Abstract
It is an interesting but little known fact that although E.H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis is generally regarded to have had a devastating impact on the ‘utopian’ thinking of the inter-war period, the Utopians themselves, or at any rate those so labelled by Carr, did not feel particularly devastated by it. Norman Angeli and Alfred Zimmern, two of Carr’s chief ‘utopian’ targets, wrote highly critical reviews of the book, and although he did not, to my knowledge, publish his thoughts on the subject, Arnold Toynbee, Carr’s other major living target, agreed whole heartedly with what his utopian fellow travellers had to say. In addition, a number of thinkers not specifically indicted by Carr felt sufficiently wounded by his remarks to write lengthy replies. Among them can be counted a distinguished moral philosopher, Susan Stebbing, and a fellow man of the Left who shared many of Carr’s ideas about the ‘New Society’, the Fabian and Bloomsburyite, Leonard Woolf. Other less than convinced respondents included the historian, R.W. Seton-Watson and, writing under a pseudonym, Richard Grossman, future government minister and political diarist, then a Labour local councillor and a journalist on the New Statesman.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1939), pp. 102–12.
Zimmern, ‘A Realist in Search of Utopia’, Spectator, 24 November 1939, p. 750.
R.W. Seton-Watson, ‘Politics and Power’, Listener, 7 December 1939, Supplement, p. 48.
R. Coventry, ‘The Illusions of Power’, New Statesman, Vol. 28, No. 457 25 November 1939, pp. 761–2
(reprinted in R.H.S. Crossman, The Charm of Politics and Other Essays in Political Criticism (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958), pp. 91–4).
L. Woolf, The War for Peace (London: Routledge, 1940), p. 129.
L. Woolf, ‘Utopia and Reality’, Political Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 2 A6pril–June 1940, p. 172.
L. Susan Stebbing, Ideals and Illusions (London: Watts and Co., 1941), pp. 6–7.
F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1986 [1944]), pp. 138–41, 169–72.
I comment on this further in my ‘The New Europe Debate in Wartime Britain’, in Philomena Murray and Paul Rich, eds, Visions of European Unity (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), pp. 39–62.
W.T.R. Fox, ‘E.H. Carr and Political Realism: Vision and Revision’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 1985, pp. 1–16
E.H. Carr, Britain: A Study of Foreign Policy from the Versailles Treaty to the Outbreak of War (London: Longmans, 1939).
See F.S. Northedge, The League of Nations: Its Life and Times 1920–1946 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1986), pp. 46–69, 317–27.
A. Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law (London: Macmillan, 1935), pp. 277–85.
Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, second edition, (London, Macmillan, 1946), p. 225.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2000 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wilson, P. (2000). Carr and his Early Critics: Responses to The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1939–46. In: Cox, M. (eds) E. H. Carr. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08823-9_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08823-9_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-3904-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-08823-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)