E.H. Carr and the Complexity of Power Politics

Abstract

The current wave of interest in E.H. Carr has culminated in several articles: a special edition of the Review of International Studies, two biographies, and a critical reintroduction, providing evidence of Carr’s enduring importance to a discipline, International Relations, that has accorded him iconic status.¹ This chapter tries to build on the achievements of previous commentators on the works of Carr, not by seeking to rescue Carr’s theory from the clutches of Realism or by making it serve as the foundation for a more emancipatory discourse of IR, but by examining Carr’s theory on its own terms as a highly complex and individualized dialectic of power and morality. In doing so, one begins to develop an awareness that this most foundational of Realists in IR theory creates a more nuanced political philosophy of power than the paradigmatic Realism with which he is often associated. The singularities of Carr’s approach mark the emergence of Realism as a social theory of change in IR, something he shared in common with Morgenthau; however, where Morgenthau feared the future, Carr embraced it. Methodologically, Carr also introduced a dialogical element to IR theory, which attempts to place theory in the context of a continuing debate between utopianism and Realism. It is this methodology that constitutes Carr’s positive theory of IR, a theory that is based not on being in international politics, but of becoming.