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The Utopian realism of E. H. Carr*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2009
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E. H. Carr is a thinker on international affairs who defies easy classification. His best-known work on the subject, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, delivered a powerful realist critique, still resonant today, of the idealist approach to international relations and helped bring about a renewed emphasis on the role of power in international affairs. Less familiar to students of international relations are Carr's more optimistic works. In Conditions of Peace and Nationalism and After, written during World War II, he was sanguine about the prospects for a peaceful postwar order and outlined the steps required to bring about that happy state of affairs. The same hopeful themes were sounded in the years after the war in The Soviet Impact on the Western World, The New Society and other shorter essays.
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References
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58 Imagery courtesy of Zacher, Mark, ‘The Decaying Pillars of the Westphalian Temple: Implications for International Order and Governance’, in Rosenau, James and Czempiel, Ernst Otto (eds), Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge, 1992).Google Scholar
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67 On this point, Carr was influenced by Freud's idea that in matters of human conduct we must always distinguish between the conscious and unconscious motivations driving human behaviour. See Carr, The New Society, p. 72.
68 Carr, The Soviet Impact, p. 85. See also chapters 1 and 2.
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82 Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, pp. 8–10.
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85 Carr, Nationalism and After, pp. 38–60.
86 This, of course, presupposes that no antithesis will arise to challenge modern liberalism, that we have, in Francis Fukayama's terms, come to the end of history. To assume this is to adopt a Eurocentric outlook. It is to suppose that revolutions in Western states established the outer bounds of possible social arrangements whose stable middle ground we have been groping towards ever since. Others writing in this vein have made the same assumption as Carr. Kant, of course, thought republican governmen t was the key to perpetual peace. More recently, George Modelski has suggested that in coming years ‘[an international] community is likely to form on the basis of shared democratic practices’ (see Modelski, ‘Is World Politics?’, p. 22).
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