Abstract
This chapter presents the hypothesis that Edward H. Carr and Carl Schmitt, despite their different philosophical starting points and opposite political affinities, paved the way to Hans Morgenthau’s post-WWII classical realism. In order to do so, I resort to a dynamic interpretation of Martin Wight’s “three traditions”-typology, positing that materialist authors such as Carr and conservative authors such as Schmitt do not merely have in common their rejection of rationalist liberal postulates at the basis of interwar idealism, but do also overlap positively because of their shared emphasis of conflicts among collective units as the engine of history. The chapter then shows that Morgenthau, whatever the ambiguity of his relationship with Schmitt and above all Carr, started his analysis with a criticism against liberal internationalism, equated politics to power politics among collective units, and displayed an elitist conception of mankind.
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Battistella, D. (2021). Edward H. Carr and Carl Schmitt: Interwar Realism’s Not so Strange Bedfellows. In: Reichwein, A., Rösch, F. (eds) Realism. Trends in European IR Theory. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58455-9_3
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