King Leopold III of Belgium had made a major step towards peace with his declaration of neutrality of October 14, 1936. Two major intellectual influences on Carr in the mid-1930s were Karl Mannheim's 1936 book Ideology and Utopia, and the work of Reinhold Niebuhr on the need to combine morality with realism.

Carr's appointment as the Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Politics caused a stir when he started to use his position to criticize the League of Nations, a viewpoint which caused much tension with his benefactor, Lord Davies, who was a strong supporter of the League. Lord Davies had established the Wilson Chair in 1924 with the intention of increasing public support for his beloved League, which helps to explain his chagrin at Carr's anti-League lectures.In his first lecture on October 14, 1936 Carr stated the League was ineffective and that:

"I do not believe the time is ripe...for the establishment of a super-national force to maintain order in the international community and I believe any scheme by which nations should bind themselves to go to war with other nations for the preservation of peace is not only impracticable, but retrograde"..

In the same lecture, Carr stated:

"If European democracy binds its living body to the putrefying corpse of the 1919 settlement, it will merely be committing a particularly unpleasant form of suicide"..

In 1937, Carr visited the Soviet Union for a second time, and was impressed by what he saw. During his visit to the Soviet Union, Carr may have inadvertently caused the death of his friend, Prince D. S. Mirsky. Carr stumbled into Prince Mirsky on the streets of Leningrad (modern Saint Petersburg, Russia), and despite Prince Mirsky's best efforts to pretend not to know him, Carr persuaded his old friend to have lunch with him Since this was at the height of the Yezhovshchina, and any Soviet citizen who had any unauthorized contact with a foreigner was likely to be regarded as a spy, the NKVD arrested and executed Prince Mirsky as a British spy As part of the same trip that took Carr to the Soviet Union in 1937 also included a visit to Germany. In a speech given on October 12, 1937 at the Chatham House summarizing his impressions of those two countries, Carr reported that Germany was "almost a free country". Unaware apparently of the fate of his friend, Carr spoke in his speech of the "strange behaviour" of his old friend, Prince Mirsky, who had at first went to great lengths to try and pretend that he did not know Carr during their accidental meeting in Leningrad Carr ended his speech by arguing that it was unfair for people in Britain to criticize either of the two dictatorships, whom Carr asserted were only reacting to the problems of the Great Depression. Carr stated:

"But let us look a little at the historical perspective. Both the German and Russian regimes, today, represent a reaction against the individualistic ideology prevailing at any, in Western Europe, for the last hundred and fifty yearsThe whole system of individualist laissez-faire economy has we know, broken down. It has broken down because production and trade can only be carried out on a nationwide scale and with the aid of State machinery and State control. Now, State control has come in its most naked and undisguised form precisely where the individualist tradition was the weakest, in Germany and Russia".

In the 1930s, Carr was a leading supporter of appeasement. In the 1930s, Carr saw Germany as the victim of the Versailles treaty, and Hitler as a typical German leader, attempting like every other previous German leader since 1919 to overthrow that settlement. In his writings on international affairs in British newspapers, Carr criticized the Czechoslovak President Edvard Bene? for clinging to the alliance with France, rather than accepting that it was his country's destiny to be in the German sphere of influence. At the same time, Carr strongly praised the Polish Foreign Minister Colonel Józef Beck, who with his balancing act between France, Germany, and the Soviet Union as "a realist who grasped the fundamentals of the European situation" and argued that his polices were "from the Polish point of view...brilliantly successful". Starting in the late 1930s, Carr started to become even more sympathetic toward the Soviet Union, as Carr was much impressed by the apparent achievements of the Five Year Plans, which stood in marked contrast to the seeming failures of capitalism in the Great Depression.

His famous work, The Twenty Years' Crisis was published in July 1939, which dealt with the subject of international relations between 1919—1939. In that book, Carr defended appeasement under the grounds that it was the only realistic policy option. At the time the book was published in the summer of 1939, Neville Chamberlain had adopted his "containment" policy towards Germany, leading Carr to later ruefully comment that his book was dated even before it was published. In the spring and summer of 1939, Carr was very dubious about Chamberlain's "guarantee" of Polish independence issued on March 31, 1939, which he regarded as an act of folly and madness In April 1939, Carr wrote in opposition to Chamberlain's "guarantee" of Poland that: "The use or threatened use of force to maintain the status quo may be morally more culpable than the use or threatened use of force to alter it"

In The Twenty Year's Crisis, Carr divided thinkers on international relations into two schools, which he labelled the realists and the utopians. Reflecting his own disillusionment with the League of Nations, Carr attacked as "utopians" those like Norman Angell who believed that a new and better international structure could be built around the League. In Carr's opinion, the entire international order constructed at Versailles was flawed, and the League was a hopelessly dream that could never do anything practical.

Carr argued against the view that the problems of the world in 1939 were the work of a clique of evil men, and dismissed Arnold J. Toynbee's view that "we are living in an exceptionally wicked age". Carr asserted that the problems of the world in 1939 were due to structural political-economic problems that transcended the importance of individual national leaders, and argued that the focus on individuals as causal agents was equivalent to focusing on the trees rather the forest. Carr contended that the 19th century theory of a balance of interests amongst the powers was an erroneous belief, and instead contended that international relations was an incessant struggle between the economically advantaged "have" powers and the economically disadvantaged "have not" powers. In this economic understanding of international relations, "have" powers like the United States, Britain, and France were inclined to avoid war because of their contended status whereas as "have not" powers like Germany, Italy and Japan were inclined towards war as they had nothing to lose, and everything to gain through war In Carr's opinion, ideological differences between fascism and democracy were beside the point as he used as an example Japan, which Carr argued was not a fascist state, but still a "have not" power Carr attacked Adam Smith for claiming there was a "harmony of interests" between the individual and his/her community, writing that the "the doctrine of the harmony of interests was tenable only if you left out of account the interests of the weak who must be driven to the wall". Carr claimed after World War I, the American President Woodrow Wilson had unfortunately created an international order based on the doctrine of "harmony of interests" through the "utopian" instrument of the League of Nations with disastrous results. Carr argued that the only way to make the League (which Carr otherwise held in complete contempt by 1939) an effective force for peace was to persuade Germany, Italy and Japan to return to the League by promising them that their economic grievances could and would be worked out at the League Carr called The Twenty Year's Crisis:

"not exactly a Marxist work, but strongly impregnated with Marxist ways of thinking, applied to international affairs"

The distinction between "have" and "have not" nations perhaps reflected the influence of the theory first propagated by Enrico Corradini and later adopted by Benito Mussolini of the natural conflict between "proletarian" nations like Italy and "plutocratic" nations like Britain. In The Twenty Years' Crisis, Carr wrote:

"When Herr Hitler refuses to believe that "God has permitted some nations first to acquire a world by force and then to defend this robbery with moralising theories", we have an authentic echo of the Marxist denial of a community of interest between "haves" and "have-nots", of the Marxist exposure of the interested character of "bourgeois" morality..."

In The Twenty Years' Crisis, Carr argued that the entire peace settlement of 1919 was flawed by the decisions of the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, the French Premier Georges Clemenceau and above all the American President Woodrow Wilson to impose a "sterile" international order in the post-war world. In particular, Carr claimed that what he saw as the basis of the post-1919 international order, namely the combination of 19th century style laissez-faire capitalism and the nationalism inspired by the principle of national self-determination made for a highly defective peace settlement, and hence a very dangerous world. Carr later wrote that:

"The Twenty Years' Crisis was written with the deliberate aim of counteracting the glaring and dangerous defect of nearly all thinking, both academic and popular, about international politics in the English-speaking countries from 1919 to 1939-the almost total neglect of the factor of power".

In Carr's opinion, the repeated demands made by Adolf Hitler for lebensraum (living space) was merely a reflection of the fact that Germany was a "have not" power (like many in interwar Britain, Carr misunderstood the term lebensraum as referring to a zone of exclusive economic influence for Germany in Eastern Europe). In Carr's view, the belligerence of the fascist powers was the "natural cynical reaction" to the empty moralizing of the "have" powers, who refused to make any concessions until the state of international relations had been allowed to seriously deteriorate. Carr argued that on moral and practical grounds the Treaty of Versailles had done a profound wrong to Germany, and that the present state of world tensions in 1939 was caused by the inability and/or unwillingness of the other powers to readdress that wrong in a timely fashion. Carr defended the Munich Agreement as the overdue recognition of changes in the balance of power. In The Twenty Years' Crisis, Carr was highly critical of Winston Churchill, whom Carr described as a mere opportunist interested only in power for himself. Writing of Churchill's opposition to appeasement, Carr stated

"The realist will have no difficulty in recognizing the pragmatic, through no doubt unconscious adjustment of Mr. Churchill's judgments to his policy of the moment."

In the same book, Carr described the opposition of realism and utopianism in international relations as a dialectic progress. Carr described realism as the acceptance that what exists is right, and the belief that there is no reality or forces outside history such as God. Carr argued that in realism there is no moral dimension, and that what is successful is right, and what is unsuccessful is wrong. Carr argued that for realists there are no basis for moralizing about the past, present or the future and that "World history is the World Court". Carr rejected both utopianism and realism as the basis of a new international order, and instead called a synthesis of the two. Carr wrote that:

"Having demolished the current utopia with weapons of realism we still need to build a new utopia of our own, which will fall to the same weapons".

Though Carr was highly sympathetic towards the realist case in international relations, and rejected utopianism as the basis of the international order, at the same time, Carr described realism as lacking :"a finite goal, an emotional appeal, a right of moral judgment, and a ground for action".

Norman Angell, one of the "utopian" thinkers attacked by in The Twenty Years' Crisis called the book a "completely mischievous piece of sophisticated moral nihilism" In a review, Angell commented that Carr's claim that international law was only a device for allowing "have" nations to maintain their privileged position provided "aid and comfort in about equal degree to the followers of Marx and the followers of Hitler". Likewise, Angell maintained that Carr's claim that "resistance to aggression" was only a empty slogan on the part of the "have" nations meant only for keeping down the "have not" nations was a "veritable gold mine for Dr. Goebbels". In response to The Twenty Years' Crisis, Angell wrote a book entitled Why Freedom Matters intended to rebut Carr. Another of the "utopian" thinkers attacked by Carr, Arnold J. Toynbee wrote that reading The Twenty Years' Crisis left one "in a moral vacuum and at a political dead point". Another "utopian", the British historian R.W. Seton-Watson wrote in response that it was "simply farcical" that Carr could wrote of morality in international politics without mentioning Christianity once in his book.

Carr immediately followed up The Twenty Year's Crisis with Britain : A Study Of Foreign Policy From The Versailles Treaty To The Outbreak Of War, a study of British foreign policy in the inter-war period that featured a preface by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. Carr ended his support for appeasement, which had so vociferously expressed in The Twenty Year's Crisis in the late summer of 1939 with a favourable review of a book containing a collection of Churchill's speeches from 1936—38, which Carr wrote were "justifiably" alarmist about Germany. After 1939, Carr largely abandoned writing about international relations in favour of contemporary events and Soviet history. Carr was to write only three more books about international relations after 1939, namely The Future Of Nations; Independence Or Interdependence? (1941), German-Soviet Relations Between The Two World Wars, 1919—1939 (1951) and International Relations Between The Two World Wars, 1919—1939 (1955). After the outbreak of World War II, Carr stated that he was somewhat mistaken in his views on Nazi Germany which he advanced before the war. In the 1946 revised edition of The Twenty Years' Crisis, Carr was more hostile in his appraisal of German foreign policy then he had been in the first edition in 1939.

Some of the major themes of Carr's writings were changes over time, and the relationship between ideational and material forces in society. Carr saw a major theme of history was the growth of reason as a social force. Carr argued that all major social changes had been caused by revolutions or wars, both of which Carr regarded as necessary, but unpleasant means of accomplishing social change. Carr saw his major task in all of writings of finding a better way of working out social transformations. Carr maintained that every revolution starting with the French Revolution had helped to move humanity in a progressive direction, but had failed to complete their purpose because of the lack of the essential instruments to finish the revolutionary project. Carr asserted that social changes had to be linked with a realistic understanding of the limitations of social changes in order to build lasting institutions capable of maintaining social change. Carr claimed that in modern industrial society that a dialogue between various social forces was the best way of achieving a social transformation "toward goals which can be defined only as we advance towards them, and the validity of which can only be verified in a process of attaining them".

World War II

During World War II, Carr's political views took a sharp turn towards the left. Carr spent the Phony War working as a clerk with the propaganda department of the Foreign Office. As Carr did not believe Britain could defeat Germany, the declaration of war on Germany on September 3, 1939 left him highly depressed.

In March 1940, Carr resigned from the Foreign Office to serve as the writer of leaders (editorials) for The Times. In his second leader published on June 21, 1940 entitled "The German Dream", Carr wrote that Hitler was offering a "Europe united by conquest". Carr went on to write:

"There must and will be a new order in Europe. But this cannot be achieved through the overweening ambition of one man or one country in defiance of the will of the majority of Europeans and of the whole world outside of Europe. To speculate on better ways of building the new order would at the present time be to divert energy from far more urgent tasks. But two conditions must at least be fulfilled. The new European order cannot be achieved through conquest but only through co-operation and it must unite Europe with the non-European world, not divide Europe from it."

In a leader of July 1, 1940 Carr wrote that the first conclusion to drawn from the present war was that "the conception of the small national unit, not strong enough for an active role in international politics, but enjoying all the prerogatives and responsibilities of a sovereignty, has been rendered obsolete by modern armaments and the scope of modern warfare". Carr ended by writing:

"Europe can no longer afford a multiplicity of economic units, each maintaining its independent economic system behind a barbed wire of tariffs, quotas, exchange restrictions and barter agreements...Over the greater part of Western Europe the common values for which we stand are known and prized. We must indeed beware of these values in purely nineteenth-century terms. If we speak of democracy, we do not mean a democracy which maintains the right to vote but forgets the right to work and the right to live. If we speak of freedom, we do not mean a rugged individualism which excludes social organization and economic planning. If we speak of equality, we do not mean a political equality nullified by social and economic privilege. If we speak of economic reconstruction we think less of maximum production (through this too will be required) than of equitable distribution".

In a leader during the summer of 1940, Carr defended the Soviet annexation of the Baltic states under the grounds that this was "not merely pressure from Moscow, but sincere recognition that this was a better alternative than absorption into a new Nazi Europe".

Carr served as the assistant editor of The Times from 1941 to 1946, during which time he was well known for his pro-Soviet attitudes which he expressed in his leaders (editorials) he wrote. After June 1941, Carr' s already strong admiration for the Soviet Union was much increased by the Soviet Union's role in defeating Germany.

In one of his first leaders Carr for the Times, he declared:

"The PRIME MINISTER expressed the mood of the nation when he declared that our only present war aim is victory. Nevertheless the British will to victory is still bound up with the conviction that our war aims stand on a different plane from those of the enemy, and that victory for our aims will point the way to a new social and international order in Europe".

Carr called the war aim of "destroying Hitlerism" insufficient, and demanded that the British government express "a definite picture of what we are fighting for, both to hearten our own people at home and to counteract German propaganda abroad" In a leader of December 5, 1940 entitled "The Two Scourges", Carr wrote that only by removing the "scourge" of unemployment could one also remove the "scourge" of war. Such was the popularity of "The Two Scourges" that it was published as a pamphlet in December 1940, during which in its first print run of 10, 000 it completely sold out. In a speech given in December 1940, Carr declared his views about the war that in his opinion:

"This is not altogether a national war, it is to a certain extent a social war, a revolutionary war; as a political revolution it is not simply confined to one country but is more or less world-wide".

Carr's left-wing leaders caused some tension with the editor of the Times, Geoffrey Dawson, who felt that Carr was taking the Times in a too radical direction, which led Carr for a time being restricted only to writing on foreign policy. After Dawson's ouster in May 1941 and his replacement with Robert M'Gowan Barrington-Ward, Carr was given a free rein to write on whatever he wished. In turn, Barrington-Ward was to find many of Carr's leaders on foreign affairs to be too radical for his liking.

Carr's leaders were noted for their advocacy of a socialist European economy under the control of an international planning board, and for his support for the idea of an Anglo-Soviet alliance as the basis of the post-war international order. In one of his leaders, Carr stated "The new order cannot be based on the preservation of privilege, whether the privilege be that of a country, of a class, or of an individual." Carr himself later described his attitude to the Soviets during his stint at the Times:

"In the Times I very quickly began to plug the Russian alliance; and when this was vindictated by Russian endurance and Russian victory, it revived my faith in the Russian revolution as a great achievement and a historical turning point. It was obvious that the Russia of the Second World War was a very different place from the Russia of the First-terms of people as well of material resources. Looking back on the thirties, I came to feel that my preoccupation with the purges and brutalities of Stalinism had distorted my perspective. The black spots were real enough, but looking exclusively at them destroyed one's vision of what was really happening".

Unlike many of his contemporaries in war-time Britain, Carr was against a Carthaginian peace with Germany, and argued for a post-war reconstruction of Germany along socialist lines. In Carr's opinion, National Socialism was not the natural result of Deutschtum (Germanism), but rather of capitalism. Carr claimed that once capitalism was removed from German society, then the social forces which gave birth to fascism would wither away and die. On his leaders on foreign affairs, Carr was very consistent in arguing after 1941 that once the war ended, it was the fate of Eastern Europe to come into the Soviet sphere of influence, and claimed that any effort to the contrary was both vain and immoral. In a leader of August 1941 entitled "Peace and Power", Carr wrote that power in Eastern Europe:

"...can fall only to Germany or to Russia. Neither Great Britain nor the United States can exercise, or will agree to exercise, any predominant role in these regions...There can be no doubt that British and Russian-and it may be added, American-interests alike demand that Russian influence in Eastern Europe should not be eclipsed by that of Germany."

In December 1941, Carr wrote "...in Europe, Great Britain and Soviet Russia must become the main bulwarks of a peace which can be preserved, and can be made real, only through their joint endeavour." In a memo sent to the British diplomat Frank Roberts (who had criticized Carr's views about the Baltic states) on January 16, 1942 Carr wrote:

"After the collapse of Russia and Germany the Baltic States enjoyed an almost accidental independence during the twenty years interregnum from 1919 to 1939. Apart from this interval in history it was always true that they would have fallen within the orbit either of Russia or Germany, and it is now more certain than ever in an age which has exposed the illusions of neutrality in Europe. The winning of the war means that they will fall within the orbit of Russia".

Between 1942—45, Carr was the Chairman of a study group at the Royal Institute of International Affairs concerned with Anglo-Soviet relations. Carr's study group concluded that Stalin had largely abandoned Communist ideology in favour of Russian nationalism, that the Soviet economy would provide a higher standard of living in the Soviet Union after the war, and it was both possible and desirable for Britain to reach a friendly understanding with the Soviets once the war had ended. In 1942, Carr published Conditions of Peace followed by Nationalism and After in 1945, in which he outlined his ideas about the post-war world should look like. In his books, and his Times leaders, Carr urged for the post-war world, the creation of a socialist European federation anchored by an Anglo-German partnership that would be aligned with, but not subordinated to the Soviet Union against the country that Carr saw as the principal post-war danger to world peace, namely the United States.

In his 1942 book Conditions of Peace, Carr argued that it was a flawed economic system which had caused World War II, and that the only way of preventing another world war was for the Western powers to fundamentally change the economic basis of their societies by adopting socialism. Carr argued that the post-war world required a "European Planning Authority" and a "Bank of Europe" that would control the currencies, trade, and investment of all the European economies. One of the main sources for ideas in Conditions of Peace was the 1940 book Dynamics of War and Revolution by the American fascist Lawrence Dennis In a review of Conditions of Peace, the British writer Rebecca West criticised Carr for using Dennis as a source, commenting "It is as odd for a serious English writer to quote Sir Oswald Mosley" In a speech on June 2, 1942 in the House of Lords, Viscount Elibank attacked Carr as an "active danger" for his views in Conditions of Peace about a magnanimous peace with Germany and for suggesting that Britain turn over all of her colonies to an international commission after the war.

In a leader of March 10, 1943 Carr wrote that:

"There can be no security in Western Europe unless there is also security in Eastern Europe, and security in Eastern Europe is unattainable unless it is buttressed by the military power of Russia. A case so clear and cogent for close co-operation between Britain and Russia after the war cannot fail to carry conviction to any open and imprartial mind."

In the same leader Carr argued for:

"ungrudging and unqualified agreement on the supposition that "If Britain's frontier is on the Rhine", it might just as pertinently be said-though it has not in fact been said-that Russia's frontier is on the Oder, and in the same sense."

The leader of March 10, 1943 led to a protest from the Polish Ambassador, Count Edward Raczy?ski, who wrote in response that he "knew what Carr's idea of Eastern Europe was, but it is not the idea of the Poles, and they knew well what Russia would mean by friendly governments".

The next month, Carr's relations with the Polish government were further worsted by the storm caused by the discovery of the Katyn Forest massacre committed by the NKVD in 1940. In a leader entitled "Russia and Poland" on April 28, 1943, Carr blasted the Polish government for accusing the Soviets of committing the Katyn Forest massacre, and for asking the Red Cross to investigate Carr wrote that:

"Every Polish statesmen and every Polish student of history knows his country imperatively needs the friendship of at least one of her greater neighbours, east and west. No Pole today can contemplate the deliberate co-operation of Germany...Yet the action of the Polish government ten days ago beyond a doubt played, in fact though not in intention, directly into German hands [Carr is referring here to the Polish request for the Red Cross to investigate the Katyn Forest massacre] ...Any Polish quarrel with Russia, whatever its origin, necessarily injures the cause of both Poland and of the United Nations."

In 1943, the Classicist Gilbert Murray wrote a letter to Carr, who was still the Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Relations at Aberystwyth complaining on behalf of Lord Davies that:

"The Chair is a "Wilson Chair" and was certainly intended to be a Chair for the Exposition of the League of Nations idea, and the founder has a right to be rather upset when he finds his professor carrying on a sort of anti-Wilson and anti-League campaign. It is not as if you merely criticised the League and wanted it changed and developed; you consider it fundamentally wrong and Wilson's principles as self-contradictory".

In reply to Murray, Carr wrote:

"May I suggest a closer parallel than yours? Would a Newton Professor of Physics be precluded from arguing that Einstein had demonstrated the inadequacy and over-simplification of Newton's laws".

Lord Davies who had been extremely unhappy with Carr almost from the moment that Carr had assumed the Wilson Chair in 1936 launched a major campaign in 1943 to have Carr fired, being particularly upset that through Carr had not taught since 1939, he was still drawing his professor's salary Lord Davies's efforts to have Carr fired failed when the majority of the Aberystwyth staff supported by the powerful Welsh political fixer Thomas Jones sided with Carr.

In December 1944, when fighting broke out in Athens, Greece between the Greek Communist ELAS and the British Army, Carr in a Times leader sided with the Greek Communists, leading to Winston Churchill to condemn him in a speech to the House of Commons. Churchill called Carr's leader defending E.L.A.S "a melancholy document" that in his opinion reflected the decline of British journalism. Carr claimed that the Greek Communist front-organization EAM was the "largest organised party or group of parties in Greece" that "appeared to exercise almost unchallengeable authority" and called for Britain to recognize the EAM as the legal Greek government. The Anglo-American historian Robert Conquest accused Carr of hypocrisy in supporting the E.A.M/E.L.A.S., noting Carr was violating his own "Might is Right" precepts of international power politics, in which the stronger power was always in the right, regardless of the facts of the case. Since Britain was a much stronger power in the world than the Greek Communists, Conquest argued that Carr by his own standards should have been on the British side during the fighting in Athens in December 1944.

In contrast to his support for E.A.M/E.L.A.S, Carr was strongly critical of the legitimate Polish government in exile and its Armia Krajowa (Home Army) resistance organization. In his leaders of 1944 on Poland, Carr urged that Britain break diplomatic relations with the London government and recognize the Soviet sponsored Lublin government as the lawful government of Poland. In a Times leader of February 10, 1945, Carr questioned whatever the Polish government in exile even had the right to speak on behalf of Poland Carr wrote that it was extremely doubtful about whatever the London government had "an exclusive title to speak for the people of Poland and a liberum veto on any move towards a settlement of Polish affairs" Carr went to argue that "The legal credentials of this Government are certainly not beyond challenge if it were relevant to examine them: the obscure and tenuous thread of continuity leads back at best to a constitution deriving from a quasi-Fascist coup d'état" Carr ended his leader with the claim that "What Marshal Stalin desires to see in Warsaw is not a puppet government acting under Russian orders, but a friendly government which fully conscious of the supreme impotence of Russo-Polish concord, will frame its independent policies in that context."

In a May 1945 leader, Carr blasted those who felt that an Anglo-American "special relationship' would be the principal bulwark of peace, writing that:

"It would be the height of unwisdom to assume that an alliance of the English-speaking world, even it were to find favour with American opinion could form by itself the all-sufficient pillar of world security and render superfluous any other foundation for British policy in Europe."

As a result of Carr's leaders, the Times became popularly known during World War II as the three pence Daily Worker (the price of the Daily Worker was one penny). Commenting on Carr's pro-Soviet leaders, the British writer George Orwell wrote in 1942 that:

"all the appeasers, e.g. Professor E. H. Carr, have switched their allegiance from Hitler to Stalin".

Reflecting his disgust with Carr's leaders in the Times, the British civil servant Sir Alexander Cadogan, the Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office wrote in his diary: "I hope someone will tie Barrington-Ward and Ted Carr together and throw them into the Thames."

Carr was to elaborate on these ideas he had first advocated in Conditions of Peace in his 1945 book Nationalism and After. In that book, Carr wrote "The driving force behind any future international order must be a belief...in the value of individual human beings irrespective of national affinities or allegiance." Carr argued that just as the military was under civilian control, that likewise so should "the holders of economic power...be responsible to, and take their orders from, the community in exactly the same way". Carr claimed it was necessary to create "maximum social and economic opportunity" for all, and argued that this would be achieved via an international planning authority that would control the world economy, and provide for "increased consumption for social stability and equitable distribution for maximum production". Carr described his views at the time as:

"Like a lot of other people, I took refuge in Utopian visions of a new world order after the war; after all, it was on the basis of such visions that a lot of real constructive work was done, and Churchill lost sympathy by being openly impatient of them. I began to be a bit ashamed of the harsh "realism" of The Twenty Years' Crisis and in 1940—41 wrote the highly Utopian Conditions of Peace [1942]-a sort of liberal Utopia, mixed with a little socialism but very little Marxism. It was my most popular book to date because it caught the current mood. But it was pretty feeble."

In 1945 during a lecture series entitled The Soviet Impact on the Western World, which were published as a book in 1946, Carr argued that "The trend away from individualism and towards totalitarianism is everywhere unmistakable", that Marxism was the by far the most successful type of totalitarianism as proved by Soviet industrial growth and the Red Army's role in defeating Germany and that only the "blind and incurable" ignored these trends. During the same lectures, Carr called democracy in the Western world a sham, which permitted a capitalist ruling class to exploit the majority, and praised the Soviet Union as offering real democracy. Carr claimed that Soviet social policies were far more progressive than Western social policies, and argued democracy was more about social equality than political rights. During the same series of lectures, Carr argued that "It was Marshal Stalin who, consciously or unconsciously usurping Woodrow Wilson's role in the previous war, once more placed democracy in the forefront of Allied war aims." Carr went on to argue that "The degree of moral favour for the social purposes of Soviet policy which is, according to all observers, generated among the citizens of the Soviet Union is an answer to those critics who used to argue that Marxism could never be successful because it lacked moral appeal." Finally, Carr claimed that:

"The social and economic system of the Soviet Union, offering-as it does-almost unlimited possibilities of internal development, is hardly subject to those specific stimuli which dictated expansionist policies to capitalist Britain in the 19th century...there is nothing in Soviet policy so far to suggest that the east-west movement is likely to take the form of armed aggression or military conquest. The peaceful penetration of the Western world by ideas emanating from the Soviet Union has been, and seems likely to remain, a far important and conspicuous symptom of the new East-West movement. Ex Oriente Lux."

One of Carr's leading associates, the British historian R.W Davies was later to write that Carr's view of the Soviet Union as expressed in The Soviet Impact on the Western World was a rather glossy, idealized picture that owed much to war-time propaganda about "our gallant Russian ally", and to Carr's very considerable faith in the Soviet Union as offering a superior social system to the West.

Cold War

, Carr wrote that "I think we have to consider seriously the hypothesis that the world revolution of which [the Bolshevik revolution] was the first stage, and which will complete the downfall of capitalism, will prove to be the revolt of the colonial peoples against capitalism in the guise of imperialism"]]In 1946, Carr started living with Joyce Marion Stock Forde, who was to remain his common law wife until 1964. In 1947, Carr was forced to resign from his position at Aberystwyth The Marxist historian Christopher Hill wrote that in the late 1940s "it was thought, or pretended to be thought that any irregularity in one's matrimonial position made it impossible for one to be a good scholar or teacher." In November 1946, Carr was involved with a radio debate with Arnold J. Toynbee on Britain's position in the world. Through Carr expressed support for Toynbee's idea of British neutrality in the emerging Cold War, Carr rejected Toynbee's idea that Britain "liquidate without too many qualms our political commitments and economic outposts in other continents". Carr declared that "The trouble about politics and economics is that if you run away from them they are apt to run after you-especially if you occupy as Britain does, a conspicuous and coveted and vulnerable position". In the late 1940s, Carr started to become increasingly influenced by Marxism. His name was on Orwell's list, a list of people which George Orwell prepared in March 1949 for the Information Research Department, a propaganda unit set up at the Foreign Office by the Labour government. Orwell considered these people to have pro-communist leanings and therefore to be inappropriate to write for the IRD.

In May—June 1951, Carr delivered a series of speeches on British radio entitled The New Society, attacked capitalism as a great social evil, and advocated a planned economy with the British state controlling every aspect of British economic life. Carr was a reclusive man who few knew well, but some of his circle of close friends included Isaac Deutscher, A. J. P. Taylor, Harold Laski and Karl Mannheim. Carr was especially close to Deutscher. Deutscher's widow was later to write of the deep, if unlikely friendship that was stuck between:

"...a self-educated, former member of the Polish Communist Party — Marxist by conviction, Jewish by origin — who was a refugee from Hitler and Stalin stranded in London; and, on the other side, an English historian who was an unmistakable product of Cambridge, a former member of the Foreign Office, schooled in a diplomatic service famous as a bastion of British traditionalism".

In 1948, Carr condemned British acceptance of an American loan in 1946 as the marking the effective end of British independence. Carr wrote that:

"The acceptance of the American loan with the conditions attached to it in 1946 was the turning point at which Britain ceased to control her own economic destinies. It is still arguable that the conditions should have been rejected and the consequences of rejection faced. The results of acceptance were perhaps psychological even more than practical. But the practical results should not be ignored. Through the conditions were never fully enforced, the fiasco of sterling convertibility in the summer of 1947 was extremely costly; and American objections to European economic union continued well into 1947-by which time the practical difficulties of its realization had enormously increased...The American loan opened the way to a silent infiltration of American influence into almost every walk of British public life. It is today almost impossible to imagine the appointment to any important public post (including posts in the Armed Forces and in the civil service as well as in industry) of anyone not persona grata in corresponding American circles. To be pro-American pays handsome dividends: to be known as anti-American is a bar to promotion to a responsible position in any walk of life. Worst of all, British dependence on the United States is now taken for granted in quite broad sections of the population and had [sic] bred a widespread sense of hopelessness and incapacity to help ourselves, so that American help and American patronage which were intended to provide a stimulus to increased productivity in Britain are in danger of producing the opposite result.".

Carr went to write that the best course for Britain was to seek neutrality in the Cold War and that "peace at any price must be the foundation of British policy". Carr ended by writing:

"It may be that the question whether war breaks out between Russia and America affects us far more than the question whether we can increase the productivity of labour or improve the organization of industry or the distribution of consumer goods. But the point is that we can hardly do anything about the first question and a great deal about the second".

Carr took a great deal of hope from the Soviet-Yugosl

Carr contributed to the foundation of what is now known as classical realism in International relations theory. Through study of history (work of Thucydides and Machiavelli) and reflection and deep epistemological disagreement with Idealism, the dominant International relations theory between the World Wars, he came up with realism. In his book The Twenty Years' Crisis, Carr defined three dichotomies of realism and utopianism (Idealism), derived from Machiavellian realism:

In the first place, history is a sequence of cause and effect, whose course can be analysed and understood by intellectual effort, but not (as the utopians believe) directed by " imagination ". Secondly; theory does not (as the utopians assume) create practice, but practice theory. In Machiavelli's words, " good counsels, whence so ever they come, are born of the wisdom of the prince, and not the wisdom of the prince from good counsels ". Thirdly, politics are not (as the utopians pretend) a function of ethics, but ethics of politics. Men " are kept honest by constraint ". Machiavelli recognised the importance of morality, but thought that there could be no effective morality where there was no effective authority. Morality is the product of power. [Carr, 1939]

Carr's distinctions of Realism and Utopianism

In the second part of the book The Twenty Years' Crisis, Carr defined six distinctions between Realism and Utopianism. The first being two schematic descriptions of idealism and realism (utopia and reality). The utopian believes in the possibility of transforming society by an act of will. The main problem of the utopian is his/her lack of information regarding the constraints that the reality poses upon us. Not regarding these constraints seriously, the utopian cannot assess his/her current position and thus is unable to move from the actual state of affairs to his/her desire. A Utopian may want a world in peace, but have no viable plan of action to bring peace on Earth, only the belief that it should be so and the conviction that such a belief will bring peace into being.

On the other hand, the realists take the society we live in as a historical consequence. The social reality is the product of a long chain of causality, a predetermined result. Thus, it cannot be changed by an act of will. The realist, taking things as they are, deprives him/herself from the possibility of changing the world.

The second distinction is that between theory and practice. For the utopian, we derive the answer to "what should be done?" from theory. The all-important question is to be able to conceive of a utopia. Once the target is constructed in mind, all we have to do is to get there. Thus, utopian confuses what "is" and what "ought to be". When a utopian says "men are equal", he actually means "men ought to be equal". The difference is crucial and confusing in actual politics. For the realist, theory is derived from reality, the actual state of affairs. While the utopian tries to reproduce reality with reference to theory, the realist tries to produce theory from reality. Thus, for a realist, a theory based on the equality of men is simply wrong or wishful thinking. The realist theory is descriptive, and you cannot derive policy from that theory; it is not prescriptive.

For Carr, one has to see the interdependence of the two. Most of our reality is the product of some ideas that took shape in the form of institutions or applied rules. Every theory carries in it a part of reality and vice versa. The problems we face in reality force us to think and imagine new ways of reality. The theory (solution) we produce changes reality and becomes part of reality. When that reality creates new problems, we come up with further theory to solve them and it goes on like this. That is a circle of causality.

The third distinction is that between the intellectual who derives the truth from books and the bureaucrat who derives it from actual experience. The intellectual believes in the predominance of theory and thus thinks of himself as the true guide of the so-called man of action. The bureaucrat is bound up with the existing order. He has no formula or theory that guides him. He merely tries to make the existing order within which he exists, continue to exist.

The fourth distinction is that between left and right. The left is progressive in the utopian sense while the right is conservative in the realist sense.

The fifth is between radical and conservative (left and right, though Carr notes, that not always radicals and conservatives represent those political orientation). Radicals are utopians, intellectuals, theoretician, while conservatives are realists, bureaucrats and people from practice.

Finally, the same distinction appears between ethics and politics. The utopian believes in the predominance of ethics as a guide to policy. The realist believes that ethics is derived from the relations of power as they stand. Thus, politics pre-dominates. For Carr, the ability to see from both angles is the right way to go about.