Edward Hallett Carr
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Edward Hallett "Ted" Carr CBE
(28 June 1892 – 3 November 1982) was a liberal and later Marxist British historian
, journalist and international relations
theorist, and an opponent of empiricism
within historiography
.
Carr was best known for his 14-volume history of the Soviet Union, in which he provided an account of Soviet history from 1917 to 1929, for his writings on international relations, and for his book What Is History?
, in which he laid out historiographical principles rejecting traditional historical methods and practices.
Educated at the Merchant Taylors' School
, London, and at Trinity College, Cambridge
, Carr began his career as a diplomat in 1916. Becoming increasingly preoccupied with the study of international relations and of the Soviet Union, he resigned from the Foreign Office in 1936 to begin an academic career. From 1941 to 1946, Carr worked as an assistant editor at The Times, where he was noted for his leaders (editorials) urging a socialist system and an Anglo-Soviet alliance as the basis of a post-war order. Afterwards, Carr worked on a massive 14-volume work on Soviet history entitled A History of Soviet Russia
, a project that he was still engaged on at the time of his death in 1982. In 1961, he delivered the G. M. Trevelyan lectures at the University of Cambridge
that became the basis of his book, What is History? Moving increasingly towards the left throughout his career, Carr saw his role as the theorist who would work out the basis of a new international order.
in London, and Trinity College, Cambridge
, where he was awarded a First Class Degree in Classics
in 1916. 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. They 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 tariff
s 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 Carr's part 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 professors 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?.
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:
s 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
on 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 Gdańsk
, 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:
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:
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:
, 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 Supplements 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:
. Carr wrote:
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:
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:
It was at this time that Carr started to admire the Soviet Union. Carr wrote in a book review in February 1931:
'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:
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:
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 written it only 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:
, and played a role in Carr's resignation from the Foreign Office later in 1936 In an 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 such as the Remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936 Carr later wrote of his views in the 1930s that "No doubt, I was very blind".
, 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:
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 was 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 gone to great lengths to try to 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, who, Carr asserted, were only reacting to the problems of the Great Depression. Carr stated:
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 Beneš
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 and 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 disillusion 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 hopeless 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 privileged "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 contented status whereas "have not" powers like Germany, Italy and Japan were inclined towards war as they had nothing to lose. 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 their community, writing that "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:
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:
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:
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
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 that 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:
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".Angell maintained that Carr's claim that "resistance to aggression" was only an 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 write of morality in international politics without mentioning Christianity once in his book. In a 2004 speech, the American political scientist John Mearsheimer
praised the The Twenty Years' Crisis and argued that Carr was correct when he claimed that international relations was a struggle of all against all with states always placing their own interests first. Mearsheimer maintained that Carr’s points were still as relevant for 2004 as for 1939 and went on to deplore what he claimed was the dominance of “idealist” thinking about international relations among British academic life
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 prewar views on Nazi Germany. 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. Through The Twenty Years' Crisis was published just months before World War II began, the Japanese historian Saho Matusumoto wrote that in a sense, Carr's book began the debate on the origins of World War II.
Some of the major themes of Carr's writings were change 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".
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:
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 the pro-Soviet attitudes that 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:
, 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:
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, the social forces that gave birth to fascism
would wither away and die. On his leaders on foreign affairs, Carr was very consistent (and correct) 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:
(who had criticized Carr's views about the Baltic states) on January 16, 1942 Carr wrote:
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 that 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 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:
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:
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:
In December 1944, when fighting broke out in Athens
, Greece between the Greek Communist front organization 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 (correctly) that the Greek 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 EAM/ELAS, 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 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:
(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:
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:
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:
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 in 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 his 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:
In 1948, Carr condemned British acceptance of an American loan in 1946 as the marking the effective end of British independence. Carr wrote that:
Throughout the remainder of Carr's life after 1941, his outlook was basically sympathetic towards Communism and its achievements. In the early 1950s, when Carr sat on the editorial board of the Chatham House, he attempted to block the publication of the manuscript that eventually became The Origins of the Communist Autocracy by Leonard Schapiro
under the grounds that the subject of repression in the Soviet Union was not a serious topic for a historian. As interest in the subject in Communism grew, Carr largely abandoned international relations
as a field of study. In part, Carr's turn away from international relations was due to his increasing scepticism about the subject. In 1959, Carr wrote to his friend and protégé Arno J. Mayer
, shortly after he began teaching international relations at Harvard warning against attempts to turn international relations into a separate subject apart from history, which Carr viewed as a foolish attempt to sever a sub-discipline of history by turning it into a discipline of its own. In 1956, Carr did not comment about the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Uprising while at the same time condemning the Suez War
.
In his few books about international relations after 1938, despite a change in emphasis, Carr's pro-German views regarding inter-war international relations continued. For an example, in his 1955 book International Relations Between the Two World Wars, 1919–1939, Carr claimed that the German default on timber reparations
in December 1922, which sparked the 1923 Ruhr crisis
, was very small and explained that the French reaction in occupying the Ruhr
was grossly disproportionate to the offence. As the American historian Sally Marks noted, even in 1955 this was a long-discredited pro-German "myth", and that in fact the German default was enormous, and Germany had been defaulting on a large scale and a frequent basis since 1921.
In 1966, Carr left Forde and married the historian Betty Behrens. That same year, Carr wrote in an essay that in India where "liberalism is professed and to some extent practised, millions of people would die without American charity. In China, where liberalism is rejected, people somehow get fed. Which is the more cruel and oppressive regime?" One of Carr's critics, the British historian Robert Conquest
, commented that Carr did not appear to be familiar with recent Chinese history, because, judging from that remark, Carr seemed to be ignorant of the millions of Chinese who had starved to death during the Great Leap Forward
. In 1961, Carr published an anonymous and very favourable review of his friend A. J. P. Taylor
's contentious book The Origins of the Second World War, which caused much controversy. In the late 1960s, Carr was one of the few British professors to be supportive of the New Left
student protestors, who, he hoped, might bring about a socialist revolution in Britain. In a 1969 introduction to the collection of essays, Heretics and Renegades and Other Essays by Carr's friend, Isaac Deutscher
, Carr endorsed Deutscher's attack on George Orwell
's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four
on the grounds that Nineteen Eighty-Four could not be an accurate picture of the Soviet Union as Orwell had never visited that state.
Carr exercised wide influence in the field of Soviet studies and international relations. The extent of Carr's influence could be seen in the 1974 festschrift
in his honour, entitled Essays In Honour of E.H. Carr ed. Chimen Abramsky
and Beryl Williams. The contributors included Sir Isaiah Berlin
, Arthur Lehning
, G.A. Cohen, Monica Partridge, Beryl Williams, Eleonore Breuning, D.C. Watt, Mary Holdsworth, Roger Morgan
, Alec Nove, John Erickson
, Michael Kaser, R.W. Davies, Moshe Lewin
, Maurice Dobb
, and Lionel Kochan
. The contributors examined such topics as the social views of Georges Sorel
, Alexander Herzen
and Mikhail Bakunin
; the impact of the Revolution of 1905 on Russian foreign policy, Count Ulrich von Brokdorff-Rantzau
and German-Soviet relations; and developments in the Soviet military, education, economy and agriculture in the 1920s–1930s. Another admirer of Carr is the American Marxist historian Arno J. Mayer
, who has stated that his work on international relations owes much to Carr.
During his last years, Carr continued to maintain his optimism in a better future, in spite of what he regarded as grave setbacks. In a 1978 interview in The New Left Review, Carr called capitalism a crazy economic system that was doomed to die. In the same interview, Carr complained about what he called "obsessive hatred and fear of Russia", stating "an outburst of national hysteria on this scale is surely the symptom of a sick society". In a 1980 letter to his friend, Tamara Deutscher, Carr wrote that he felt that the government of Margaret Thatcher
had forced "the forces of Socialism" in Britain into a "full retreat". In the same letter to Deutscher, Carr wrote that "Socialism cannot be obtained through reformism, i.e. through the machinery of bourgeois democracy". Carr went on to decry disunity on the Left, and wrote:
in China in the late 1970s as a regressive development, he saw opportunities, and wrote to his stock broker in 1978: "a lot of people, as well as the Japanese, are going to benefit from the opening up of trade with China. Have you any ideas?". In one of his last letters to Tamara Deutscher, shortly before his death in 1982, Carr expressed a great deal of dismay at the state of the world, writing that "The left is foolish and the right vicious." Carr wrote to Deutscher that the sort of socialism envisioned by Marx could never be achieved via the means of democracy, but complained that the working class in Britain were not capable of staging the revolution needed to destroy British capitalism. Carr criticized what he regarded as an excessive preoccupation in the West with the human rights situation in the Soviet Union, blasted the European Left for naïveté, and Eurocommunism
as a useless watered-down version of Communism. Carr wrote to Deutscher:
A latter day controversy concerning Carr surrounds the question of whether he was an anti-Semite. Carr's critics point to the fact that he was champion in succession of two anti-Semitic dictators, namely Hitler and Stalin, his opposition to Israel
, and to the fact that most of Carr's opponents such as Sir Geoffrey Elton, Leonard Schapiro
, Sir Karl Popper
, Bertram Wolfe
, Richard Pipes
, Adam Ulam
, Leopold Labedz
, Sir Isaiah Berlin
, and Walter Laqueur
were Jewish. Carr's defenders such as Jonathan Haslam have argued against the charge of anti-Semitism, noting that Carr had many Jewish friends (including such erstwhile intellectual sparring partners such as Berlin and Namier), that his last wife Betty Behrens was Jewish and that his support for Nazi Germany in the 1930s and the Soviet Union in the 1940s–50s was in spite rather than because of anti-Semitism in those states.
from 1953 to 1955 when he became a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
. In the 1950s, Carr was well known as an outspoken admirer of the Soviet Union. Carr's writings include his History of Soviet Russia (14 vol., 1950–78). During World War II, Carr was favourably impressed with what he regarded as the extraordinary heroic performance of the Soviet people, and towards the end of 1944 Carr decided to write a complete history of the Soviet Russia from 1917 comprising all aspects of social
, political
and economic history
in order to explain how the Soviet Union withstood the challenge of the German invasion. The resulting work was his 14 volume History of Soviet Russia, which took the story up to 1929. Carr initially intended the series to begin in 1923 with a long chapter summarizing the state of the Soviet Union just before Lenin's death. Carr found that the idea of one chapter on the situation in the Soviet Union in the year 1923 "proved on examination almost ludicrously inadequate to the magnitude of Lenin's achievement and of its influence on the future".
Carr's friend and close associate, the British historian R.W. Davies, was to write that Carr belonged to the anti-Cold-War school of history, which regarded the Soviet Union as the major progressive force in the world, the United States as the world's principal obstacle to the advancement of humanity, and the Cold War
as a case of American aggression against the Soviet Union. In 1950, Carr wrote in the defence of the Soviet Union that:
argument, Carr criticized those WASP historians who, he felt, had unfairly judged the Soviet Union by the cultural norms of Britain and the United States. In 1960, Carr wrote that:
Carr began his magnum opus by arguing that the 1917 October Revolution was a "proletarian revolution" forced on the Bolsheviks. Carr argued that:
In Carr's view, Soviet history
went through three periods in the inter-war era and was personified by the change of leadership from Vladimir Lenin
to Joseph Stalin
. After an initial period of chaos, Carr wrote that the dissolution of the Constituent Assemby
in January 1918 was the last "tearing asunder of the veil of bourgeois constitutionalism", and that henceforward, the Bolsheviks would rule Russia their own way. Carr, like many others, argued that the emergence of Russia from a backward peasant economy to a leading industrial power was the most important event of the 20th century. The first part of a History of Soviet Russia comprised three volumes entitled The Bolshevik Revolution, published in 1950, 1952, and 1953, and traced Soviet history from 1917 to 1922. During the writing of the first volumes of The History of Soviet Russia, Deutscher had much influence on Carr's understanding of the period. The second part was intended to comprise three volumes called The Struggle for Power, which was intended to cover the years 1922–28, but Carr instead to decided to publish a single volume labelled The Interregnum that covered the events of 1923–24, and another four volumes entitled Socialism In One Country, which took the story up to 1926. The final volumes in the series were entitled The Foundations of the Planned Economy, which covered the years until 1929. Originally, Carr had planned to take the series up to Operation Barbarossa
in 1941 and the Soviet victory of 1945, but his death in 1982 put an end to the project.
Carr argued that Soviet history went through three periods in the 1917–45 era. In the first phrase was the war communism
era (1917–21), which saw much rationing, economic production focused into huge centres of manufacturing, critical services and supplies being sold at either set prices or for free, and to a large extent a return to a barter economy. Carr contended that the problems in the agrarian sector forced the abandonment of war communism in 1921, and its replacement by the New Economic Policy
(NEP). During the same period saw what Carr called one of Lenin's "astonishing achievements", namely the gathering together of nearly all of the former territories of Imperial Russia (with the notable exceptions of Finland, Poland, Lithuania
, Latvia
and Estonia
) under the banner of the Soviet Union. In the NEP period (1921–28), Carr maintained that the Soviet economy became a mixed capitalist-socialist one with peasants after fulfilling quotas to the state being allowed to sell their surplus on the open market, and industrialists being permitted be allowed to produce and sell agricultural and light industrial goods. Carr contended that the post-Lenin succession struggle after 1924 was more about personal disputes than ideological quarrels. In Carr's opinion, "personalities rather than principles were at stake". Carr argued that the victory of Stalin over Leon Trotsky
in the succession struggle was inevitable because Stalin was better suited to the new order emerging in the Soviet Union in the 1920s than Trotsky. Carr stated "Trotsky was a hero of the revolution. He fell when the heroic age was over." Carr argued that Stalin had stumbled into the doctrine of "Socialism in One Country
" more by accident than by design in 1925, but argued that Stalin was swift to grasp how effective the doctrine was as a weapon to beat Trotsky with. Carr wrote
and the OGPU. Writing of the OGPU, Carr noted that since the Bolsheviks had eliminated all of their enemies outside of the Party by the mid-1920s: "The repressive powers of the OGPU were henceforth directed primarily against opposition in the party, which was the only effective form of opposition in the state." Reflecting his background as a diplomat and scholar on international relations, Carr provided very detailed treatment of foreign affairs with a focus on both the Narkomindel and the Comintern
. In particular, Carr examined the relationship between the Soviet Communist Party and the other Communist parties around the world, the Comintern's structure, the Soviet reaction to the Locarno Treaties
, and the early efforts (ultimately successful in 1949) to promote a revolution in China.
The third phrase was the period of the Five Year Plans beginning with the First Five-Year Plan
in 1928, which saw the Soviet state promoting the growth of heavy industry, eliminating private enterprise, collectivising agriculture, and of quotes for industrial production being set in Moscow. In Carr's opinion, the changes wrought by the First Five Year were a positive development. Carr argued that the economic system that existed during the N.E.P. period was highly inefficient, and that any economic system based on planning by the state was superior to what Carr saw as the disorganized chaos of capitalism. Carr accepted the Soviet claim that the so-called "kulak
s" existed as a distinct class, that they were a negative social force, and as such, the "dekulakisation" campaign that saw at least 2 million alleged "kulaks" deported to the Gulag
in 1930–32 was a necessary measure that improved the lives of the Soviet peasantry. R.W. Davies, Carr's associate and co-writer on the History of Soviet Russia expressed some doubts to Carr about whatever the "kulaks" actually existed, and thought the term was more an invention of Soviet propaganda than a reflection of the social conditions in the Soviet countryside.
Accompanying these social-economic changes were the changes in the leadership. Carr argued that Lenin saw himself as the leader of an elite band of revolutionaries who sought to give power to the people and wanted a world revolution. By contrast, Carr claimed that Stalin was a bureaucratic leader who concentrated power in his own hands, ruled in a ruthless fashion, carried a policy of "revolution from above", and by promoting a merger of Russian nationalism
and Communism
cared more for the interests of the Soviet Union than for the world Communist movement. However, Carr argued that Stalin's achievements in the making the Soviet Union a great industrial power by and large outweighed any of the actions for which he is commonly criticized for. Carr claimed that Stalin played both the roles of dictator and emancipator simultaneously, and argued that this reflected less than the man then the times and place in which he lived. Writing of Stalin, Carr claimed "Few great men have been so conspicuously as Stalin the product of the time and place in which they live." Carr claimed that if even Lenin had not died in 1924, history would still had worked out the same. In 1978, Carr claimed that if Lenin were still alive in 1928, he "would have faced exactly the same problems" as did Stalin, and had chosen the same solution, namely the "revolution from above". But Carr argued that Lenin would had been able to "minimize and mitigate the element of coercion" in the "revolution from above". As a result, Carr wrote that: "Stalin's personality, combined with the primitive and cruel traditions of the Russian bureaucracy, imparted to the revolution from above a particularly brutal quality."
A book that was not part of the History of Soviet Russia series, though closely related due to common research in the same archives was Carr's 1951 book German-Soviet Relations Between the Two World Wars, 1919–1939. In that book, Carr blamed the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain
for the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 Carr accused Chamberlain of deliberately snubbing Joseph Stalin
's offers of an alliance, and as such, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
, which partitioned much of Eastern Europe
between Germany and the Soviet Union was under the circumstances the only policy the Soviets could have followed in the summer of 1939 Following the official interpretation of the reasons for the German-Soviet pact in the Soviet Union, Carr went to accuse Chamberlain of seeking to direct German aggression against the Soviet Union in 1939. Carr argued that Chamberlain was pursuing this alleged policy of seeking to provoke a German-Soviet war as a way of deflecting German attention from Western Europe and because of his supposed anti-Communist phobias. Carr argued that the British "guarantee" of Poland given on March 31, 1939 was a foolhardy move that indicated Chamberlain's preference for an alliance with Poland as opposed to an alliance with the Soviet Union. In Carr's opinion, the sacking of Maxim Litvinov
as Foreign Commissar on May 3, 1939 and his replacement with Vyacheslav Molotov
indicated not a change in Soviet foreign policy from the collective security approach that Litvinov had championed as many historians argue, but was rather Stalin's way of engaging in hard bargaining with Britain and France. Carr argued that the Anglo-French delegation sent to travel on Moscow on the slow ship City of Exeter in August 1939 to negotiate the "peace front" as the proposed revived Triple Entente
was called, were unimpressive diplomats and their unwillingness and inability to pressure the Poles to grant to transit rights to the Red Army
reflected a fundamental lack of interest in reaching an alliance with the Soviet Union. By contrast, Carr argued that the willingness of the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop
to come to Moscow anytime via aero-plane with full powers to negotiate whatever was necessary to secure a German-Soviet alliance reflected the deep German interest in reaching an understanding with the Soviets in 1939. Carr defended the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact under the grounds that: "In return for 'non-intervention' Stalin secured a breathing space of immunity from German attack." According to Carr, the "bastion" created by means of the Pact, "was and could only be, a line of defence against potential German attack." An important advantage (projected by Carr) was that "if Soviet Russia had eventually to fight Hitler, the Western Powers would already be involved." In an implicit broadside against the idea of West German membership in NATO (a controversial subject in the early 1950s) and Atlanticism
, Carr concluded his book with the argument that ever since 1870 German foreign policy had always been successful when the Reich was aligned with Russia and unsuccessful when aligned against Russia, and expressed hope that the leaders of the then newly founded Federal Republic would understand the lessons of history.
In 1955, a major scandal that damaged Carr's reputation as a historian of the Soviet Union occurred when he wrote the introduction to Notes for a Journal, the supposed memoir of the former Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov
that was shortly there afterwards was exposed as a forgery. Notes for a Journal was a KGB
forgery written in the early-1950s by a former Narkomindel official turned Chekist forger named Grigori Besedovsky specializing in forgeries designed to fool gullible Westerns. The American historian Barry Rubin
argued it can be easily be established that Notes for a Journal was an anti-Semitic forgery in that in the Notes Litvinov was portrayed as a proud Jew whereas the real Litvinov did not see himself as Jewish at all, and more importantly the Notes showed Litvinov together with other Soviet officials of Jewish origin working behind the scenes for Jewish interests in the Soviet Union. Rubin also noted other improbabilities in Notes for a Journal such having Litvinov meeting regularly with rabbis in order to further Jewish interests, describing Aaron Soltz
as the son of a rabbi whereas he was the son of a merchant and having those Soviet officials of Jewish origin be referred to by their patronyms
. Rubin argued that this portrayal of Litvinov reflected Soviet anti-Semitism, and that Carr was amiss in not recognizing Notes for a Journal as the anti-Semitic forgery it was.
The first volume of A History of Soviet Russia published in 1950 was criticized by some historians, most notably the British Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher
(who was a close friend) as being too concerned with institutional development of the Soviet state, and for being impersonal and dry, capturing little of the tremendous emotions of the times. Likewise, Carr was criticized from both left and right for his downplaying of the importance of ideology for the Bolsheviks, and his argument that the Bolsheviks thought in only in terms of Russia rather than the entire world. In a 1955 article, Deutscher argued that:
contended in 1955 that:
noted that Carr had a strong preference for Lenin the politician attempting to build a new order in Russia after 1917 vs. Lenin the revolutionary working to destroy the old order before 1917 The scope and scale of History of Soviet Russia was illustrated in a letter Carr wrote to Tamara Deutscher, where in one volume Carr wished to examine Soviet relations with all of the Western nations between 1926–29, relations between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Western Communist parties; efforts to promote a "World Revolution"; the work and the "machinery" of the Comintern
and the Profintern
, Communist thinking on the "Negro Question" in the United States, and the history of Communist parties in China, Outer Mongolia
, Turkey
, Egypt
, Afghanistan
, and the Dutch East Indies
.
A recurring theme of Carr's writings on Soviet history was his hostility towards those who argued that Soviet history could have taken different courses from what it did. In a 1974 book review of the American historian Stephen F. Cohen's biography of Nikolai Bukharin
published in the Times Literary Supplement, Carr lashed out against Cohen for advocating the thesis that Bukharin represented a better alternative to Stalin. Carr dismissed Cohen's argument that the NEP was a viable alternative to the First Five Year Plan, and contemptuously labelled Bukharin a weak-willed and a rather pathetic figure who was both destined and deserved to lose to Stalin in the post-Lenin succession struggle. Carr ended his review by attacking Cohen as typical of the American left, who, Carr claimed, were a group of ineffective, woolly-headed idealists who, in a reference to the recent Watergate scandal
, could not even bring down Richard Nixon
, whom Carr charged had brought himself down while the American left did nothing useful to facilitate that event. Carr ended his review with the scornful remark that since the American left could produce nothing but "losers" like George McGovern
, so it was natural that an American leftist like Cohen would sympathize with Bukharin, whom Carr likewise regarded as a great "loser" of history.
Carr's last book, 1982's The Twilight of the Comintern, though not officially a part of the History of Soviet Russia series, was regarded by Carr as the completion of the series. In this book, Carr examined the response of the Comintern to fascism in the years 1930–1935. Carr claimed that the failure of the Austrian-German customs union project of 1931 due to intense French pressure, besides discrediting the German Chancellor Heinrich Brüning
, had left Germany open to Western economic domination due to the bank collapse of the Creditanstalt
followed by the rest of the Central European banking system, and thus led to the triumph of National Socialism in 1933. Carr praised the 1932 article written by his friend Isaac Deutscher
condemning the Third Period
of the Comintern and calling for a united front of socialists and Communists against fascism as an excellent analysis, which had it been followed might have spared the world Nazi Germany. In this same way, Carr praised the examination of fascism offered by Trotsky as being very astute and penetrating. Carr argued that Trotsky was correct in condemning the Comintern's social fascism
theory as doing more harm than good for the cause of the left, and contended that though the SPD
was basically a "bourgeois" party, it was not a fascist party as the Comintern claimed Carr maintained that the Comintern was divided into two fractions in the early 1930s. One fraction headed by the Hungarian Communist Béla Kun
preferred the Third Period policy of treating the non-communist left as "disguised fascists", whereas another fraction headed by the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov
supported a policy of building popular fronts with socialists and liberals against fascism. Carr argued that the adoption of the Popular Front
policy in 1935 had been forced on Stalin by pressure from Communist parties abroad, especially the French Communist Party
Carr contended that the 7th Congress of the Comintern in 1935 was essentially the end of the Comintern since it marked the abandonment of world revolution as a goal, and instead subordinated the cause of Communism and world revolution towards the goal of building popular fronts against fascism Another related book that Carr was unable to complete before his death, and was published posthumously by Tamara Deutscher in 1984, was The Comintern and the Spanish Civil War.
The History of Soviet Russia volumes met with a mixed reception. The Encyclopaedia Britannia in 1970 described the History of Soviet Russia series as simply "magisterial". The British historian Chimen Abramsky
praised Carr as the world's foremost historian of the Soviet Union who displayed an astonishing knowledge of the subject. In a 1960 review of Socialism in One Country, the Anglo-Austrian Marxist scholar Rudolf Schlesinger praised Carr for his comprehensive treatment of Soviet history, writing that no other historian had ever covered Soviet history in such detail. The Canadian historian John Keep called the series "A towering scholarly monument; in its shadow the rest of us are but pygmies." Deutscher called A History of Soviet Russia "...a truly outstanding achievement". The left-wing British historian A. J. P. Taylor
called A History of Soviet Russia the most fair and best series of books ever written on Soviet history. Taylor was later to call Carr "an Olympian among historians, a Goethe in range and spirit". The American journalist Harrison Salisbury
called Carr "one of the half dozen greatest specialists in Soviet affairs and in Soviet-German relations". The British academic Michael Cox
praised the History of Soviet Russia series as "...an amazing construction: almost pyramid-like...in its architectural audacity" The British historian John Barber argued that History of Soviet Russia series through a scrupulous and detailed survey of the evidence "transformed" the study of Soviet history in the West. The British historian Hugh Seton-Watson
called Carr "an object of admiration and gratitude" for his work in Soviet studies The South African born British Marxist historian Hillel Ticktin praised Carr as an honest historian of the Soviet Union and accused all of his critics such as Norman Stone
, Richard Pipes
, and Leopold Labedz
of being "Cold War" historians who betoken to McCarthyism criticized Carr for being "for being on the side of the people". Ticktin went to label Carr's critics "...an entirely unsavory collection, not unconnected with serving the needs of official British and American foreign policy" who were "...closely identified with a discredited right-wing politics...". Ticktin described historians such as Pipes and Labedz as being "...never intellectuals but bureaucrats of knowledge, if not worse". Ticktin went to call all historians who were critical of the Soviet Union either rabidly right-wing "Cold Warriors" such as Richard Pipes
and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
or "CIA intellectuals", and called Carr an "icon of the Left" who sought to honestly portray Soviet history. In 1983, four American historians, namely Geoff Eley
, W. Rosenberg, Moshe Lewin
and Ronald Suny
in a joint article in the London Review of Books wrote of the "grandeur" of Carr's work and his "extraordinary pioneering quality". The four went on to write:
wrote that the "…History of Soviet Russia constitutes, with Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, the most remarkable effort of single-handed historical scholarship undertaken in Britain within living memory". The American historian Peter Wiles called the History of Soviet Russia "one of the great historiographical enterprises of our day" and wrote of Carr's "immensely impressive" work The American Marxist historian Arno J. Mayer
wrote that "...the History of Soviet Russia...established E.H. Carr not only as the towering giant among Western specialists of recent Russian history, but certainly also as the leading British historian of his generation". Most unusually for a book by a Western historian, A History of Soviet Russia met with warily favourable reviews by Soviet historians. Normally, any works by Western historians, no matter how favourable to Communism, met with hostile reviews in the Soviet Union, and there was even a brand of polemical literature by Soviet historians attacking so-called "bourgeois historians" under the xenophobic grounds that only Soviet historians were capable of understanding the Soviet past".
The History of Soviet Russia series were not translated into Russian and published in the Soviet Union until 1990. A Soviet journal commented in 1991 that Carr was "almost unknown to a broad Soviet readership", through all Soviet historians were aware of his work, and most of them had considerable respect for Carr, through they had been unable to say so until Perestroika
. Those Soviet historians who specialized in rebutting the "bourgeois falsifiers" as Western historians were so labelled in the Soviet Union attacked Carr for writing that Soviet countryside was in chaos after 1917, but praised Carr as one of the "few bourgeois authors" who told the "truth" about Soviet economic achievements. Through right up until glasnost
period, Carr was considered a "bourgeois falsifier" in the Soviet Union, Carr was praised as a British historian who taken "certain steps" towards Marxism, and whose History of Soviet Russia was described as "fairly objective" and "one of the most fundamental works in bourgeois Sovietology". In a preface to the Soviet edition of The History of Soviet Russia in 1990, the Soviet historian Albert Nenarokov wrote in his lifetime Carr had been 'automatically been ranked with the falsifiers", but in fact The History of Soviet Russia was a "scrupulous, professionally conscientious work". Nenarokov called Carr a "honest, objective scholar, espousing liberal principles and attempting on the basis of an enormous documentary base to create a satisfactory picture of the epoch he was considering and those involved in it, to assist a sober and realistic perception of the USSR and a better understanding of the great social processes of the twentieth century". However, Nenarokov expressed some concern about Carr's use of Stalinist language such as calling Bukharin part of the "right deviation" in the Party without the use of the quotation marks. Nenarokov took the view that Carr had too narrowly reduced Soviet history after 1924 down to a choice of either Stalin or Trotsky, arguing that Bukharin was a better, more humane alternative to both Stalin and Trotsky.
The pro-Soviet slant in Carr's The History of Soviet Russia attracted some controversy. The American writer Max Eastman
in a 1950 review of the first volume of A History of Soviet Russia called Carr as "a mild-quiet-hearted bourgeois with a vicarious taste for revolutionary violence" In 1951, the Austrian journalist Franz Borkenau
wrote in the Der Monat newspaper:
accused Carr of systemically taking on Lenin's point of view in History of Soviet Russia volumes and of being unwilling to consider other perspectives on Russian history. In 1962 the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper argued that Carr's identification with the "victors" of history meant that Carr saw Stalin as historically important, and that Carr had neither time nor sympathy for the millions of Stalin's victims. The Anglo-American historian Robert Conquest
argued that Carr took the official reasons for the launching of the First Five Year Plan too seriously, and argued that the "crisis" of the late 1920s was more the result of Soviet misunderstanding of economics than an "objective" economic crisis forced on Stalin. Furthermore, Conquest maintained that Carr's opponents such as Leonard Schapiro
, Adam Ulam
, Bertram Wolfe
, Robert C. Tucker
and Richard Pipes
had a far better understanding of Soviet history than did Carr. The Polish-born American historian Richard Pipes
wrote that the essential questions of Soviet history were: "Who were the Bolsheviks, what did they want, why did some follow them and others resist? What was the intellectual and moral atmosphere in which all these events occurred?", and went on to note that Carr failed to pose these questions, let alone answer them. Pipes was later to compare Carr's single paragraph dismissal in the History of Soviet Russia of the 1921 famine
as unimportant (because there were no sources for the death toll that Carr deemed trustworthy) with Holocaust denial
.
The Polish Kremlinologist Leopold Labedz
criticized Carr for taking the claims of the Soviet government too seriously. Labedz wrote that:
Labedz argued that:
argued that Carr was guilty of writing in a bland style meant to hide his pro-Soviet sympathies. Writing of a History of Soviet Russia in 1983, Stone commented that:
The American historian Walter Laqueur
argued that the History of Soviet Russia volumes were a dubious historical source that for the most part excluded mention of the more unpleasant aspects of Soviet life, reflecting Carr's pro-Soviet tendencies. Laqueur commented that Carr called Stalin a ruthless tyrant in his 1979 book The Russian Revolution, and noted that he almost totally refrained from expressing any criticism of Stalin in all 14 volumes of the History of Soviet Russia series. Likewise, Laqueur contended that Carr excelled at irony, and that writing panegyrics to the Soviet Union was not his forte. In Laqueur's opinion, if Carr is to be remembered by future generations, it will be for books like Dostoyevsky, The Romantic Exiles and Bakunin, and his History of Soviet Russia will besmirch the fine reputation created by those books. A major source of criticism of a History of Soviet Russia was Carr's decision to ignore the Russian Civil War
under the grounds it was unimportant, and likewise to his devoting only a few lines to the Kronstadt mutiny
of 1921 since Carr argued it only a minor event. Laqueur commented in his opinion that Carr's ignoring the Russian Civil War while paying an inordinate amount of attention to such subjects as the relations between the Swedish Communist Party and the Soviet Communist Party
and Soviet diplomatic relations with Outer Mongolia
in the 1920s left the History of Soviet Russia very unbalanced.
What Is History? Carr is also famous today for his work of historiography
, What is History?
(1961), a book based upon his series of G. M. Trevelyan
lectures, delivered at the University of Cambridge
between January–March 1961. In this work, Carr argued that he was presenting a middle-of-the-road position between the empirical
view of history and R. G. Collingwood
's idealism
. Carr rejected the empirical view of the historian's work being an accretion of "facts" that he or she has at their disposal as nonsense. Carr claimed:
, but only Julius Caesar
's crossing in 49 BC is declared noteworthy by historians. Carr divided facts into two categories, "facts of the past", that is historical information that historians deem unimportant, and "historical facts", information that the historians have decided is important. Carr contended that historians quite arbitrarily determine which of the "facts of the past" to turn into "historical facts" according to their own biases and agendas. Carr stated that:
's famous dictum wie es eigentlich gewesen (show what actually happened) was wrong because it presumed that the "facts" influenced what the historian wrote, rather than the historian choosing what "facts of the past" he or she intended to turn into "historical facts". At the same time, Carr argued that the study of the facts may lead the historian to change his or her views. In this way, Carr argued that history was "an unending dialogue between the past and present".
Carr used as an example of how he believed that "facts of the past" were transformed into the "facts of history" an obscure riot that took place in Wales
in 1850 that saw a gingerbread seller beaten to death. Carr argued that this incident had been totally ignored by historians until the 1950s when George Kitson Clark
mentioned it in one of his books. Since Kitson Clark, Carr claimed that several other historians have cited the same riot for what it revealed about Victorian Britain, leading Carr to assert that the riot and the murder of the gingerbread seller was in the progress of going from a "fact of the past" to a "fact of history" that in the future will be regularly cited by historians. Another example Carr used of his theory was the publication in 1932 of the papers of the former German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann
by his secretary Bernhard. Carr noted when Stresemann died in 1929, he left behind 300 boxes of papers relating to his time in office, and in 1932 Bernhard published three volumes of Stresemann's papers under the title Stresemanns Vermächtnis. Carr noted that because of the Dawes Plan
, the Locarno Treaties
(for which Stresemann was a co-winner of the Nobel peace prize), and the Young Plan
, Bernhard devoted most of the papers in Stresemanns Vermächtnis to Stresemann's work with relations to Britain, France and the United States. Carr noted that the documents of the Auswärtiges Amt
and Stresemann's own papers show that Stresemann was far more concerned with relations with the Soviet Union instead of the Western powers, and that Bernhard had edited the selection in Stresemanns Vermächtnis to focus more on Stresemann's Nobel Peace Prize-winning successes and to make him seem more like an apostle of peace than what he really was (one of Stresemann's major interests was in partitioning Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union). Moreover, Carr noted that when an English translation of Stresemanns Vermächtnis was published in 1935, the translator abbreviated one-third of the German original to focus more on those aspects of Stresemann's diplomacy that were of primary interest to British readers, which had the effect of making it seem that Stesemann was almost exclusively concerned with relations with the Western powers and had little time for relations with the Soviet Union. Carr commented that if it were only the English translation of Stresemanns Vermächtnis that had survived World War II, then historians would have been seriously misled about what Stresemann had been up to as Foreign Minister. Finally Carr argued that in the conversations between Stresemann and the Soviet Foreign Commissar Georgy Chicherin
, Stresemann does most of the talking and says all of the intelligent and original things, leading Carr to suggest that Stresemann himself had edited the papers to place himself in the best possible light. Carr used Stresemanns Vermächtnis to argue for the subjective nature of the documents historians used, which he then used to support his attacks against the idea of the work of the historians being purely that of a totally objective observer who "lets the facts speak for themselves".
Likewise, Carr charged that historians are always influenced by the present when writing about the past. As an example, he used the changing viewpoints about the German past expressed by the German historian Friedrich Meinecke
during the Imperial, Weimar, Nazi and post-war periods to support his contention. The British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, one of Carr's leading critics, summarised Carr's argument as:
In general, Carr held to a deterministic
outlook in history. In Carr's opinion, all that happens in the world had a cause, and events could not happened differently unless there was a different cause. In Carr's example, if one's friend Smith suddenly starts acting out of character one day, then it must be understood that there is a reason for the strange behaviour, and that if that reason did not exist, than Smith would be acting normally. Carr criticised counter-factual history as a "parlour game" played by the "losers" in history. Carr contended that those who engaged in counter-factual speculations about Russian history, such as if Count Pyotr Stolypin
's land reforms were given enough time, would the Russian Revolution have been prevented, were those who were uncomfortable about the fact that the Bolsheviks were the "winners" of Russian history and their opponents were not. Likewise, Carr asserted those who stress the importance of "accidents" as a central causal agent in history were the "losers" of history, who wished to play explain away their defeats as the workings of chance and fate. In the same way, Carr argued that historians must concern themselves with the "winners" of history. In Carr's example, it is those who score centuries in cricket
matches who are recorded, not those who are dismissed for ducks, and in the same way, Carr maintained that a preoccupation with the "losers" would be the equivalent of someone only listing the losers of cricket games. Carr dismissed the free will
arguments made by Sir Karl Popper
and Sir Isaiah Berlin
as Cold War
propaganda meant to discredit communism
. In a similar way, Carr took a hostile view of those historians who stress the workings of chance and contingency in the workings of history. In Carr's view, such historians did not understand their craft very well, or were in some way identified with the "losers" of history.
In the same way, Carr argued that no individual is truly free of the social environment in which they live, but contended that within those limitations, there was room, albeit very narrow room for people to make decisions that have an impact on history. Carr made a division between those who, like Vladimir Lenin
and Oliver Cromwell
, helped to shape the social forces that carried them to historical greatness and those who, like Otto von Bismarck
and Napoleon
, rode on the back of social forces over which they had little or no control. Though Carr was willing to grant individuals a role in history, he argued that those who focus exclusively on individuals in a Great man theory
of history were doing a profound disservice to the past. As an example, Carr complained of those historians who explained the Russian Revolution solely as the result of the "stupidity" of the Emperor Nicholas II
(which Carr regarded as a factor but only of lesser importance) rather than the working of a great social forces.
Carr claimed that when examining causation in history, historians should seek to find "rational" causes of historical occurrences, that is causes that can be generalized across time to explain other occurrences in other times and places. For Carr, historical "accidents" can not be generalized, and thus not worth the historian's time. Carr illustrated his theory by telling a story of a man named Robinson who went out to buy some cigarettes one night, and was killed by an automobile with defective brakes driven by a drunk driver named Jones on a sharp turn of the road. Carr argued one could contend that the "real" reasons for the accident that killed Robinson might be the defective brakes or the sharp turn of the road or the inebriated state of Jones, but that to argue that it was Robinson's wish to buy cigarettes was the cause of his death, that while a factor was not the "real" cause of his death. As such, Carr argued that those who were seeking to prevent a repeat of Robinson's death would do well to pass laws regulating drunk driving, straightening the sharp turn of the road and the quality of automobile brakes, but would be wasting their time passing a law forbidding people to take a walk to buy cigarettes. In a not too subtle dig at critics of determinism like Sir Karl Popper
and Sir Isaiah Berlin
, Carr spoke of the inquiry into Robinson's death being interrupted by two "distinguished gentlemen" who maintained quite vehemently that it was Robinson's wish to buy cigarettes that caused his death. In the same way, Carr argued that historians needed to find the "real" causes of historical events by finding the general trend which could inspire a better understanding of the present than by focusing on the role of the accidental and incidental.
As an example of his attack on the role of accidents in history, Carr mocked the hypothesis of "Cleopatra's nose" (Pascal's thought that, but for the magnetism exerted by the nose of Cleopatra on Mark Anthony
there would have been no affair between the two, and hence the Second Triumvirate
would not have broken up, and therefore the Roman Republic would have continued). Carr sarcastically commented that the male attraction to female beauty can hardly be considered an accident at all, and is rather one of the most common cases of cause and effect in the world. Other examples of "Cleopatra's Nose" type of history cited by Carr were the claim by Edward Gibbon
if the Turkish sultan Bayezid I
did not suffer from gout, he would have conquered Central Europe
, Winston Churchill
's statement if King Alexander had not died of a monkey bite, the Greco-Turkish War would have been avoided, and Leon Trotsky
's remark that if he not contracted a cold while duck hunting, he would not have missed a crucial Politburo
meeting in 1923. Rather than accidents, Carr asserted history was a series of causal chains interacting with each other. Carr contemptuously compared those like Winston Churchill
who in his book The World Crisis claimed that the death of King Alexander from a monkey bite caused the Greek-Turkish war to those who would claim that the "real" cause of Robinson's death was due to his desire to buy cigarettes. Carr argued that the claim that history was a series of "accidents" was merely an expression of the pessimism, which Carr claimed was the dominant mood in Britain in 1961 due to the decline of the British Empire.
In Carr's opinion, historical works that serve to broaden society's understanding of the past via generalisations are more "right" and "socially acceptable" than works that do not. Citing the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl
, Carr argued that as the values of society changes, so do the values of historical works. Carr used Geyl's 1946 book Napoleon: voor en tegen in de Franse geschiedschrijving (Napoleon For and Against) about how different French historians have viewed Napoleon in different periods to make a case that historians are always influenced by the society and times they live in. Carr argued that as society continues to progress in the 20th century, historians must change the values that they apply in writing their works to reflect the work of progress. Carr argued during his lectures that Karl Marx
had developed a schema for understanding past, present and the future that reflected the proper and dual role of the historian both to analyse the past and provide a call for action for the present in order to create a better future for humanity.
Carr emphatically contended that history was a social science
, not an art
. Carr argued that history should be considered a social science because historians like scientists seek generalizations that helped to broaden the understanding of one's subject. Carr used the example of the word revolution, arguing that if the word did not have a specific meaning that it would make no sense for historians to write of revolutions, even though every revolution that occurred in history was in its own way unique. Moreover, Carr claimed that historical generalisations were often related to lessons to be learned from other historical occurrences. Since in Carr's view, lessons can be sought and learned in history, then history was more like a science than any art. Though Carr conceded that historians can not predict exact events in the future, he argued that historical generalisations can supply information useful to understanding both the present and the future. Carr argued that since scientists are not purely neutral observers, but have a reciprocal relationship with the objects under their study just like historians, that this supported identifying history with the sciences rather than the arts. Likewise, Carr contended that history, like science, has no moral judgments, which in his opinion, supports the identification of history as a science.
Carr was well known for his assertions in What Is History? in denying moral judgements in history. Carr argued that it was ahistorical for the historian to judge people in different times according to the moral values of his or her time. Carr argued that individuals should be judged only in terms of the values of their time and place, not by the values of the historian's time and/or place. In Carr's opinion, historians should not act as judges. Carr quoted Thomas Carlyle
's remark on the British reaction to the French Revolution
: "Exaggeration abounds, execration, wailing and on the whole darkness"...", and complained that exactly the same could be said about too much of Western commentary and writing on the Russian Revolution
. Likewise, Carr quoted Carlyle on the Reign of Terror
as a way of confronting Western complaints about Soviet terror:
solely upon Neville Chamberlain
, those Germans who argued that Nazi-era crimes were the work of Adolf Hitler
alone or those in the United States who blamed McCarthyism
exclusively upon Senator Joseph McCarthy
. In Carr's opinion, historians should reject concepts like good and Evil
when making judgements about events and people. Instead, Carr preferred the terms progressive or reactionary as the terms for value judgements. In Carr's opinion, if a historical event such as the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture in the early 1930s led to the growth of the Soviet heavy industry and the achievement of the goals of the First Five Year Plan, then the collectivisation must be considered a progressive development in history, and hence all of the sufferings and millions of deaths caused by collectivisation, the "dekulakisation" campaign and the Holodomor
were justified by the growth of Soviet heavy industry. Likewise, Carr argued that the suffering of Chinese workers in the treaty ports and in the mines of South Africa in the late 19th-early 20th centuries was terrible, but must be considered a progressive development as it helped to push China towards the Communist revolution. Carr argued that China was much better off under the leadership of Mao Zedong
then it was under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek
, and hence all of the developments that led to the fall of Chiang's regime in 1949 and the rise to power of Mao must considered progressive. Finally, Carr argued that historians can be "objective" if they are capable of moving beyond their narrow view of the situation both in the past and in the present and write historical works that helped to contribute to progress of society.
At the end of his lectures, Carr criticized a number of conservative/liberal historians and philosophers such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, Sir Karl Popper
, Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison
, Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier
and Michael Oakeshott
, and argued that "progress" in the world was against them. Carr ended his book with the predication that "progress" would sweep away everything that Popper, Morison, Namier, Trever-Roper and Oakeshott believed in the 20th century just the same way that "progress" swept away the Catholic Church's opposition to Galileo Galilei
's astronomical theories in the 17th century. Elaborating on the theme of "progress" inevitably sweeping away the old order of things in the world, in a 1970 article entitled "Marxism and History", Carr argued that with the exception of the Mexican Revolution
, every revolution in the last sixty-odd years had been led by Marxists. The other revolutions Carr counted were the revolutions in Cuba
, China, Russia, and a half-revolution in Vietnam
(presumably a reference to the then on-going Vietnam War
). This together with what Carr saw as the miserable condition of the Third World
, which comprised most of the world led Carr to argue that Marxism had the greatest appeal in the Third World, and was the most likely wave of the future. Carr expanded on this thesis of "progress" being an unstoppable force in September 1978 when he stated:
In his notes for a second edition of What Is History?, Carr remarked on recent trends in historiography. Carr wrote about the rise of social history that:
. Carr wrote there was the structuralist approach, which Carr called a "horizontal" way of understanding history that "analyses a society in terms of the functional or structural inter-relation of its parts". Against it, there was what Carr called the "vertical" approach that "analyses it [society] in terms of where it has come from and where it is going". Through Carr was willing to allow that a structural approach had some advantages, he wrote:
who took a just-the-facts approach would resemble a character named Funes
in a short story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges
who never forgot anything he had seen or heard, so his memory was a "garbage heap" Thus, Funes was "not very capable of thought" because "to think is forget differences, to generalise, to make abstractions" In his introduction to the second edition of What is History? written shortly before his death in 1982, which was all that Carr had finished of the second edition, Carr proclaimed his belief that the western world was in a state of despair, writing:
The claims that Carr made about the nature of historical work in What Is History? proved be very controversial, and inspired Sir Geoffrey Elton to write his 1967 book The Practice of History in response, defending traditional historical methods. Elton criticized Carr for his "whimsical" distinction between the "historical facts" and the "facts of the past", arguing that it reflected "...an extraordinarily arrogant attitude both to the past and to the place of the historian studying it". Though Elton praised Carr for rejecting the role of "accidents" in history, he maintained that Carr's philosophy of history was merely an attempt to provide a secular version of the mediaeval view of history as the working of God's master plan with "Progress" playing the part of God. In response to Elton's book, Carr wrote a letter to him that began with a warning about suing him for libel. However, the libel threat was just a practical joke as Carr wrote "Nobody before has accused me of having been an undergraduate at Oxford, and my solicitors might, I fear take a low view of this". Carr was referring here to the sentence in The Practice of History where Elton had written that Carr's knowledge of ancient Greece were based on "the fifty-year memories of an Oxford undergraduate" (Carr had of course attended Cambridge).
The British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper argued that Carr's dismissal of the "might-have-beens of history" reflected a fundamental lack of interest in examining historical causation. Trevor-Roper asserted that examining possible alternative outcomes of history was far from being a "parlour-game" was rather an essential part of the historians' work. Trevor-Roper argued that only by considering all possible outcomes of a given historical situation could a historian properly understand the period under study. In Trevor-Roper's opinion, only by looking at all possible outcomes and all sides could a historian properly understand history, and those historians who adopted Carr's perspective of only seeking to understand the "winners" of history, and treating the outcome of a particular set of events as the only possible outcome were "bad historians". In a review in 1963 in Historische Zeitschrift, Andreas Hillgruber
wrote favourably of Carr's geistvoll-ironischer (ironically spirited) criticism of conservative, liberal and positivist historians A more positive assessment of What is History? came from the British philosopher W.H. Walsh who in a 1963 review endorsed Carr's theory of "facts of history" and "facts of the past", writing that it is not a "fact of history" he had toast for breakfast today. Walsh went on to write that Carr was correct that historians did not stand above history, and were instead products of their own places and times, which in turn decided what "facts of the past" they determined into "facts of history".
The British historian Richard J. Evans
credited What Is History? with causing a revolution in British historiography in the 1960s. The Australian historian Keith Windschuttle
, a critic of Carr noted regretfully that What Is History? has proved to be one of the most influential books ever written about historiography, and that there were very few historians working in the English language since the 1960s who had not read What Is History? Against Carr's theory of "facts of the past" and "facts of history", Winschuttle wrote:
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:
, 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 predominates. For Carr, the ability to see from both angles is the right way to go about.
The Papers of E. H. Carr are held at the University of Birmingham
Special Collections
Order of the British Empire
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by George V of the United Kingdom. The Order comprises five classes in civil and military divisions...
(28 June 1892 – 3 November 1982) was a liberal and later Marxist British historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
, journalist and international relations
International relations
International relations is the study of relationships between countries, including the roles of states, inter-governmental organizations , international nongovernmental organizations , non-governmental organizations and multinational corporations...
theorist, and an opponent of empiricism
Empiricism
Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,...
within historiography
Historiography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
.
Carr was best known for his 14-volume history of the Soviet Union, in which he provided an account of Soviet history from 1917 to 1929, for his writings on international relations, and for his book What Is History?
What is History?
What Is History? is a 1961 non-fiction book by historian Edward Hallett Carr on historiography. It discusses history, facts, the bias of historians, science, morality, individuals and society, and moral judgements in history....
, in which he laid out historiographical principles rejecting traditional historical methods and practices.
Educated at the Merchant Taylors' School
Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood
Merchant Taylors' School is a British independent day school for boys, originally located in the City of London. Since 1933 it has been located at Sandy Lodge in the Three Rivers district of Hertfordshire ....
, London, and at Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...
, Carr began his career as a diplomat in 1916. Becoming increasingly preoccupied with the study of international relations and of the Soviet Union, he resigned from the Foreign Office in 1936 to begin an academic career. From 1941 to 1946, Carr worked as an assistant editor at The Times, where he was noted for his leaders (editorials) urging a socialist system and an Anglo-Soviet alliance as the basis of a post-war order. Afterwards, Carr worked on a massive 14-volume work on Soviet history entitled A History of Soviet Russia
A History of Soviet Russia
A History of Soviet Russia was a 14-volume work by Edward Hallett Carr, covering the first twelve years of the history of the Soviet Union. It was first published from 1950 onwards, and re-issued from 1978 onwards....
, a project that he was still engaged on at the time of his death in 1982. In 1961, he delivered the G. M. Trevelyan lectures at the University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
that became the basis of his book, What is History? Moving increasingly towards the left throughout his career, Carr saw his role as the theorist who would work out the basis of a new international order.
Early life
Carr was born in London to a middle-class family, and was educated at the Merchant Taylors' SchoolMerchant Taylors' School, Northwood
Merchant Taylors' School is a British independent day school for boys, originally located in the City of London. Since 1933 it has been located at Sandy Lodge in the Three Rivers district of Hertfordshire ....
in London, and Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...
, where he was awarded a First Class Degree in Classics
Classics
Classics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean world ; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity Classics (sometimes encompassing Classical Studies or...
in 1916. 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. They were initially Conservatives
Conservative Party (UK)
The Conservative Party, formally the Conservative and Unionist Party, is a centre-right political party in the United Kingdom that adheres to the philosophies of conservatism and British unionism. It is the largest political party in the UK, and is currently the largest single party in the House...
, but went over to supporting the Liberals
Liberal Party (UK)
The Liberal Party was one of the two major political parties of the United Kingdom during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was a third party of negligible importance throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, before merging with the Social Democratic Party in 1988 to form the present day...
in 1903 over the free trade
Free trade
Under a free trade policy, prices emerge from supply and demand, and are the sole determinant of resource allocation. 'Free' trade differs from other forms of trade policy where the allocation of goods and services among trading countries are determined by price strategies that may differ from...
issue. When Joseph Chamberlain
Joseph Chamberlain
Joseph Chamberlain was an influential British politician and statesman. Unlike most major politicians of the time, he was a self-made businessman and had not attended Oxford or Cambridge University....
proclaimed his opposition to free trade and announced in favour of Imperial preference
Imperial Preference
Imperial Preference was a proposed system of reciprocally-levelled tariffs or free trade agreements between the dominions and colonies within the British Empire...
, Carr's father, for whom all tariff
Tariff
A tariff may be either tax on imports or exports , or a list or schedule of prices for such things as rail service, bus routes, and electrical usage ....
s 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 Carr's part 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 professors lecture on how the Peloponnesian War
Peloponnesian War
The Peloponnesian War, 431 to 404 BC, was an ancient Greek war fought by Athens and its empire against the Peloponnesian League led by Sparta. Historians have traditionally divided the war into three phases...
influenced Herodotus
Herodotus
Herodotus was an ancient Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria and lived in the 5th century BC . He has been called the "Father of History", and was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a...
in the writing of the Histories
Histories (Herodotus)
The Histories of Herodotus is considered one of the seminal works of history in Western literature. Written from the 450s to the 420s BC in the Ionic dialect of classical Greek, The Histories serves as a record of the ancient traditions, politics, geography, and clashes of various cultures that...
. 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 Office
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office, commonly called the Foreign Office or the FCO is a British government department responsible for promoting the interests of the United Kingdom overseas, created in 1968 by merging the Foreign Office and the Commonwealth Office.The head of the FCO is the...
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
E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax, , known as The Lord Irwin from 1925 until 1934 and as The Viscount Halifax from 1934 until 1944, was one of the most senior British Conservative politicians of the 1930s, during which he held several senior ministerial posts, most notably as...
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 Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
s were destined to win the Russian Civil War
Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
, and approved of the Prime Minister David Lloyd George
David Lloyd George
David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor OM, PC was a British Liberal politician and statesman...
's opposition to the anti-Bolshevik ideas of the War Secretary Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
on the grounds of realpolitik
Realpolitik
Realpolitik refers to politics or diplomacy based primarily on power and on practical and material factors and considerations, rather than ideological notions or moralistic or ethical premises...
. In Carr's opinion, Churchill's support of the White Russian
White movement
The White movement and its military arm the White Army - known as the White Guard or the Whites - was a loose confederation of Anti-Communist forces.The movement comprised one of the politico-military Russian forces who fought...
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"
Paris Peace Conference, 1919
The Paris Peace Conference was the meeting of the Allied victors following the end of World War I to set the peace terms for the defeated Central Powers following the armistices of 1918. It took place in Paris in 1919 and involved diplomats from more than 32 countries and nationalities...
and was involved in the drafting of parts of the Treaty of Versailles
Treaty of Versailles
The Treaty of Versailles was one of the peace treaties at the end of World War I. It ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. It was signed on 28 June 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The other Central Powers on the German side of...
relating to the League of Nations
League of Nations
The League of Nations was an intergovernmental organization founded as a result of the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War. It was the first permanent international organization whose principal mission was to maintain world peace...
. 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 Gdańsk
Gdansk
Gdańsk is a Polish city on the Baltic coast, at the centre of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.The city lies on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay , in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, spa town of Sopot, and suburban communities, which together form a metropolitan area called the...
, Poland) be ceded to Poland In March 1919, Carr fought against the idea of a Minorities Treaty
Little Treaty of Versailles
Little Treaty of Versailles or the Polish Minority Treaty was one of the bilateral Minority Treaties signed between minor powers and the League of Nations in the aftermath of the First World War. The Polish treaty was signed on 28 June 1919, the same day as the main Treaty of Versailles was signed...
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
Adam Zamoyski
Count Adam Stefan Zamoyski is a historian and a member of the ancient Zamoyski family of Polish nobility.-Life:Zamoyski was born in New York City, but was raised in England and was educated at Downside School and The Queen's College, Oxford...
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
Germanophile
A Germanophile is a person who is fond of German culture, German people, and Germany in general, exhibiting as it were German nationalism in spite of not being an ethnic German or a German citizen. Its opposite is Germanophobia...
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
Isaac Deutscher
Isaac Deutscher was a Polish-born Jewish Marxist writer, journalist and political activist who moved to the United Kingdom at the outbreak of World War II. He is best known as a biographer of Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin and as a commentator on Soviet affairs...
, Carr described his attitude to Poland at the time:
"This was the period of KorfantyWojciech KorfantyWojciech Korfanty , born Adalbert Korfanty, was a Polish nationalist activist, journalist and politician, serving as member of the German parliaments Reichstag and Prussian Landtag, and later on, in the Polish Sejm...
, ŻeligowskiLucjan ZeligowskiLucjan Żeligowski , was a Polish general, and veteran of World War I, the Polish-Soviet War and World War II. He is mostly remembered for his role in Żeligowski's Mutiny and as head of a short-lived Republic of Central Lithuania.-Biography:...
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
Order of the British Empire
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by George V of the United Kingdom. The Order comprises five classes in civil and military divisions...
. 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
League of Nations
The League of Nations was an intergovernmental organization founded as a result of the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War. It was the first permanent international organization whose principal mission was to maintain world peace...
before being sent to the British Embassy in Riga
Riga
Riga is the capital and largest city of Latvia. With 702,891 inhabitants Riga is the largest city of the Baltic states, one of the largest cities in Northern Europe and home to more than one third of Latvia's population. The city is an important seaport and a major industrial, commercial,...
, Latvia
Latvia
Latvia , officially the Republic of Latvia , is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Estonia , to the south by Lithuania , to the east by the Russian Federation , to the southeast by Belarus and shares maritime borders to the west with Sweden...
, 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
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
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
Alexander Herzen
Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen was a Russian pro-Western writer and thinker known as the "father of Russian socialism", and one of the main fathers of agrarian populism...
, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov....
and the work of other 19th century Russian intellectuals caused him to re-think his liberal
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
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
Fortnightly Review
Fortnightly Review was one of the most important and influential magazines in nineteenth-century England. It was founded in 1865 by Anthony Trollope, Frederic Harrison, Edward Spencer Beesly, and six others with an investment of £9,000; the first edition appeared on 15 May 1865...
, The Spectator
The Spectator
The Spectator is a weekly British magazine first published on 6 July 1828. It is currently owned by David and Frederick Barclay, who also owns The Daily Telegraph. Its principal subject areas are politics and culture...
, the Times Literary Supplement and later towards the end of his life, the London Review of Books
London Review of Books
The London Review of Books is a fortnightly British magazine of literary and intellectual essays.-History:The LRB was founded in 1979, during the year-long lock-out at The Times, by publisher A...
. In particular, Carr emerged as the Times Literary Supplements 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
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov....
, during which the course of researching Dostoevsky's life, Carr befriended Prince D. S. Mirsky
D. S. Mirsky
D.S. Mirsky is the English pen-name of Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky , often known as Prince Mirsky , a Russian political and literary historian who promoted the knowledge and translations of Russian literature in Britain and of English literature in the Soviet Union.-Life:A scion of the...
, a Russian émigré scholar living at that time in Britain.
Beside studies on international relations
International relations
International relations is the study of relationships between countries, including the roles of states, inter-governmental organizations , international nongovernmental organizations , non-governmental organizations and multinational corporations...
, Carr's writings in the 1930s included biographies of Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov....
(1931), Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
(1934), and Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was a well-known Russian revolutionary and theorist of collectivist anarchism. He has also often been called the father of anarchist theory in general. Bakunin grew up near Moscow, where he moved to study philosophy and began to read the French Encyclopedists,...
(1937). An early sign of Carr's increasing admiration of the Soviet Union was a 1929 review of Baron Pyotr Wrangel
Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel
Baron Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel or Vrangel was an officer in the Imperial Russian army and later commanding general of the anti-Bolshevik White Army in Southern Russia in the later stages of the Russian Civil War.-Life:Wrangel was born in Mukuliai, Kovno Governorate in the Russian Empire...
'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
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
. 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
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
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
Geneva
Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...
, 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
Arthur Henderson
Arthur Henderson was a British iron moulder and Labour politician. He was the 1934 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and he served three short terms as the Leader of the Labour Party from 1908–1910, 1914–1917 and 1931-1932....
. 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
Maurice Dobb
Maurice Herbert Dobb , was a British Marxist economist, and a lecturer 1924-1959 and Reader 1959-1976 at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge 1948-1976.-Life:...
'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
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
Carr wrote that in the 1920s, German leaders like Gustav Stresemann
Gustav Stresemann
was a German politician and statesman who served as Chancellor and Foreign Minister during the Weimar Republic. He was co-laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926.Stresemann's politics defy easy categorization...
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
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
, 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
Dialectical materialism
Dialectical materialism is a strand of Marxism synthesizing Hegel's dialectics. The idea was originally invented by Moses Hess and it was later developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...
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 written it only because his publisher had made a Marx biography the precondition of publishing the biography of Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was a well-known Russian revolutionary and theorist of collectivist anarchism. He has also often been called the father of anarchist theory in general. Bakunin grew up near Moscow, where he moved to study philosophy and began to read the French Encyclopedists,...
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.
Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act
The Tariff Act of 1930, otherwise known as the Smoot–Hawley Tariff was an act, sponsored by United States Senator Reed Smoot and Representative Willis C. Hawley, and signed into law on June 17, 1930, that raised U.S. tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods to record levels.The overall level tariffs...
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
Robert Vansittart, 1st Baron Vansittart
Robert Gilbert Vansittart, 1st Baron Vansittart GCB, GCMG, PC, MVO was a senior British diplomat in the period before and during the Second World War...
, and played a role in Carr's resignation from the Foreign Office later in 1936 In an 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
Treaty of Versailles
The Treaty of Versailles was one of the peace treaties at the end of World War I. It ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. It was signed on 28 June 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The other Central Powers on the German side of...
, which he viewed as unjust to Germany, Carr was very supportive of the Nazi regime's efforts to destroy Versailles through moves such 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, AberystwythUniversity of Wales, Aberystwyth
Aberystwyth University is a university located in Aberystwyth, Wales. Aberystwyth was a founding Member Institution of the former federal University of Wales. As of late 2006, the university had over 12,000 students spread across seventeen academic departments.The university was founded in 1872 as...
, and is particularly known for his contribution on international relations theory
International relations theory
International relations theory is the study of international relations from a theoretical perspective; it attempts to provide a conceptual framework upon which international relations can be analyzed. Ole Holsti describes international relations theories act as a pair of coloured sunglasses,...
. Carr's last words of advice as a diplomat was a memo urging that Britain accept the Balkans
Balkans
The Balkans is a geopolitical and cultural region of southeastern Europe...
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
Fortnightly Review
Fortnightly Review was one of the most important and influential magazines in nineteenth-century England. It was founded in 1865 by Anthony Trollope, Frederic Harrison, Edward Spencer Beesly, and six others with an investment of £9,000; the first edition appeared on 15 May 1865...
, Carr argued that the Soviet Union and France were not working for collective security
Collective security
Collective security can be understood as a security arrangement, regional or global, in which each state in the system accepts that the security of one is the concern of all, and agrees to join in a collective response to threats to, and breaches of, the peace...
, but rather "...a division of the Great Powers into two armored camps", supported non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
, and asserted that King Leopold III
Leopold III of Belgium
Leopold III reigned as King of the Belgians from 1934 until 1951, when he abdicated in favour of the Heir Apparent,...
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
Karl Mannheim
Karl Mannheim , or Károly Mannheim in the original writing of his name, was a Jewish Hungarian-born sociologist, influential in the first half of the 20th century and one of the founding fathers of classical sociology and a founder of the sociology of knowledge.-Life:Mannheim studied in Budapest,...
's 1936 book Ideology and Utopia, and the work of Reinhold Niebuhr
Reinhold Niebuhr
Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr was an American theologian and commentator on public affairs. Starting as a leftist minister in the 1920s indebted to theological liberalism, he shifted to the new Neo-Orthodox theology in the 1930s, explaining how the sin of pride created evil in the world...
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
David Davies, 1st Baron Davies
David Davies, 1st Baron Davies , was a politician and public benefactor, the grandson of the famous industrialist, David Davies "Llandinam"....
, 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
D. S. Mirsky
D.S. Mirsky is the English pen-name of Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky , often known as Prince Mirsky , a Russian political and literary historian who promoted the knowledge and translations of Russian literature in Britain and of English literature in the Soviet Union.-Life:A scion of the...
. Carr stumbled into Prince Mirsky on the streets of Leningrad
Leningrad
Leningrad is the former name of Saint Petersburg, Russia.Leningrad may also refer to:- Places :* Leningrad Oblast, a federal subject of Russia, around Saint Petersburg* Leningrad, Tajikistan, capital of Muminobod district in Khatlon Province...
(modern Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...
, 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
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
, and any Soviet citizen who had any unauthorized contact with a foreigner was likely to be regarded as a spy, the NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
arrested and executed Prince Mirsky as a British spy. As part of the same trip that took Carr to the Soviet Union in 1937 was a visit to Germany. In a speech given on October 12, 1937 at the Chatham House
Chatham House
Chatham House, formally known as The Royal Institute of International Affairs, is a non-profit, non-governmental organization based in London whose mission is to analyse and promote the understanding of major international issues and current affairs. It is regarded as one of the world's leading...
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 gone to great lengths to try to 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, who, 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 years…The 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
Appeasement
The term appeasement is commonly understood to refer to a diplomatic policy aimed at avoiding war by making concessions to another power. Historian Paul Kennedy defines it as "the policy of settling international quarrels by admitting and satisfying grievances through rational negotiation and...
. 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 Beneš
Edvard Beneš
Edvard Beneš was a leader of the Czechoslovak independence movement, Minister of Foreign Affairs and the second President of Czechoslovakia. He was known to be a skilled diplomat.- Youth :...
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
Józef Beck
' was a Polish statesman, diplomat, military officer, and close associate of Józef Piłsudski...
, 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
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
.
The Twenty Years' Crisis
The Twenty Years' Crisis': 1919-1939 is a book on international relations written by Edward Hallett Carr . The book was written in the 1930s shortly before the outbreak of World War II in Europe and the first edition was published in September 1939, shortly after the war' s outbreak. Carr...
was published in July 1939, which dealt with the subject of international relations between 1919 and 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
Neville Chamberlain
Arthur Neville Chamberlain FRS was a British Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1937 to May 1940. Chamberlain is best known for his appeasement foreign policy, and in particular for his signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938, conceding the...
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 disillusion with the League of Nations, Carr attacked as "utopians" those like Norman Angell
Norman Angell
Sir Ralph Norman Angell was an English lecturer, journalist, author, and Member of Parliament for the Labour Party.Angell was one of the principal founders of the Union of Democratic Control...
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 hopeless 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
Arnold J. Toynbee
Arnold Joseph Toynbee CH was a British historian whose twelve-volume analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations, A Study of History, 1934–1961, was a synthesis of world history, a metahistory based on universal rhythms of rise, flowering and decline, which examined history from a global...
'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 privileged "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 contented status whereas "have not" powers like Germany, Italy and Japan were inclined towards war as they had nothing to lose. 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
Adam Smith
Adam Smith was a Scottish social philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations...
for claiming there was a "harmony of interests" between the individual and their community, writing that "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
Woodrow Wilson
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States, from 1913 to 1921. A leader of the Progressive Movement, he served as President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, and then as the Governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913...
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
Enrico Corradini
Enrico Corradini was an Italian novelist, essayist, journalist and nationalist political figure.-Biography:Corradini was born near Montelupo Fiorentino, Tuscany....
and later adopted by Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
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
David Lloyd George
David Lloyd George, 1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor OM, PC was a British Liberal politician and statesman...
, the French Premier Georges Clemenceau
Georges Clemenceau
Georges Benjamin Clemenceau was a French statesman, physician and journalist. He served as the Prime Minister of France from 1906 to 1909, and again from 1917 to 1920. For nearly the final year of World War I he led France, and was one of the major voices behind the Treaty of Versailles at the...
and above all the American President Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States, from 1913 to 1921. A leader of the Progressive Movement, he served as President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, and then as the Governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913...
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
Self-determination
Self-determination is the principle in international law that nations have the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status with no external compulsion or external interference...
, 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 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
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
for lebensraum
Lebensraum
was one of the major political ideas of Adolf Hitler, and an important component of Nazi ideology. It served as the motivation for the expansionist policies of Nazi Germany, aiming to provide extra space for the growth of the German population, for a Greater Germany...
(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
Treaty of Versailles
The Treaty of Versailles was one of the peace treaties at the end of World War I. It ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. It was signed on 28 June 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The other Central Powers on the German side of...
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
Munich Agreement
The Munich Pact was an agreement permitting the Nazi German annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. The Sudetenland were areas along Czech borders, mainly inhabited by ethnic Germans. The agreement was negotiated at a conference held in Munich, Germany, among the major powers of Europe without...
as the overdue recognition of changes in the balance of power. In The Twenty Years' Crisis, Carr was highly critical of Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
, 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
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
. Carr argued that in realism there is no moral dimension and that what is successful is right and that 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, Carr described realism as lacking :"a finite goal, an emotional appeal, a right of moral judgment, and a ground for action".
Norman Angell
Sir Ralph Norman Angell was an English lecturer, journalist, author, and Member of Parliament for the Labour Party.Angell was one of the principal founders of the Union of Democratic Control...
, 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".Angell maintained that Carr's claim that "resistance to aggression" was only an 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
Arnold J. Toynbee
Arnold Joseph Toynbee CH was a British historian whose twelve-volume analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations, A Study of History, 1934–1961, was a synthesis of world history, a metahistory based on universal rhythms of rise, flowering and decline, which examined history from a global...
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
Robert William Seton-Watson
Robert William Seton-Watson , commonly referred to as R.W. Seton-Watson, and also known by the pseudonym Scotus Viator, was a British political activist and historian who played an active role in encouraging the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the emergence of Czechoslovakia and...
wrote in response that it was "simply farcical" that Carr could write of morality in international politics without mentioning Christianity once in his book. In a 2004 speech, the American political scientist John Mearsheimer
John Mearsheimer
John J. Mearsheimer is an American professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is an international relations theorist. Known for his book on offensive realism, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, more recently Mearsheimer has attracted attention for co-authoring and publishing...
praised the The Twenty Years' Crisis and argued that Carr was correct when he claimed that international relations was a struggle of all against all with states always placing their own interests first. Mearsheimer maintained that Carr’s points were still as relevant for 2004 as for 1939 and went on to deplore what he claimed was the dominance of “idealist” thinking about international relations among British academic life
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
E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax, , known as The Lord Irwin from 1925 until 1934 and as The Viscount Halifax from 1934 until 1944, was one of the most senior British Conservative politicians of the 1930s, during which he held several senior ministerial posts, most notably as...
. 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 prewar views on Nazi Germany. 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. Through The Twenty Years' Crisis was published just months before World War II began, the Japanese historian Saho Matusumoto wrote that in a sense, Carr's book began the debate on the origins of World War II.
Some of the major themes of Carr's writings were change and the relationship between ideational and material forces in society. Carr saw a major theme of history was the growth of reason
Reason
Reason is a term that refers to the capacity human beings have to make sense of things, to establish and verify facts, and to change or justify practices, institutions, and beliefs. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, language, ...
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
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
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 WarPhony War
The Phoney War was a phase early in World War II – in the months following Britain and France's declaration of war on Germany in September 1939 and preceding the Battle of France in May 1940 – that was marked by a lack of major military operations by the Western Allies against the German Reich...
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
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
. 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
Baltic states
The term Baltic states refers to the Baltic territories which gained independence from the Russian Empire in the wake of World War I: primarily the contiguous trio of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ; Finland also fell within the scope of the term after initially gaining independence in the 1920s.The...
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
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
from 1941 to 1946, during which time he was well known for the pro-Soviet attitudes that 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
Geoffrey Dawson
George Geoffrey Dawson was editor of The Times from 1912 to 1919 and again from 1923 until 1941. His original last name was Robinson, but he changed it in 1917.-Early life:...
, 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
Robert M'Gowan Barrington-Ward
Robert McGowan Barrington-Ward DSO MC was an English barrister and journalist who was editor of The Times from 1941 until 1948.-Family and early life:...
, 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 theTimes 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
Carthaginian peace
Carthaginian Peace can refer to two things: either the peace imposed on Carthage by Rome in 146 BC, whereby the Romans systematically burned Carthage to the ground, or the imposition of a very brutal 'peace' in general.-Origin:...
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, the social forces that gave birth to fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
would wither away and die. On his leaders on foreign affairs, Carr was very consistent (and correct) in arguing after 1941 that once the war ended, it was the fate of Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
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
Frank Roberts (diplomat)
Sir Frank Kenyon Roberts, GCMG, GCVO was a British diplomat. He played a key role in British diplomacy in the early years of the Cold War, and in developing Anglo-German relations in the 1960s....
(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
Chatham House
Chatham House, formally known as The Royal Institute of International Affairs, is a non-profit, non-governmental organization based in London whose mission is to analyse and promote the understanding of major international issues and current affairs. It is regarded as one of the world's leading...
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
Conditions of Peace
Conditions of Peace is a book written by Edward Hallett Carr.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...
followed by Nationalism and After
Nationalism and After
Nationalism and After is a 1945 work by E.H. Carr. The book compares the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century with those of the twentieth....
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 that 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
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
. 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 Lawrence Dennis
Lawrence Dennis
Lawrence Dennis was an mixed raced American diplomat, consultant and author. He advocated Socialist fascism in America after the Great Depression, arguing that capitalism was doomed.-Life:...
In a review of Conditions of Peace, the British writer Rebecca West
Rebecca West
Cicely Isabel Fairfield , known by her pen name Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, DBE was an English author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. A prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public...
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
House of Lords
The House of Lords is the upper house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Like the House of Commons, it meets in the Palace of Westminster....
, Viscount Elibank
Gideon Oliphant-Murray, 2nd Viscount Elibank
Gideon Oliphant-Murray, 2nd Viscount Elibank was a Scottish politician and nobleman, inheriting the viscountcy as the eldest surviving son of 1st 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 OderThe leader of March 10, 1943 led to a protest from the Polish Ambassador, Count Edward Raczyński, 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".OderThe Oder is a river in Central Europe. It rises in the Czech Republic and flows through western Poland, later forming of the border between Poland and Germany, part of the Oder-Neisse line...
, and in the same sense."
Katyn massacre
The Katyn massacre, also known as the Katyn Forest massacre , was a mass execution of Polish nationals carried out by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs , the Soviet secret police, in April and May 1940. The massacre was prompted by Lavrentiy Beria's proposal to execute all members of...
committed by the NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
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
Gilbert Murray
George Gilbert Aimé Murray, OM was an Australian born British classical scholar and public intellectual, with connections in many spheres. He was an outstanding scholar of the language and culture of Ancient Greece, perhaps the leading authority in the first half of the twentieth century...
wrote a letter to Carr, who was still the Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Relations at Aberystwyth complaining on behalf of Lord Davies
David Davies, 1st Baron Davies
David Davies, 1st Baron Davies , was a politician and public benefactor, the grandson of the famous industrialist, David Davies "Llandinam"....
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
Athens
Athens , is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, as its recorded history spans around 3,400 years. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state...
, Greece between the Greek Communist front organization ELAS and the British Army
British Army
The British Army is the land warfare branch of Her Majesty's Armed Forces in the United Kingdom. It came into being with the unification of the Kingdom of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. The new British Army incorporated Regiments that had already existed in England...
, Carr in a Times leader sided with the Greek Communists, leading to Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
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 (correctly) that the Greek 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
Robert Conquest
George Robert Ackworth Conquest CMG is a British historian who became a well-known writer and researcher on the Soviet Union with the publication in 1968 of The Great Terror, an account of Stalin's purges of the 1930s...
accused Carr of hypocrisy in supporting the EAM/ELAS, 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 Polish government in exile and its Armia Krajowa
Armia Krajowa
The Armia Krajowa , or Home Army, was the dominant Polish resistance movement in World War II German-occupied Poland. It was formed in February 1942 from the Związek Walki Zbrojnej . Over the next two years, it absorbed most other Polish underground forces...
(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
Polish Committee of National Liberation
The Polish Committee of National Liberation , also known as the Lublin Committee, was a provisional government of Poland, officially proclaimed 21 July 1944 in Chełm under the direction of State National Council in opposition to the Polish government in exile...
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
Liberum veto
The liberum veto was a parliamentary device in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It allowed any member of the Sejm to force an immediate end to the current session and nullify any legislation that had already been passed at the session by shouting Nie pozwalam! .From the mid-16th to the late 18th...
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 Morning Star
The Morning Star is a left wing British daily tabloid newspaper with a focus on social and trade union issues. Articles and comment columns are contributed by writers from socialist, social democratic, green and religious perspectives....
(the price of the Daily Worker was one penny). Commenting on Carr's pro-Soviet leaders, the British writer George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
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."
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
was the by far the most successful type of totalitarianism
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible...
as proved by Soviet industrial growth and the Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
's role in defeating Germany and that only the "blind and incurable ignored these trends". During the same lectures, Carr called democracy
Democracy
Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...
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
Christopher Hill (historian)
John Edward Christopher Hill , usually known simply as Christopher Hill, was an English Marxist historian and author of textbooks....
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 in a radio debate with Arnold J. Toynbee
Arnold J. Toynbee
Arnold Joseph Toynbee CH was a British historian whose twelve-volume analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations, A Study of History, 1934–1961, was a synthesis of world history, a metahistory based on universal rhythms of rise, flowering and decline, which examined history from a global...
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 his 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
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
. His name was on Orwell's list
Orwell's list
Orwell's list, prepared in 1949 by the English author George Orwell, shortly before he died, comprises names of notable writers and other individuals he considered to be unsuitable as possible writers for the Information Research Department's anti-communist propaganda activities.-Background:The...
, a list of people which George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
prepared in March 1949 for the Information Research Department
Information Research Department
The Information Research Department, founded in 1948 by Christopher Mayhew MP, was a department of the British Foreign Office set up to counter Russian propaganda and infiltration, particularly amongst the western labour movement....
, 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
Isaac Deutscher
Isaac Deutscher was a Polish-born Jewish Marxist writer, journalist and political activist who moved to the United Kingdom at the outbreak of World War II. He is best known as a biographer of Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin and as a commentator on Soviet affairs...
, A. J. P. Taylor
A. J. P. Taylor
Alan John Percivale Taylor, FBA was a British historian of the 20th century and renowned academic who became well known to millions through his popular television lectures.-Early life:...
, Harold Laski
Harold Laski
Harold Joseph Laski was a British Marxist, political theorist, economist, author, and lecturer, who served as the chairman of the Labour Party during 1945-1946, and was a professor at the LSE from 1926 to 1950....
and Karl Mannheim
Karl Mannheim
Karl Mannheim , or Károly Mannheim in the original writing of his name, was a Jewish Hungarian-born sociologist, influential in the first half of the 20th century and one of the founding fathers of classical sociology and a founder of the sociology of knowledge.-Life:Mannheim studied in Budapest,...
. 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-Yugoslav split of 1948. In an essay entitled "Spectre of Communism" published in the Times on July 2, 1948, Carr wrote:
"It is this identification of Communist ideology with Soviet power, pointed by the looser, but none the less patent, defence of western democratic ideas and capitalist practices with the power of the United States, which makes the present international conjuncture so dark and menacing...That the two strongest Powers in the world today have become the centres of groups of nations formed on the basis not of old-fashioned alliances of power politics, but of contending views on the way in which society should be organized, enhances the dangers of conflict in a way which no contemporary observer can ignore. It would be a striking reversal of existing trends if Yugoslavia succeeded in vindicating for herself either a position of independent authority within the Soviet alliance or a right to stand along outside it"
Throughout the remainder of Carr's life after 1941, his outlook was basically sympathetic towards Communism and its achievements. In the early 1950s, when Carr sat on the editorial board of the Chatham House, he attempted to block the publication of the manuscript that eventually became The Origins of the Communist Autocracy by Leonard Schapiro
Leonard Schapiro
Leonard Bertram Naman Schapiro was a British academic and scholar of Russian politics. He taught for many years at the London School of Economics, where he was Professor of Political Science with Special Reference to Russian Studies...
under the grounds that the subject of repression in the Soviet Union was not a serious topic for a historian. As interest in the subject in Communism grew, Carr largely abandoned international relations
International relations
International relations is the study of relationships between countries, including the roles of states, inter-governmental organizations , international nongovernmental organizations , non-governmental organizations and multinational corporations...
as a field of study. In part, Carr's turn away from international relations was due to his increasing scepticism about the subject. In 1959, Carr wrote to his friend and protégé Arno J. Mayer
Arno J. Mayer
Arno Joseph Mayer is a United States Marxist historian originally from Luxembourg, who specializes in modern Europe, diplomatic history, and the Holocaust, and is currently Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Emeritus, at Princeton University.-Early life and academic career:Mayer was born into a...
, shortly after he began teaching international relations at Harvard warning against attempts to turn international relations into a separate subject apart from history, which Carr viewed as a foolish attempt to sever a sub-discipline of history by turning it into a discipline of its own. In 1956, Carr did not comment about the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Uprising while at the same time condemning the Suez War
Suez Crisis
The Suez Crisis, also referred to as the Tripartite Aggression, Suez War was an offensive war fought by France, the United Kingdom, and Israel against Egypt beginning on 29 October 1956. Less than a day after Israel invaded Egypt, Britain and France issued a joint ultimatum to Egypt and Israel,...
.
In his few books about international relations after 1938, despite a change in emphasis, Carr's pro-German views regarding inter-war international relations continued. For an example, in his 1955 book International Relations Between the Two World Wars, 1919–1939, Carr claimed that the German default on timber reparations
World War I reparations
World War I reparations refers to the payments and transfers of property and equipment that Germany was forced to make under the Treaty of Versailles following its defeat during World War I...
in December 1922, which sparked the 1923 Ruhr crisis
Occupation of the Ruhr
The Occupation of the Ruhr between 1923 and 1925, by troops from France and Belgium, was a response to the failure of the German Weimar Republic under Chancellor Cuno to pay reparations in the aftermath of World War I.-Background:...
, was very small and explained that the French reaction in occupying the Ruhr
Ruhr
The Ruhr is a medium-size river in western Germany , a right tributary of the Rhine.-Description:The source of the Ruhr is near the town of Winterberg in the mountainous Sauerland region, at an elevation of approximately 2,200 feet...
was grossly disproportionate to the offence. As the American historian Sally Marks noted, even in 1955 this was a long-discredited pro-German "myth", and that in fact the German default was enormous, and Germany had been defaulting on a large scale and a frequent basis since 1921.
In 1966, Carr left Forde and married the historian Betty Behrens. That same year, Carr wrote in an essay that in India where "liberalism is professed and to some extent practised, millions of people would die without American charity. In China, where liberalism is rejected, people somehow get fed. Which is the more cruel and oppressive regime?" One of Carr's critics, the British historian Robert Conquest
Robert Conquest
George Robert Ackworth Conquest CMG is a British historian who became a well-known writer and researcher on the Soviet Union with the publication in 1968 of The Great Terror, an account of Stalin's purges of the 1930s...
, commented that Carr did not appear to be familiar with recent Chinese history, because, judging from that remark, Carr seemed to be ignorant of the millions of Chinese who had starved to death during the Great Leap Forward
Great Leap Forward
The Great Leap Forward of the People's Republic of China was an economic and social campaign of the Communist Party of China , reflected in planning decisions from 1958 to 1961, which aimed to use China's vast population to rapidly transform the country from an agrarian economy into a modern...
. In 1961, Carr published an anonymous and very favourable review of his friend A. J. P. Taylor
A. J. P. Taylor
Alan John Percivale Taylor, FBA was a British historian of the 20th century and renowned academic who became well known to millions through his popular television lectures.-Early life:...
's contentious book The Origins of the Second World War, which caused much controversy. In the late 1960s, Carr was one of the few British professors to be supportive of the New Left
New Left
The New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
student protestors, who, he hoped, might bring about a socialist revolution in Britain. In a 1969 introduction to the collection of essays, Heretics and Renegades and Other Essays by Carr's friend, Isaac Deutscher
Isaac Deutscher
Isaac Deutscher was a Polish-born Jewish Marxist writer, journalist and political activist who moved to the United Kingdom at the outbreak of World War II. He is best known as a biographer of Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin and as a commentator on Soviet affairs...
, Carr endorsed Deutscher's attack on George Orwell
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...
's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is a dystopian novel about Oceania, a society ruled by the oligarchical dictatorship of the Party...
on the grounds that Nineteen Eighty-Four could not be an accurate picture of the Soviet Union as Orwell had never visited that state.
Carr exercised wide influence in the field of Soviet studies and international relations. The extent of Carr's influence could be seen in the 1974 festschrift
Festschrift
In academia, a Festschrift , is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during his or her lifetime. The term, borrowed from German, could be translated as celebration publication or celebratory writing...
in his honour, entitled Essays In Honour of E.H. Carr ed. Chimen Abramsky
Chimen Abramsky
Chimen Abramsky was emeritus Professor of Jewish Studies at University College London. His first name is pronounced Shimon....
and Beryl Williams. The contributors included Sir Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
Sir Isaiah Berlin OM, FBA was a British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas of Russian-Jewish origin, regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century and a dominant liberal scholar of his generation...
, Arthur Lehning
Arthur Lehning
Paul Arthur Müller-Lehning was a Dutch author, historian and anarchist.Arthur Lehning wrote noted French translations of Mikhail Bakunin. In 1992 he won the Gouden Ganzenveer, and in 1999 the P. C. Hooft Award...
, G.A. Cohen, Monica Partridge, Beryl Williams, Eleonore Breuning, D.C. Watt, Mary Holdsworth, Roger Morgan
Roger Morgan
Roger Ernest Morgan is an English former footballer, born in Walthamstow, London, who played as a winger in the Football League for Queens Park Rangers and Tottenham Hotspur....
, Alec Nove, John Erickson
John Erickson (historian)
John Erickson was a British historian who wrote extensively on the Second World War...
, Michael Kaser, R.W. Davies, Moshe Lewin
Moshe Lewin
Moshe Lewin was a scholar of Russian and Soviet history; he was a major figure in the revisionist school of Soviet studies which emerged in the 1960s. His surname is pronounced "Luh-VENE".-Early years:...
, Maurice Dobb
Maurice Dobb
Maurice Herbert Dobb , was a British Marxist economist, and a lecturer 1924-1959 and Reader 1959-1976 at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge 1948-1976.-Life:...
, and Lionel Kochan
Lionel Kochan
Lionel Edmond Kochan was a British historian, who before coming to academia worked in journalism and publishing. He was a doctoral student of Sir Charles Webster. His first post in 1959 was at Edinburgh University; he became Bearsted Reader in Jewish History at University of Warwick in 1969.He was...
. The contributors examined such topics as the social views of Georges Sorel
Georges Sorel
Georges Eugène Sorel was a French philosopher and theorist of revolutionary syndicalism. His notion of the power of myth in people's lives inspired Marxists and Fascists. It is, together with his defense of violence, the contribution for which he is most often remembered. Oron J...
, Alexander Herzen
Alexander Herzen
Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen was a Russian pro-Western writer and thinker known as the "father of Russian socialism", and one of the main fathers of agrarian populism...
and Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was a well-known Russian revolutionary and theorist of collectivist anarchism. He has also often been called the father of anarchist theory in general. Bakunin grew up near Moscow, where he moved to study philosophy and began to read the French Encyclopedists,...
; the impact of the Revolution of 1905 on Russian foreign policy, Count Ulrich von Brokdorff-Rantzau
Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau
Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau was a German diplomat, the first Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic and German Ambassador to the USSR for most of the twenties.-Early career:...
and German-Soviet relations; and developments in the Soviet military, education, economy and agriculture in the 1920s–1930s. Another admirer of Carr is the American Marxist historian Arno J. Mayer
Arno J. Mayer
Arno Joseph Mayer is a United States Marxist historian originally from Luxembourg, who specializes in modern Europe, diplomatic history, and the Holocaust, and is currently Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Emeritus, at Princeton University.-Early life and academic career:Mayer was born into a...
, who has stated that his work on international relations owes much to Carr.
During his last years, Carr continued to maintain his optimism in a better future, in spite of what he regarded as grave setbacks. In a 1978 interview in The New Left Review, Carr called capitalism a crazy economic system that was doomed to die. In the same interview, Carr complained about what he called "obsessive hatred and fear of Russia", stating "an outburst of national hysteria on this scale is surely the symptom of a sick society". In a 1980 letter to his friend, Tamara Deutscher, Carr wrote that he felt that the government of Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990...
had forced "the forces of Socialism" in Britain into a "full retreat". In the same letter to Deutscher, Carr wrote that "Socialism cannot be obtained through reformism, i.e. through the machinery of bourgeois democracy". Carr went on to decry disunity on the Left, and wrote:
"What worries me is not only what is happening in this country today, but my preoccupation with what happened in the 30s. The hard-liners denied that Brüning was a lesser evil than Hitler, and refused to co-operate with the Social Democrats. I don't know that in the draft chapters [of Twilight of the Comintern] I have specifically attacked this view, but that is certainly the slant of the whole narrative. Trotsky denounced this line from the start, and in the last forty years I cannot think of any writer who has defended it. Have we all been wrong? And should we really deny that Callaghan is a lesser evil than Thatcher?Though Carr regarded the abandonment of Maoism
Another thought. Lenin in the 1920s wanted the Communists 'to help the MacDonalds and the Snowdens to defeat the Lloyd Georges and the Churchills'. Are Callaghan and Healey so much worse than M[acDonald] and S[nowden]?"
Maoism
Maoism, also known as the Mao Zedong Thought , is claimed by Maoists as an anti-Revisionist form of Marxist communist theory, derived from the teachings of the Chinese political leader Mao Zedong . Developed during the 1950s and 1960s, it was widely applied as the political and military guiding...
in China in the late 1970s as a regressive development, he saw opportunities, and wrote to his stock broker in 1978: "a lot of people, as well as the Japanese, are going to benefit from the opening up of trade with China. Have you any ideas?". In one of his last letters to Tamara Deutscher, shortly before his death in 1982, Carr expressed a great deal of dismay at the state of the world, writing that "The left is foolish and the right vicious." Carr wrote to Deutscher that the sort of socialism envisioned by Marx could never be achieved via the means of democracy, but complained that the working class in Britain were not capable of staging the revolution needed to destroy British capitalism. Carr criticized what he regarded as an excessive preoccupation in the West with the human rights situation in the Soviet Union, blasted the European Left for naïveté, and Eurocommunism
Eurocommunism
Eurocommunism was a trend in the 1970s and 1980s within various Western European communist parties to develop a theory and practice of social transformation that was more relevant in a Western European democracy and less aligned to the influence or control of the Communist Party of the Soviet...
as a useless watered-down version of Communism. Carr wrote to Deutscher:
"What can one think of "Eurocommunists" who have produced no programme of their own, but are prepared at the drop of a hat to rub shoulders with declared counter-revolutionaries (anti-Lenin, anti-Marx) and Cold Warriors? This must be meat and drink to the hardliners in the Kremlin. Back to the "united front from Trotsky to Chamberlain?" At least Trotsky never did that. Where are we going? There are too many war-mongers around the world at present for comfort. Cannot the New Left go back to Nuclear Disarmament? Also perhaps a bit naïve, but healthier."Carr ended his letter by saying that he did not believe that the British proletariat, or any of the other Western proletariats, had the willingness and/or the capacity to stage the sort of revolutions that Marx had predicated, and that because of his lack of faith in the revolutionary potential of the Western working classes, he could not be a Marxist. Beside the issue about the non-imminence of a workers' uprising in the West, Carr stated that he was in otherwise complete agreement with all of the main tenets of Marxism. In a letter to Deutscher, Carr wrote he had been convinced of the "bankruptcy of capitalism" since the 1930s, but that:
"It would be fair to say that I have always been more interested in Marxism as a method of revealing hidden springs of thought and action, and debunking the logical and moralistic facade, erected around them, than in the Marxist analysis of the decline of capitalism. Capitalism was clearly on the way out, and the precise mechanism of its downfall did not seem to me all that interesting.".Carr added that he "could not see the Western proletariat, the progeny of Western bourgeois capitalism, as the bearer of the world revolution in its next stage". Shortly before his death, Carr wrote that he believed:
"I cannot indeed foresee for western society in anything like its present form any prospect but decline and decay, perhaps but not necessarily ending in dramatic collapse. But I believe that new forces and movements, whose shape we cannot yet guess, are germinating beneath the surface, here or elsewhere. That is my unverifiable Utopia, and I suppose I should call it "socialist" and I am to this extent Marxist. But Marx did not define the content of socialism except in a few Utopian phrases; and nor can I".
A latter day controversy concerning Carr surrounds the question of whether he was an anti-Semite. Carr's critics point to the fact that he was champion in succession of two anti-Semitic dictators, namely Hitler and Stalin, his opposition to Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
, and to the fact that most of Carr's opponents such as Sir Geoffrey Elton, Leonard Schapiro
Leonard Schapiro
Leonard Bertram Naman Schapiro was a British academic and scholar of Russian politics. He taught for many years at the London School of Economics, where he was Professor of Political Science with Special Reference to Russian Studies...
, Sir Karl Popper
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...
, Bertram Wolfe
Bertram Wolfe
Bertram David "Bert" Wolfe was an American scholar and former communist best known for biographical studies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Diego Rivera.-Early life:...
, Richard Pipes
Richard Pipes
Richard Edgar Pipes is an American academic who specializes in Russian history, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union...
, Adam Ulam
Adam Ulam
Adam Bruno Ulam was a Polish and American historian and political scientist at Harvard University. Ulam was one of the world's foremost authorities on Russia and the Soviet Union, and author of twenty books and many articles.-Biography:...
, Leopold Labedz
Leopold Labedz
Leopold Labedz was an anti-communist Anglo-Polish commentator on the Soviet Union.Labedz was born to a Polish Jewish doctor in Russia. The family soon returned to Warsaw and the young Labedz decided to follow his father into the medical profession. He studied medicine in Paris...
, Sir Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
Sir Isaiah Berlin OM, FBA was a British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas of Russian-Jewish origin, regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century and a dominant liberal scholar of his generation...
, and Walter Laqueur
Walter Laqueur
Walter Zeev Laqueur is an American historian and political commentator. He was born in Breslau, Germany , to a Jewish family. In 1938, Laqueur left Germany for the British Mandate of Palestine. His parents, who were unable to leave, became victims of the Holocaust...
were Jewish. Carr's defenders such as Jonathan Haslam have argued against the charge of anti-Semitism, noting that Carr had many Jewish friends (including such erstwhile intellectual sparring partners such as Berlin and Namier), that his last wife Betty Behrens was Jewish and that his support for Nazi Germany in the 1930s and the Soviet Union in the 1940s–50s was in spite rather than because of anti-Semitism in those states.
History of Soviet Russia
After the war, Carr was a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and then Trinity College, where he published most of his popular works—A History of Soviet Russia and What is History? He remained at Trinity College until his death. He was a tutor in Politics at Balliol College, OxfordBalliol College, Oxford
Balliol College , founded in 1263, is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England but founded by a family with strong Scottish connections....
from 1953 to 1955 when he became a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...
. In the 1950s, Carr was well known as an outspoken admirer of the Soviet Union. Carr's writings include his History of Soviet Russia (14 vol., 1950–78). During World War II, Carr was favourably impressed with what he regarded as the extraordinary heroic performance of the Soviet people, and towards the end of 1944 Carr decided to write a complete history of the Soviet Russia from 1917 comprising all aspects of social
Social history
Social history, often called the new social history, is a branch of History that includes history of ordinary people and their strategies of coping with life. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments...
, political
Political history
Political history is the narrative and analysis of political events, ideas, movements, and leaders. It is distinct from, but related to, other fields of history such as Diplomatic history, social history, economic history, and military history, as well as constitutional history and public...
and economic history
Economic history
Economic history is the study of economies or economic phenomena in the past. Analysis in economic history is undertaken using a combination of historical methods, statistical methods and by applying economic theory to historical situations and institutions...
in order to explain how the Soviet Union withstood the challenge of the German invasion. The resulting work was his 14 volume History of Soviet Russia, which took the story up to 1929. Carr initially intended the series to begin in 1923 with a long chapter summarizing the state of the Soviet Union just before Lenin's death. Carr found that the idea of one chapter on the situation in the Soviet Union in the year 1923 "proved on examination almost ludicrously inadequate to the magnitude of Lenin's achievement and of its influence on the future".
Carr's friend and close associate, the British historian R.W. Davies, was to write that Carr belonged to the anti-Cold-War school of history, which regarded the Soviet Union as the major progressive force in the world, the United States as the world's principal obstacle to the advancement of humanity, and the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
as a case of American aggression against the Soviet Union. In 1950, Carr wrote in the defence of the Soviet Union that:
"No sensible person will be tempted to measure the Russia of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin by any yardstick borrowed from the Britain of MacDonald, Baldwin or Churchill, or the America of Wilson, Hoover or Franklin Roosevelt."Using that cultural relativist
Cultural relativism
Cultural relativism is the principle that an individual human's beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of that individual's own culture. This principle was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and...
argument, Carr criticized those WASP historians who, he felt, had unfairly judged the Soviet Union by the cultural norms of Britain and the United States. In 1960, Carr wrote that:
"Much of what has been written in the English speaking countries during the last ten years about the Soviet Union...has been vitiated by this inability to achieve even the most elementary measure of imaginative understanding of what goes on in the mind of the other party..."
Carr began his magnum opus by arguing that the 1917 October Revolution was a "proletarian revolution" forced on the Bolsheviks. Carr argued that:
"It was the masses who drove their hesitating and temporising leaders down the path of revolution."In Carr's opinion, since the Bolsheviks had driven to power against their will by the Russian people in 1917, they were then faced with the question of what to do with it.
In Carr's view, Soviet history
History of the Soviet Union
The history of the Soviet Union has roots in the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, emerged as the main political force in the capital of the former Russian Empire, though they had to fight a long and brutal civil war against the Mensheviks, or Whites...
went through three periods in the inter-war era and was personified by the change of leadership from Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...
to Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
. After an initial period of chaos, Carr wrote that the dissolution of the Constituent Assemby
Russian Constituent Assembly
The All Russian Constituent Assembly was a constitutional body convened in Russia after the October Revolution of 1917. It is generally reckoned as the first democratically elected legislative body of any kind in Russian history. It met for 13 hours, from 4 p.m...
in January 1918 was the last "tearing asunder of the veil of bourgeois constitutionalism", and that henceforward, the Bolsheviks would rule Russia their own way. Carr, like many others, argued that the emergence of Russia from a backward peasant economy to a leading industrial power was the most important event of the 20th century. The first part of a History of Soviet Russia comprised three volumes entitled The Bolshevik Revolution, published in 1950, 1952, and 1953, and traced Soviet history from 1917 to 1922. During the writing of the first volumes of The History of Soviet Russia, Deutscher had much influence on Carr's understanding of the period. The second part was intended to comprise three volumes called The Struggle for Power, which was intended to cover the years 1922–28, but Carr instead to decided to publish a single volume labelled The Interregnum that covered the events of 1923–24, and another four volumes entitled Socialism In One Country, which took the story up to 1926. The final volumes in the series were entitled The Foundations of the Planned Economy, which covered the years until 1929. Originally, Carr had planned to take the series up to Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a front., the largest invasion in the history of warfare...
in 1941 and the Soviet victory of 1945, but his death in 1982 put an end to the project.
War communism
War communism or military communism was the economic and political system that existed in Soviet Russia during the Russian Civil War, from 1918 to 1921...
era (1917–21), which saw much rationing, economic production focused into huge centres of manufacturing, critical services and supplies being sold at either set prices or for free, and to a large extent a return to a barter economy. Carr contended that the problems in the agrarian sector forced the abandonment of war communism in 1921, and its replacement by the New Economic Policy
New Economic Policy
The New Economic Policy was an economic policy proposed by Vladimir Lenin, who called it state capitalism. Allowing some private ventures, the NEP allowed small animal businesses or smoke shops, for instance, to reopen for private profit while the state continued to control banks, foreign trade,...
(NEP). During the same period saw what Carr called one of Lenin's "astonishing achievements", namely the gathering together of nearly all of the former territories of Imperial Russia (with the notable exceptions of Finland, Poland, Lithuania
Lithuania
Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...
, Latvia
Latvia
Latvia , officially the Republic of Latvia , is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Estonia , to the south by Lithuania , to the east by the Russian Federation , to the southeast by Belarus and shares maritime borders to the west with Sweden...
and Estonia
Estonia
Estonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...
) under the banner of the Soviet Union. In the NEP period (1921–28), Carr maintained that the Soviet economy became a mixed capitalist-socialist one with peasants after fulfilling quotas to the state being allowed to sell their surplus on the open market, and industrialists being permitted be allowed to produce and sell agricultural and light industrial goods. Carr contended that the post-Lenin succession struggle after 1924 was more about personal disputes than ideological quarrels. In Carr's opinion, "personalities rather than principles were at stake". Carr argued that the victory of Stalin over Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
in the succession struggle was inevitable because Stalin was better suited to the new order emerging in the Soviet Union in the 1920s than Trotsky. Carr stated "Trotsky was a hero of the revolution. He fell when the heroic age was over." Carr argued that Stalin had stumbled into the doctrine of "Socialism in One Country
Socialism in One Country
Socialism in One Country was a theory put forth by Joseph Stalin in 1924, elaborated by Nikolai Bukharin in 1925 and finally adopted as state policy by Stalin...
" more by accident than by design in 1925, but argued that Stalin was swift to grasp how effective the doctrine was as a weapon to beat Trotsky with. Carr wrote
"It was easy, on the basis of the new doctrine, to depict Stalin as the true expositor of Bolshevism and Leninism and his opponents as the heirs of those who had resisted Lenin and denied the Bolshevik creed in the past. Unwittingly Stalin had forged for himself an instrument of enormous power. Once forged, he was quick to discover its strength, and wielded it with masterful skill and ruthlessness."Beside reviewing the politics and economics of the 1920s, Carr also devoted considerable space to the Soviet constitution of 1922, the relationship between the Soviet Socialist Republics and Moscow, efforts to "revitalize" the soviets (councils), the development of the Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
and the OGPU. Writing of the OGPU, Carr noted that since the Bolsheviks had eliminated all of their enemies outside of the Party by the mid-1920s: "The repressive powers of the OGPU were henceforth directed primarily against opposition in the party, which was the only effective form of opposition in the state." Reflecting his background as a diplomat and scholar on international relations, Carr provided very detailed treatment of foreign affairs with a focus on both the Narkomindel and the Comintern
Comintern
The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern, also known as the Third International, was an international communist organization initiated in Moscow during March 1919...
. In particular, Carr examined the relationship between the Soviet Communist Party and the other Communist parties around the world, the Comintern's structure, the Soviet reaction to the Locarno Treaties
Locarno Treaties
The Locarno Treaties were seven agreements negotiated at Locarno, Switzerland, on 5 October – 16 October 1925 and formally signed in London on 3 December, in which the First World War Western European Allied powers and the new states of central and Eastern Europe sought to secure the post-war...
, and the early efforts (ultimately successful in 1949) to promote a revolution in China.
The third phrase was the period of the Five Year Plans beginning with the First Five-Year Plan
First Five-Year Plan
The First Five-Year Plan, or 1st Five-Year Plan, of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a list of economic goals that was designed to strengthen the country's economy between 1928 and 1932, making the nation both militarily and industrially self-sufficient. "We are fifty or a hundred...
in 1928, which saw the Soviet state promoting the growth of heavy industry, eliminating private enterprise, collectivising agriculture, and of quotes for industrial production being set in Moscow. In Carr's opinion, the changes wrought by the First Five Year were a positive development. Carr argued that the economic system that existed during the N.E.P. period was highly inefficient, and that any economic system based on planning by the state was superior to what Carr saw as the disorganized chaos of capitalism. Carr accepted the Soviet claim that the so-called "kulak
Kulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...
s" existed as a distinct class, that they were a negative social force, and as such, the "dekulakisation" campaign that saw at least 2 million alleged "kulaks" deported to the Gulag
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
in 1930–32 was a necessary measure that improved the lives of the Soviet peasantry. R.W. Davies, Carr's associate and co-writer on the History of Soviet Russia expressed some doubts to Carr about whatever the "kulaks" actually existed, and thought the term was more an invention of Soviet propaganda than a reflection of the social conditions in the Soviet countryside.
Accompanying these social-economic changes were the changes in the leadership. Carr argued that Lenin saw himself as the leader of an elite band of revolutionaries who sought to give power to the people and wanted a world revolution. By contrast, Carr claimed that Stalin was a bureaucratic leader who concentrated power in his own hands, ruled in a ruthless fashion, carried a policy of "revolution from above", and by promoting a merger of Russian nationalism
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
and Communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
cared more for the interests of the Soviet Union than for the world Communist movement. However, Carr argued that Stalin's achievements in the making the Soviet Union a great industrial power by and large outweighed any of the actions for which he is commonly criticized for. Carr claimed that Stalin played both the roles of dictator and emancipator simultaneously, and argued that this reflected less than the man then the times and place in which he lived. Writing of Stalin, Carr claimed "Few great men have been so conspicuously as Stalin the product of the time and place in which they live." Carr claimed that if even Lenin had not died in 1924, history would still had worked out the same. In 1978, Carr claimed that if Lenin were still alive in 1928, he "would have faced exactly the same problems" as did Stalin, and had chosen the same solution, namely the "revolution from above". But Carr argued that Lenin would had been able to "minimize and mitigate the element of coercion" in the "revolution from above". As a result, Carr wrote that: "Stalin's personality, combined with the primitive and cruel traditions of the Russian bureaucracy, imparted to the revolution from above a particularly brutal quality."
A book that was not part of the History of Soviet Russia series, though closely related due to common research in the same archives was Carr's 1951 book German-Soviet Relations Between the Two World Wars, 1919–1939. In that book, Carr blamed the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain
Neville Chamberlain
Arthur Neville Chamberlain FRS was a British Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1937 to May 1940. Chamberlain is best known for his appeasement foreign policy, and in particular for his signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938, conceding the...
for the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 Carr accused Chamberlain of deliberately snubbing Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
's offers of an alliance, and as such, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named after the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, was an agreement officially titled the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union and signed in Moscow in the late hours of 23 August 1939...
, which partitioned much of Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
between Germany and the Soviet Union was under the circumstances the only policy the Soviets could have followed in the summer of 1939 Following the official interpretation of the reasons for the German-Soviet pact in the Soviet Union, Carr went to accuse Chamberlain of seeking to direct German aggression against the Soviet Union in 1939. Carr argued that Chamberlain was pursuing this alleged policy of seeking to provoke a German-Soviet war as a way of deflecting German attention from Western Europe and because of his supposed anti-Communist phobias. Carr argued that the British "guarantee" of Poland given on March 31, 1939 was a foolhardy move that indicated Chamberlain's preference for an alliance with Poland as opposed to an alliance with the Soviet Union. In Carr's opinion, the sacking of Maxim Litvinov
Maxim Litvinov
Maxim Maximovich Litvinov was a Russian revolutionary and prominent Soviet diplomat.- Early life and first exile :...
as Foreign Commissar on May 3, 1939 and his replacement with Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov was a Soviet politician and diplomat, an Old Bolshevik and a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s, when he rose to power as a protégé of Joseph Stalin, to 1957, when he was dismissed from the Presidium of the Central Committee by Nikita Khrushchev...
indicated not a change in Soviet foreign policy from the collective security approach that Litvinov had championed as many historians argue, but was rather Stalin's way of engaging in hard bargaining with Britain and France. Carr argued that the Anglo-French delegation sent to travel on Moscow on the slow ship City of Exeter in August 1939 to negotiate the "peace front" as the proposed revived Triple Entente
Triple Entente
The Triple Entente was the name given to the alliance among Britain, France and Russia after the signing of the Anglo-Russian Entente in 1907....
was called, were unimpressive diplomats and their unwillingness and inability to pressure the Poles to grant to transit rights to the Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
reflected a fundamental lack of interest in reaching an alliance with the Soviet Union. By contrast, Carr argued that the willingness of the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop
Joachim von Ribbentrop
Ulrich Friedrich Wilhelm Joachim von Ribbentrop was Foreign Minister of Germany from 1938 until 1945. He was later hanged for war crimes after the Nuremberg Trials.-Early life:...
to come to Moscow anytime via aero-plane with full powers to negotiate whatever was necessary to secure a German-Soviet alliance reflected the deep German interest in reaching an understanding with the Soviets in 1939. Carr defended the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact under the grounds that: "In return for 'non-intervention' Stalin secured a breathing space of immunity from German attack." According to Carr, the "bastion" created by means of the Pact, "was and could only be, a line of defence against potential German attack." An important advantage (projected by Carr) was that "if Soviet Russia had eventually to fight Hitler, the Western Powers would already be involved." In an implicit broadside against the idea of West German membership in NATO (a controversial subject in the early 1950s) and Atlanticism
Atlanticism
Atlanticism is a philosophy of cooperation among Western European and North American nations regarding political, economic, and defense issues, with the purpose to maintain the security of the participating countries, and to protect the values that unite them: "democracy, individual liberty and...
, Carr concluded his book with the argument that ever since 1870 German foreign policy had always been successful when the Reich was aligned with Russia and unsuccessful when aligned against Russia, and expressed hope that the leaders of the then newly founded Federal Republic would understand the lessons of history.
Maxim Litvinov
Maxim Maximovich Litvinov was a Russian revolutionary and prominent Soviet diplomat.- Early life and first exile :...
that was shortly there afterwards was exposed as a forgery. Notes for a Journal was a KGB
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
forgery written in the early-1950s by a former Narkomindel official turned Chekist forger named Grigori Besedovsky specializing in forgeries designed to fool gullible Westerns. The American historian Barry Rubin
Barry Rubin
Barry Rubin is an American-born Israeli expert in terrorism. He is a professor at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel and the director of the Global Research in International Affairs Center of the IDC, and a senior fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center's International Policy...
argued it can be easily be established that Notes for a Journal was an anti-Semitic forgery in that in the Notes Litvinov was portrayed as a proud Jew whereas the real Litvinov did not see himself as Jewish at all, and more importantly the Notes showed Litvinov together with other Soviet officials of Jewish origin working behind the scenes for Jewish interests in the Soviet Union. Rubin also noted other improbabilities in Notes for a Journal such having Litvinov meeting regularly with rabbis in order to further Jewish interests, describing Aaron Soltz
Aaron Soltz
Aaron Aleksandrovich Soltz was an Old Bolshevik and a Soviet politician and lawyer. He was informally known as the conscience of the Party...
as the son of a rabbi whereas he was the son of a merchant and having those Soviet officials of Jewish origin be referred to by their patronyms
Patronymic
A patronym, or patronymic, is a component of a personal name based on the name of one's father, grandfather or an even earlier male ancestor. A component of a name based on the name of one's mother or a female ancestor is a matronymic. Each is a means of conveying lineage.In many areas patronyms...
. Rubin argued that this portrayal of Litvinov reflected Soviet anti-Semitism, and that Carr was amiss in not recognizing Notes for a Journal as the anti-Semitic forgery it was.
The first volume of A History of Soviet Russia published in 1950 was criticized by some historians, most notably the British Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher
Isaac Deutscher
Isaac Deutscher was a Polish-born Jewish Marxist writer, journalist and political activist who moved to the United Kingdom at the outbreak of World War II. He is best known as a biographer of Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin and as a commentator on Soviet affairs...
(who was a close friend) as being too concerned with institutional development of the Soviet state, and for being impersonal and dry, capturing little of the tremendous emotions of the times. Likewise, Carr was criticized from both left and right for his downplaying of the importance of ideology for the Bolsheviks, and his argument that the Bolsheviks thought in only in terms of Russia rather than the entire world. In a 1955 article, Deutscher argued that:
"Perhaps the main weakness of Mr Carr's conception is that he sees the Russian Revolution as virtually a national phenomenon only...he treats it as a historical process essentially national in character and self-sufficient within the national framework. He thinks in terms of statecraft and statecraft is national. His Lenin is a Russian super-Bismarck."Despite his criticism, Deutscher ended his review by writing "It is Mr Carr's enduring and distinguished merit that he is the first genuine historian of the Soviet regime." Echoing Deutscher's criticism, the American historian Bertram Wolfe
Bertram Wolfe
Bertram David "Bert" Wolfe was an American scholar and former communist best known for biographical studies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Diego Rivera.-Early life:...
contended in 1955 that:
"Mr Carr believes that the revolution was right for Russia. But he cannot quite make himself believe that in the matter of world revolution, this power-concentrated, dogmatic man [Lenin] was in deadly earnest."It was often observed that Carr had little sympathy towards revolutionaries, presenting the pre-1917 Bolsheviks as somewhat comic and ridiculous figures. Walter Laqueur
Walter Laqueur
Walter Zeev Laqueur is an American historian and political commentator. He was born in Breslau, Germany , to a Jewish family. In 1938, Laqueur left Germany for the British Mandate of Palestine. His parents, who were unable to leave, became victims of the Holocaust...
noted that Carr had a strong preference for Lenin the politician attempting to build a new order in Russia after 1917 vs. Lenin the revolutionary working to destroy the old order before 1917 The scope and scale of History of Soviet Russia was illustrated in a letter Carr wrote to Tamara Deutscher, where in one volume Carr wished to examine Soviet relations with all of the Western nations between 1926–29, relations between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Western Communist parties; efforts to promote a "World Revolution"; the work and the "machinery" of the Comintern
Comintern
The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern, also known as the Third International, was an international communist organization initiated in Moscow during March 1919...
and the Profintern
Profintern
The Red International of Labor Unions , commonly known as the Profintern, was an international body established by the Communist International with the aim of coordinating Communist activities within trade unions...
, Communist thinking on the "Negro Question" in the United States, and the history of Communist parties in China, Outer Mongolia
Outer Mongolia
Outer Mongolia was a territory of the Qing Dynasty = the Manchu Empire. Its area was roughly equivalent to that of the modern state of Mongolia, which is sometimes informally called "Outer Mongolia" today...
, Turkey
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
, Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
, Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Afghanistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located in the centre of Asia, forming South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. With a population of about 29 million, it has an area of , making it the 42nd most populous and 41st largest nation in the world...
, and the Dutch East Indies
Dutch East Indies
The Dutch East Indies was a Dutch colony that became modern Indonesia following World War II. It was formed from the nationalised colonies of the Dutch East India Company, which came under the administration of the Netherlands government in 1800....
.
A recurring theme of Carr's writings on Soviet history was his hostility towards those who argued that Soviet history could have taken different courses from what it did. In a 1974 book review of the American historian Stephen F. Cohen's biography of Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin , was a Russian Marxist, Bolshevik revolutionary, and Soviet politician. He was a member of the Politburo and Central Committee , chairman of the Communist International , and the editor in chief of Pravda , the journal Bolshevik , Izvestia , and the Great Soviet...
published in the Times Literary Supplement, Carr lashed out against Cohen for advocating the thesis that Bukharin represented a better alternative to Stalin. Carr dismissed Cohen's argument that the NEP was a viable alternative to the First Five Year Plan, and contemptuously labelled Bukharin a weak-willed and a rather pathetic figure who was both destined and deserved to lose to Stalin in the post-Lenin succession struggle. Carr ended his review by attacking Cohen as typical of the American left, who, Carr claimed, were a group of ineffective, woolly-headed idealists who, in a reference to the recent Watergate scandal
Watergate scandal
The Watergate scandal was a political scandal during the 1970s in the United States resulting from the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., and the Nixon administration's attempted cover-up of its involvement...
, could not even bring down Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...
, whom Carr charged had brought himself down while the American left did nothing useful to facilitate that event. Carr ended his review with the scornful remark that since the American left could produce nothing but "losers" like George McGovern
George McGovern
George Stanley McGovern is an historian, author, and former U.S. Representative, U.S. Senator, and the Democratic Party nominee in the 1972 presidential election....
, so it was natural that an American leftist like Cohen would sympathize with Bukharin, whom Carr likewise regarded as a great "loser" of history.
Heinrich Brüning
Heinrich Brüning was Chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932, during the Weimar Republic. He was the longest serving Chancellor of the Weimar Republic, and remains a controversial figure in German politics....
, had left Germany open to Western economic domination due to the bank collapse of the Creditanstalt
Creditanstalt
The Creditanstalt was an Austrian bank. The Creditanstalt was based in Vienna, founded in 1855 as K. k. priv. Österreichische Credit-Anstalt für Handel und Gewerbe by the Rothschild family...
followed by the rest of the Central European banking system, and thus led to the triumph of National Socialism in 1933. Carr praised the 1932 article written by his friend Isaac Deutscher
Isaac Deutscher
Isaac Deutscher was a Polish-born Jewish Marxist writer, journalist and political activist who moved to the United Kingdom at the outbreak of World War II. He is best known as a biographer of Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin and as a commentator on Soviet affairs...
condemning the Third Period
Third Period
The Third Period is a ideological concept adopted by the Communist International at its 6th World Congress, held in Moscow in the summer of 1928....
of the Comintern and calling for a united front of socialists and Communists against fascism as an excellent analysis, which had it been followed might have spared the world Nazi Germany. In this same way, Carr praised the examination of fascism offered by Trotsky as being very astute and penetrating. Carr argued that Trotsky was correct in condemning the Comintern's social fascism
Social fascism
Social fascism was a theory supported by the Communist International during the early 1930s, which believed that social democracy was a variant of fascism because, in addition to a shared corporatist economic model, it stood in the way of a complete and final transition to communism...
theory as doing more harm than good for the cause of the left, and contended that though the SPD
Social Democratic Party of Germany
The Social Democratic Party of Germany is a social-democratic political party in Germany...
was basically a "bourgeois" party, it was not a fascist party as the Comintern claimed Carr maintained that the Comintern was divided into two fractions in the early 1930s. One fraction headed by the Hungarian Communist Béla Kun
Béla Kun
Béla Kun , born Béla Kohn, was a Hungarian Communist politician and a Bolshevik Revolutionary who led the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919.- Early life :...
preferred the Third Period policy of treating the non-communist left as "disguised fascists", whereas another fraction headed by the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov
Georgi Dimitrov
Georgi Dimitrov Mikhaylov , also known as Georgi Mikhaylovich Dimitrov , was a Bulgarian Communist politician...
supported a policy of building popular fronts with socialists and liberals against fascism. Carr argued that the adoption of the Popular Front
Popular front
A popular front is a broad coalition of different political groupings, often made up of leftists and centrists. Being very broad, they can sometimes include centrist and liberal forces as well as socialist and communist groups...
policy in 1935 had been forced on Stalin by pressure from Communist parties abroad, especially the French Communist Party
French Communist Party
The French Communist Party is a political party in France which advocates the principles of communism.Although its electoral support has declined in recent decades, the PCF retains a large membership, behind only that of the Union for a Popular Movement , and considerable influence in French...
Carr contended that the 7th Congress of the Comintern in 1935 was essentially the end of the Comintern since it marked the abandonment of world revolution as a goal, and instead subordinated the cause of Communism and world revolution towards the goal of building popular fronts against fascism Another related book that Carr was unable to complete before his death, and was published posthumously by Tamara Deutscher in 1984, was The Comintern and the Spanish Civil War.
The History of Soviet Russia volumes met with a mixed reception. The Encyclopaedia Britannia in 1970 described the History of Soviet Russia series as simply "magisterial". The British historian Chimen Abramsky
Chimen Abramsky
Chimen Abramsky was emeritus Professor of Jewish Studies at University College London. His first name is pronounced Shimon....
praised Carr as the world's foremost historian of the Soviet Union who displayed an astonishing knowledge of the subject. In a 1960 review of Socialism in One Country, the Anglo-Austrian Marxist scholar Rudolf Schlesinger praised Carr for his comprehensive treatment of Soviet history, writing that no other historian had ever covered Soviet history in such detail. The Canadian historian John Keep called the series "A towering scholarly monument; in its shadow the rest of us are but pygmies." Deutscher called A History of Soviet Russia "...a truly outstanding achievement". The left-wing British historian A. J. P. Taylor
A. J. P. Taylor
Alan John Percivale Taylor, FBA was a British historian of the 20th century and renowned academic who became well known to millions through his popular television lectures.-Early life:...
called A History of Soviet Russia the most fair and best series of books ever written on Soviet history. Taylor was later to call Carr "an Olympian among historians, a Goethe in range and spirit". The American journalist Harrison Salisbury
Harrison Salisbury
Harrison Evans Salisbury , an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist , was the first regular New York Times correspondent in Moscow after World War II. He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota...
called Carr "one of the half dozen greatest specialists in Soviet affairs and in Soviet-German relations". The British academic Michael Cox
Michael Cox (academic)
Michael E. Cox is a British academic and international relations scholar. He is currently a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics , where he is Co-Director of LSE IDEAS...
praised the History of Soviet Russia series as "...an amazing construction: almost pyramid-like...in its architectural audacity" The British historian John Barber argued that History of Soviet Russia series through a scrupulous and detailed survey of the evidence "transformed" the study of Soviet history in the West. The British historian Hugh Seton-Watson
Hugh Seton-Watson
George Hugh Nicholas Seton-Watson , was a British historian and political scientist specializing in Russia.-Early life:...
called Carr "an object of admiration and gratitude" for his work in Soviet studies The South African born British Marxist historian Hillel Ticktin praised Carr as an honest historian of the Soviet Union and accused all of his critics such as Norman Stone
Norman Stone
Norman Stone is a British academic, historian, author and is currently a Professor in the Department of International Relations at Bilkent University, Ankara...
, Richard Pipes
Richard Pipes
Richard Edgar Pipes is an American academic who specializes in Russian history, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union...
, and Leopold Labedz
Leopold Labedz
Leopold Labedz was an anti-communist Anglo-Polish commentator on the Soviet Union.Labedz was born to a Polish Jewish doctor in Russia. The family soon returned to Warsaw and the young Labedz decided to follow his father into the medical profession. He studied medicine in Paris...
of being "Cold War" historians who betoken to McCarthyism criticized Carr for being "for being on the side of the people". Ticktin went to label Carr's critics "...an entirely unsavory collection, not unconnected with serving the needs of official British and American foreign policy" who were "...closely identified with a discredited right-wing politics...". Ticktin described historians such as Pipes and Labedz as being "...never intellectuals but bureaucrats of knowledge, if not worse". Ticktin went to call all historians who were critical of the Soviet Union either rabidly right-wing "Cold Warriors" such as Richard Pipes
Richard Pipes
Richard Edgar Pipes is an American academic who specializes in Russian history, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union...
and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...
or "CIA intellectuals", and called Carr an "icon of the Left" who sought to honestly portray Soviet history. In 1983, four American historians, namely Geoff Eley
Geoff Eley
Geoff Eley is a British-born historian of Germany. He received his D.Phil from the University of Sussex in 1974, and has taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor since 1979...
, W. Rosenberg, Moshe Lewin
Moshe Lewin
Moshe Lewin was a scholar of Russian and Soviet history; he was a major figure in the revisionist school of Soviet studies which emerged in the 1960s. His surname is pronounced "Luh-VENE".-Early years:...
and Ronald Suny
Ronald Grigor Suny
Ronald Grigor Suny is currently director of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies and the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan, as well as Emeritus Professor of political science and history at the University of Chicago...
in a joint article in the London Review of Books wrote of the "grandeur" of Carr's work and his "extraordinary pioneering quality". The four went on to write:
"In the scope of his work Carr went where no one had gone before and where only a few have really gone since. He mapped the territory of Soviet history in the 1920s and delivered an agenda of questions which will be pursued for the rest of the 20th century...Carr's analysis is now an indispensable starting point for understanding the dynamics of Stalinism".One of Carr's students, the British historian Jonathan Haslam, called Carr a victim of British "McCarthyism" who was unjustly punished for his willingness to defend and praise the Soviet Union. The British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm
Eric Hobsbawm
Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm , CH, FBA, is a British Marxist historian, public intellectual, and author...
wrote that the "…History of Soviet Russia constitutes, with Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, the most remarkable effort of single-handed historical scholarship undertaken in Britain within living memory". The American historian Peter Wiles called the History of Soviet Russia "one of the great historiographical enterprises of our day" and wrote of Carr's "immensely impressive" work The American Marxist historian Arno J. Mayer
Arno J. Mayer
Arno Joseph Mayer is a United States Marxist historian originally from Luxembourg, who specializes in modern Europe, diplomatic history, and the Holocaust, and is currently Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Emeritus, at Princeton University.-Early life and academic career:Mayer was born into a...
wrote that "...the History of Soviet Russia...established E.H. Carr not only as the towering giant among Western specialists of recent Russian history, but certainly also as the leading British historian of his generation". Most unusually for a book by a Western historian, A History of Soviet Russia met with warily favourable reviews by Soviet historians. Normally, any works by Western historians, no matter how favourable to Communism, met with hostile reviews in the Soviet Union, and there was even a brand of polemical literature by Soviet historians attacking so-called "bourgeois historians" under the xenophobic grounds that only Soviet historians were capable of understanding the Soviet past".
The History of Soviet Russia series were not translated into Russian and published in the Soviet Union until 1990. A Soviet journal commented in 1991 that Carr was "almost unknown to a broad Soviet readership", through all Soviet historians were aware of his work, and most of them had considerable respect for Carr, through they had been unable to say so until Perestroika
Perestroika
Perestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...
. Those Soviet historians who specialized in rebutting the "bourgeois falsifiers" as Western historians were so labelled in the Soviet Union attacked Carr for writing that Soviet countryside was in chaos after 1917, but praised Carr as one of the "few bourgeois authors" who told the "truth" about Soviet economic achievements. Through right up until glasnost
Glasnost
Glasnost was the policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions in the Soviet Union, together with freedom of information, introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s...
period, Carr was considered a "bourgeois falsifier" in the Soviet Union, Carr was praised as a British historian who taken "certain steps" towards Marxism, and whose History of Soviet Russia was described as "fairly objective" and "one of the most fundamental works in bourgeois Sovietology". In a preface to the Soviet edition of The History of Soviet Russia in 1990, the Soviet historian Albert Nenarokov wrote in his lifetime Carr had been 'automatically been ranked with the falsifiers", but in fact The History of Soviet Russia was a "scrupulous, professionally conscientious work". Nenarokov called Carr a "honest, objective scholar, espousing liberal principles and attempting on the basis of an enormous documentary base to create a satisfactory picture of the epoch he was considering and those involved in it, to assist a sober and realistic perception of the USSR and a better understanding of the great social processes of the twentieth century". However, Nenarokov expressed some concern about Carr's use of Stalinist language such as calling Bukharin part of the "right deviation" in the Party without the use of the quotation marks. Nenarokov took the view that Carr had too narrowly reduced Soviet history after 1924 down to a choice of either Stalin or Trotsky, arguing that Bukharin was a better, more humane alternative to both Stalin and Trotsky.
The pro-Soviet slant in Carr's The History of Soviet Russia attracted some controversy. The American writer Max Eastman
Max Eastman
Max Forrester Eastman was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet, and a prominent political activist. For many years, Eastman was a supporter of socialism, a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes...
in a 1950 review of the first volume of A History of Soviet Russia called Carr as "a mild-quiet-hearted bourgeois with a vicarious taste for revolutionary violence" In 1951, the Austrian journalist Franz Borkenau
Franz Borkenau
Franz Borkenau was an Austrian writer. Borkenau was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of a civil servant. As a university student in Leipzig, his main interests were Marxism and psychoanalysis...
wrote in the Der Monat newspaper:
"Human suffering he seems to say, is not a historical factor; Carr belongs to those very cold people who always believe they think and act with the iciest calculation and therefore fail to understand why they are mistaken in their calculations time and time again".In a 1955 review in Commentary, Bertram Wolfe
Bertram Wolfe
Bertram David "Bert" Wolfe was an American scholar and former communist best known for biographical studies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Diego Rivera.-Early life:...
accused Carr of systemically taking on Lenin's point of view in History of Soviet Russia volumes and of being unwilling to consider other perspectives on Russian history. In 1962 the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper argued that Carr's identification with the "victors" of history meant that Carr saw Stalin as historically important, and that Carr had neither time nor sympathy for the millions of Stalin's victims. The Anglo-American historian Robert Conquest
Robert Conquest
George Robert Ackworth Conquest CMG is a British historian who became a well-known writer and researcher on the Soviet Union with the publication in 1968 of The Great Terror, an account of Stalin's purges of the 1930s...
argued that Carr took the official reasons for the launching of the First Five Year Plan too seriously, and argued that the "crisis" of the late 1920s was more the result of Soviet misunderstanding of economics than an "objective" economic crisis forced on Stalin. Furthermore, Conquest maintained that Carr's opponents such as Leonard Schapiro
Leonard Schapiro
Leonard Bertram Naman Schapiro was a British academic and scholar of Russian politics. He taught for many years at the London School of Economics, where he was Professor of Political Science with Special Reference to Russian Studies...
, Adam Ulam
Adam Ulam
Adam Bruno Ulam was a Polish and American historian and political scientist at Harvard University. Ulam was one of the world's foremost authorities on Russia and the Soviet Union, and author of twenty books and many articles.-Biography:...
, Bertram Wolfe
Bertram Wolfe
Bertram David "Bert" Wolfe was an American scholar and former communist best known for biographical studies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and Diego Rivera.-Early life:...
, Robert C. Tucker
Robert C. Tucker
Robert Charles Tucker was an American political scientist.Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he was a Sovietologist at Princeton University. He served as an attaché at the American Embassy in Moscow from 1944–1953. He received his PhD degree from Harvard University in 1958; his doctoral dissertation...
and Richard Pipes
Richard Pipes
Richard Edgar Pipes is an American academic who specializes in Russian history, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union...
had a far better understanding of Soviet history than did Carr. The Polish-born American historian Richard Pipes
Richard Pipes
Richard Edgar Pipes is an American academic who specializes in Russian history, particularly with respect to the Soviet Union...
wrote that the essential questions of Soviet history were: "Who were the Bolsheviks, what did they want, why did some follow them and others resist? What was the intellectual and moral atmosphere in which all these events occurred?", and went on to note that Carr failed to pose these questions, let alone answer them. Pipes was later to compare Carr's single paragraph dismissal in the History of Soviet Russia of the 1921 famine
Russian famine of 1921
The Russian famine of 1921, also known as Povolzhye famine, which began in the early spring of that year, and lasted through 1922, was a severe famine that occurred in Bolshevik Russia...
as unimportant (because there were no sources for the death toll that Carr deemed trustworthy) with Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial
Holocaust denial is the act of denying the genocide of Jews in World War II, usually referred to as the Holocaust. The key claims of Holocaust denial are: the German Nazi government had no official policy or intention of exterminating Jews, Nazi authorities did not use extermination camps and gas...
.
Leopold Labedz
Leopold Labedz was an anti-communist Anglo-Polish commentator on the Soviet Union.Labedz was born to a Polish Jewish doctor in Russia. The family soon returned to Warsaw and the young Labedz decided to follow his father into the medical profession. He studied medicine in Paris...
criticized Carr for taking the claims of the Soviet government too seriously. Labedz wrote that:
"He [Carr] tended to confine himself to the penumbra of official formulations and of ideological formulas which always concealed, rather than revealed, real Soviet life".Labedz argued that what he regarded as Carr's worship of kratos (power) led him to engage in an apologia for Stalin by ignoring facts that placed Stalin in an unfavourable light and by highlighting those facts that placed Stalin in a positive light. Labedz noted it only after 17 years after the first volume of the History of Soviet Russia series was published did Carr criticize Stalin in volume 8 of the series, albeit only once and in a veiled form. Labedz went on to argue that Carr's decision to end the History of Soviet Russia series at 1929 reflected not the lack of documentary material as Carr claimed, but rather an inability and unwillingness to confront the horrors of Stalin's Soviet Union. Labedz drew an unflattering comparison between Carr and Edward Gibbon
Edward Gibbon
Edward Gibbon was an English historian and Member of Parliament...
Labedz argued that:
"To compare Carr's approach with Gibbon's is to register the contrast between his moral indifference and Gibbon's human concern, his blinkered pedantry and Gibbon's sovereign achievement in the sifting and validation of evidence."Labedz was very critical of Carr's handling of sources, arguing that Carr was too inclined to accept official Soviet documents at face value, and unwilling to admit to systematic falsification of the historical record under Stalin. Finally, Labedz took Carr to task over what Labedz regarded as his tendency to white-wash Soviet crimes "behind an abstract formula which often combines "progressive" stereotypes with the lexicon of Soviet terminology". The British historian Norman Stone
Norman Stone
Norman Stone is a British academic, historian, author and is currently a Professor in the Department of International Relations at Bilkent University, Ankara...
argued that Carr was guilty of writing in a bland style meant to hide his pro-Soviet sympathies. Writing of a History of Soviet Russia in 1983, Stone commented that:
"Much of the book concerns economics, a subject on which Carr was hardly an expert. The lack of definitive point in the book...makes it dull and unrevealing. Like Carr himself it peters out...Carr'sHistory is not a history of the Soviet Union, but effectively of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Even then, much of it is the kind of unreconstructed Stalinist version that could not now see the light of day in Russia itself...I am nearly tempted to exclaim that no more useless set of volumes has ever masqueraded as a classic. Carr's real talent lay in mathematics...From the mathematical spirit he took a quality not so much of abstraction as of autism which was carried over into his historical work. The result is a trail of devastation." Stone later wrote about Carr in 2004 that:
"Tocqueville says somewhere that if you approve of dictatorship for a people, it means you despise the people. Carr did-he said at the end of his life that all those dead peasants meant progress. As Orwell said, it's all very well saying you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs, but where's the omelette?"
The American historian Walter Laqueur
Walter Laqueur
Walter Zeev Laqueur is an American historian and political commentator. He was born in Breslau, Germany , to a Jewish family. In 1938, Laqueur left Germany for the British Mandate of Palestine. His parents, who were unable to leave, became victims of the Holocaust...
argued that the History of Soviet Russia volumes were a dubious historical source that for the most part excluded mention of the more unpleasant aspects of Soviet life, reflecting Carr's pro-Soviet tendencies. Laqueur commented that Carr called Stalin a ruthless tyrant in his 1979 book The Russian Revolution, and noted that he almost totally refrained from expressing any criticism of Stalin in all 14 volumes of the History of Soviet Russia series. Likewise, Laqueur contended that Carr excelled at irony, and that writing panegyrics to the Soviet Union was not his forte. In Laqueur's opinion, if Carr is to be remembered by future generations, it will be for books like Dostoyevsky, The Romantic Exiles and Bakunin, and his History of Soviet Russia will besmirch the fine reputation created by those books. A major source of criticism of a History of Soviet Russia was Carr's decision to ignore the Russian Civil War
Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
under the grounds it was unimportant, and likewise to his devoting only a few lines to the Kronstadt mutiny
Kronstadt rebellion
The Kronstadt rebellion was one of many major unsuccessful left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War...
of 1921 since Carr argued it only a minor event. Laqueur commented in his opinion that Carr's ignoring the Russian Civil War while paying an inordinate amount of attention to such subjects as the relations between the Swedish Communist Party and the Soviet Communist Party
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
and Soviet diplomatic relations with Outer Mongolia
Outer Mongolia
Outer Mongolia was a territory of the Qing Dynasty = the Manchu Empire. Its area was roughly equivalent to that of the modern state of Mongolia, which is sometimes informally called "Outer Mongolia" today...
in the 1920s left the History of Soviet Russia very unbalanced.
What Is History? Carr is also famous today for his work of historiography
Historiography
Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...
, What is History?
What is History?
What Is History? is a 1961 non-fiction book by historian Edward Hallett Carr on historiography. It discusses history, facts, the bias of historians, science, morality, individuals and society, and moral judgements in history....
(1961), a book based upon his series of G. M. Trevelyan
G. M. Trevelyan
George Macaulay Trevelyan, OM, CBE, FRS, FBA , was a British historian. Trevelyan was the third son of Sir George Otto Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet, and great-nephew of Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose staunch liberal Whig principles he espoused in accessible works of literate narrative avoiding a...
lectures, delivered at the University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
between January–March 1961. In this work, Carr argued that he was presenting a middle-of-the-road position between the empirical
Empiricism
Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,...
view of history and R. G. Collingwood
R. G. Collingwood
Robin George Collingwood was a British philosopher and historian. He was born at Cartmel, Grange-over-Sands in Lancashire, the son of the academic W. G. Collingwood, and was educated at Rugby School and at University College, Oxford, where he read Greats...
's idealism
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
. Carr rejected the empirical view of the historian's work being an accretion of "facts" that he or she has at their disposal as nonsense. Carr claimed:
"The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate".Carr maintained that there is such a vast quantity of information, at least about post-Dark Ages times, that the historian always chooses the "facts" he or she decides to make use of. In Carr's famous example, he claimed that millions had crossed the Rubicon
Rubicon
The Rubicon is a shallow river in northeastern Italy, about 80 kilometres long, running from the Apennine Mountains to the Adriatic Sea through the southern Emilia-Romagna region, between the towns of Rimini and Cesena. The Latin word rubico comes from the adjective "rubeus", meaning "red"...
, but only Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar
Gaius Julius Caesar was a Roman general and statesman and a distinguished writer of Latin prose. He played a critical role in the gradual transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire....
's crossing in 49 BC is declared noteworthy by historians. Carr divided facts into two categories, "facts of the past", that is historical information that historians deem unimportant, and "historical facts", information that the historians have decided is important. Carr contended that historians quite arbitrarily determine which of the "facts of the past" to turn into "historical facts" according to their own biases and agendas. Carr stated that:
"Study the historian before you begin to study the facts. This is, after all, not very abstruse. It is what is already done by the intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended to read a work by that great scholar Jones of St. Jude's, goes round to a friend at St. Jude's to ask what sort of chap Jones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet. When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog. The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation. Indeed, if, standing Sir George Clark on his head, I were to call history "a hard core of interpretation surrounded by a pulp of disputable facts", my statement would, no doubt, be one-sided and misleading, but no more so, I venture to think, than the original dictum"For this reason, Carr argued that Leopold von Ranke
Leopold von Ranke
Leopold von Ranke was a German historian, considered one of the founders of modern source-based history. Ranke set the standards for much of later historical writing, introducing such ideas as reliance on primary sources , an emphasis on narrative history and especially international politics .-...
's famous dictum wie es eigentlich gewesen (show what actually happened) was wrong because it presumed that the "facts" influenced what the historian wrote, rather than the historian choosing what "facts of the past" he or she intended to turn into "historical facts". At the same time, Carr argued that the study of the facts may lead the historian to change his or her views. In this way, Carr argued that history was "an unending dialogue between the past and present".
Carr used as an example of how he believed that "facts of the past" were transformed into the "facts of history" an obscure riot that took place in Wales
Wales
Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...
in 1850 that saw a gingerbread seller beaten to death. Carr argued that this incident had been totally ignored by historians until the 1950s when George Kitson Clark
George Kitson Clark
George Sidney Roberts Kitson Clark was an English historian, a specialist in the nineteenth century.-Historian:He is known as a revisionist historian of the Repeal of the Corn Laws. G. D. H...
mentioned it in one of his books. Since Kitson Clark, Carr claimed that several other historians have cited the same riot for what it revealed about Victorian Britain, leading Carr to assert that the riot and the murder of the gingerbread seller was in the progress of going from a "fact of the past" to a "fact of history" that in the future will be regularly cited by historians. Another example Carr used of his theory was the publication in 1932 of the papers of the former German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann
Gustav Stresemann
was a German politician and statesman who served as Chancellor and Foreign Minister during the Weimar Republic. He was co-laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926.Stresemann's politics defy easy categorization...
by his secretary Bernhard. Carr noted when Stresemann died in 1929, he left behind 300 boxes of papers relating to his time in office, and in 1932 Bernhard published three volumes of Stresemann's papers under the title Stresemanns Vermächtnis. Carr noted that because of the Dawes Plan
Dawes Plan
The Dawes Plan was an attempt in 1924, following World War I for the Triple Entente to collect war reparations debt from Germany...
, the Locarno Treaties
Locarno Treaties
The Locarno Treaties were seven agreements negotiated at Locarno, Switzerland, on 5 October – 16 October 1925 and formally signed in London on 3 December, in which the First World War Western European Allied powers and the new states of central and Eastern Europe sought to secure the post-war...
(for which Stresemann was a co-winner of the Nobel peace prize), and the Young Plan
Young Plan
The Young Plan was a program for settlement of German reparations debts after World War I written in 1929 and formally adopted in 1930. It was presented by the committee headed by American Owen D. Young. After the Dawes Plan was put into operation , it became apparent that Germany could not meet...
, Bernhard devoted most of the papers in Stresemanns Vermächtnis to Stresemann's work with relations to Britain, France and the United States. Carr noted that the documents of the Auswärtiges Amt
Foreign Office (Germany)
The Foreign Office is the foreign ministry of Germany, a federal agency responsible for both the country's foreign politics and its relationship with the European Union. From 1871 to 1919, it was led by a Foreign Secretary, and since 1919, it has been led by the Foreign Minister of Germany...
and Stresemann's own papers show that Stresemann was far more concerned with relations with the Soviet Union instead of the Western powers, and that Bernhard had edited the selection in Stresemanns Vermächtnis to focus more on Stresemann's Nobel Peace Prize-winning successes and to make him seem more like an apostle of peace than what he really was (one of Stresemann's major interests was in partitioning Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union). Moreover, Carr noted that when an English translation of Stresemanns Vermächtnis was published in 1935, the translator abbreviated one-third of the German original to focus more on those aspects of Stresemann's diplomacy that were of primary interest to British readers, which had the effect of making it seem that Stesemann was almost exclusively concerned with relations with the Western powers and had little time for relations with the Soviet Union. Carr commented that if it were only the English translation of Stresemanns Vermächtnis that had survived World War II, then historians would have been seriously misled about what Stresemann had been up to as Foreign Minister. Finally Carr argued that in the conversations between Stresemann and the Soviet Foreign Commissar Georgy Chicherin
Georgy Chicherin
Georgy Vasilyevich Chicherin was a Marxist revolutionary and a Soviet politician. He served as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs in the Soviet government from March 1918 to 1930.-Childhood and early career:...
, Stresemann does most of the talking and says all of the intelligent and original things, leading Carr to suggest that Stresemann himself had edited the papers to place himself in the best possible light. Carr used Stresemanns Vermächtnis to argue for the subjective nature of the documents historians used, which he then used to support his attacks against the idea of the work of the historians being purely that of a totally objective observer who "lets the facts speak for themselves".
Likewise, Carr charged that historians are always influenced by the present when writing about the past. As an example, he used the changing viewpoints about the German past expressed by the German historian Friedrich Meinecke
Friedrich Meinecke
Friedrich Meinecke was a liberal German historian, probably the most famous German historian of his generation. As a representative of an older tradition still writing after World War II, he was an important figure to the end of his life.-Life:Meinecke was born in Salzwedel in the Province of Saxony...
during the Imperial, Weimar, Nazi and post-war periods to support his contention. The British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, one of Carr's leading critics, summarised Carr's argument as:
"George Grote, the 19th-century historian of Greece, was an enlightened radical banker; therefore, his picture of Periclean Athens is merely an allegory of 19th century England as seen by an enlightened banker. Mommsen's History of Rome is similarly dismissed as a product and illustration of pre-Bismarckian Germany. Sir Lewis Namier's choice of subject and treatment of it simply show the predictable prejudices of a Polish conservative".
In general, Carr held to a deterministic
Determinism
Determinism is the general philosophical thesis that states that for everything that happens there are conditions such that, given them, nothing else could happen. There are many versions of this thesis. Each of them rests upon various alleged connections, and interdependencies of things and...
outlook in history. In Carr's opinion, all that happens in the world had a cause, and events could not happened differently unless there was a different cause. In Carr's example, if one's friend Smith suddenly starts acting out of character one day, then it must be understood that there is a reason for the strange behaviour, and that if that reason did not exist, than Smith would be acting normally. Carr criticised counter-factual history as a "parlour game" played by the "losers" in history. Carr contended that those who engaged in counter-factual speculations about Russian history, such as if Count Pyotr Stolypin
Pyotr Stolypin
Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin served as the leader of the 3rd DUMA—from 1906 to 1911. His tenure was marked by efforts to repress revolutionary groups, as well as for the institution of noteworthy agrarian reforms. Stolypin hoped, through his reforms, to stem peasant unrest by creating a class of...
's land reforms were given enough time, would the Russian Revolution have been prevented, were those who were uncomfortable about the fact that the Bolsheviks were the "winners" of Russian history and their opponents were not. Likewise, Carr asserted those who stress the importance of "accidents" as a central causal agent in history were the "losers" of history, who wished to play explain away their defeats as the workings of chance and fate. In the same way, Carr argued that historians must concern themselves with the "winners" of history. In Carr's example, it is those who score centuries in cricket
Cricket
Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players on an oval-shaped field, at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard long pitch. One team bats, trying to score as many runs as possible while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the batsmen and thus limit the...
matches who are recorded, not those who are dismissed for ducks, and in the same way, Carr maintained that a preoccupation with the "losers" would be the equivalent of someone only listing the losers of cricket games. Carr dismissed the free will
Free will
"To make my own decisions whether I am successful or not due to uncontrollable forces" -Troy MorrisonA pragmatic definition of free willFree will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long...
arguments made by Sir Karl Popper
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...
and Sir Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
Sir Isaiah Berlin OM, FBA was a British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas of Russian-Jewish origin, regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century and a dominant liberal scholar of his generation...
as Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
propaganda meant to discredit communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
. In a similar way, Carr took a hostile view of those historians who stress the workings of chance and contingency in the workings of history. In Carr's view, such historians did not understand their craft very well, or were in some way identified with the "losers" of history.
In the same way, Carr argued that no individual is truly free of the social environment in which they live, but contended that within those limitations, there was room, albeit very narrow room for people to make decisions that have an impact on history. Carr made a division between those who, like Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...
and Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell was an English military and political leader who overthrew the English monarchy and temporarily turned England into a republican Commonwealth, and served as Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland....
, helped to shape the social forces that carried them to historical greatness and those who, like Otto von Bismarck
Otto von Bismarck
Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg , simply known as Otto von Bismarck, was a Prussian-German statesman whose actions unified Germany, made it a major player in world affairs, and created a balance of power that kept Europe at peace after 1871.As Minister President of...
and Napoleon
Napoleon I of France
Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader during the latter stages of the French Revolution.As Napoleon I, he was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815...
, rode on the back of social forces over which they had little or no control. Though Carr was willing to grant individuals a role in history, he argued that those who focus exclusively on individuals in a Great man theory
Great man theory
The Great Man Theory was a popular 19th century idea according to which history can be largely explained by the impact of "great men", or heroes: highly influential individuals who, due to either their personal charisma, intelligence, wisdom, or Machiavellianism utilized their power in a way that...
of history were doing a profound disservice to the past. As an example, Carr complained of those historians who explained the Russian Revolution solely as the result of the "stupidity" of the Emperor Nicholas II
Nicholas II of Russia
Nicholas II was the last Emperor of Russia, Grand Prince of Finland, and titular King of Poland. His official short title was Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias and he is known as Saint Nicholas the Passion-Bearer by the Russian Orthodox Church.Nicholas II ruled from 1894 until...
(which Carr regarded as a factor but only of lesser importance) rather than the working of a great social forces.
Carr claimed that when examining causation in history, historians should seek to find "rational" causes of historical occurrences, that is causes that can be generalized across time to explain other occurrences in other times and places. For Carr, historical "accidents" can not be generalized, and thus not worth the historian's time. Carr illustrated his theory by telling a story of a man named Robinson who went out to buy some cigarettes one night, and was killed by an automobile with defective brakes driven by a drunk driver named Jones on a sharp turn of the road. Carr argued one could contend that the "real" reasons for the accident that killed Robinson might be the defective brakes or the sharp turn of the road or the inebriated state of Jones, but that to argue that it was Robinson's wish to buy cigarettes was the cause of his death, that while a factor was not the "real" cause of his death. As such, Carr argued that those who were seeking to prevent a repeat of Robinson's death would do well to pass laws regulating drunk driving, straightening the sharp turn of the road and the quality of automobile brakes, but would be wasting their time passing a law forbidding people to take a walk to buy cigarettes. In a not too subtle dig at critics of determinism like Sir Karl Popper
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...
and Sir Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
Sir Isaiah Berlin OM, FBA was a British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas of Russian-Jewish origin, regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century and a dominant liberal scholar of his generation...
, Carr spoke of the inquiry into Robinson's death being interrupted by two "distinguished gentlemen" who maintained quite vehemently that it was Robinson's wish to buy cigarettes that caused his death. In the same way, Carr argued that historians needed to find the "real" causes of historical events by finding the general trend which could inspire a better understanding of the present than by focusing on the role of the accidental and incidental.
As an example of his attack on the role of accidents in history, Carr mocked the hypothesis of "Cleopatra's nose" (Pascal's thought that, but for the magnetism exerted by the nose of Cleopatra on Mark Anthony
Mark Antony
Marcus Antonius , known in English as Mark Antony, was a Roman politician and general. As a military commander and administrator, he was an important supporter and loyal friend of his mother's cousin Julius Caesar...
there would have been no affair between the two, and hence the Second Triumvirate
Second Triumvirate
The Second Triumvirate is the name historians give to the official political alliance of Octavius , Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, and Mark Antony, formed on 26 November 43 BC with the enactment of the Lex Titia, the adoption of which marked the end of the Roman Republic...
would not have broken up, and therefore the Roman Republic would have continued). Carr sarcastically commented that the male attraction to female beauty can hardly be considered an accident at all, and is rather one of the most common cases of cause and effect in the world. Other examples of "Cleopatra's Nose" type of history cited by Carr were the claim by Edward Gibbon
Edward Gibbon
Edward Gibbon was an English historian and Member of Parliament...
if the Turkish sultan Bayezid I
Bayezid I
Bayezid I was the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, from 1389 to 1402. He was the son of Murad I and Valide Sultan Gülçiçek Hatun.-Biography:Bayezid was born in Edirne and spent his youth in Bursa, where he received a high-level education...
did not suffer from gout, he would have conquered Central Europe
Central Europe
Central Europe or alternatively Middle Europe is a region of the European continent lying between the variously defined areas of Eastern and Western Europe...
, Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
's statement if King Alexander had not died of a monkey bite, the Greco-Turkish War would have been avoided, and Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
's remark that if he not contracted a cold while duck hunting, he would not have missed a crucial Politburo
Politburo
Politburo , literally "Political Bureau [of the Central Committee]," is the executive committee for a number of communist political parties.-Marxist-Leninist states:...
meeting in 1923. Rather than accidents, Carr asserted history was a series of causal chains interacting with each other. Carr contemptuously compared those like Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
who in his book The World Crisis claimed that the death of King Alexander from a monkey bite caused the Greek-Turkish war to those who would claim that the "real" cause of Robinson's death was due to his desire to buy cigarettes. Carr argued that the claim that history was a series of "accidents" was merely an expression of the pessimism, which Carr claimed was the dominant mood in Britain in 1961 due to the decline of the British Empire.
Pieter Geyl
Pieter Catharinus Arie Geyl was a Dutch historian, well-known for his studies in early modern Dutch history and in historiography.-Background:...
, Carr argued that as the values of society changes, so do the values of historical works. Carr used Geyl's 1946 book Napoleon: voor en tegen in de Franse geschiedschrijving (Napoleon For and Against) about how different French historians have viewed Napoleon in different periods to make a case that historians are always influenced by the society and times they live in. Carr argued that as society continues to progress in the 20th century, historians must change the values that they apply in writing their works to reflect the work of progress. Carr argued during his lectures that Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
had developed a schema for understanding past, present and the future that reflected the proper and dual role of the historian both to analyse the past and provide a call for action for the present in order to create a better future for humanity.
Carr emphatically contended that history was a social science
Social sciences
Social science is the field of study concerned with society. "Social science" is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences usually exclusive of the administrative or managerial sciences...
, not an art
The arts
The arts are a vast subdivision of culture, composed of many creative endeavors and disciplines. It is a broader term than "art", which as a description of a field usually means only the visual arts. The arts encompass visual arts, literary arts and the performing arts – music, theatre, dance and...
. Carr argued that history should be considered a social science because historians like scientists seek generalizations that helped to broaden the understanding of one's subject. Carr used the example of the word revolution, arguing that if the word did not have a specific meaning that it would make no sense for historians to write of revolutions, even though every revolution that occurred in history was in its own way unique. Moreover, Carr claimed that historical generalisations were often related to lessons to be learned from other historical occurrences. Since in Carr's view, lessons can be sought and learned in history, then history was more like a science than any art. Though Carr conceded that historians can not predict exact events in the future, he argued that historical generalisations can supply information useful to understanding both the present and the future. Carr argued that since scientists are not purely neutral observers, but have a reciprocal relationship with the objects under their study just like historians, that this supported identifying history with the sciences rather than the arts. Likewise, Carr contended that history, like science, has no moral judgments, which in his opinion, supports the identification of history as a science.
Carr was well known for his assertions in What Is History? in denying moral judgements in history. Carr argued that it was ahistorical for the historian to judge people in different times according to the moral values of his or her time. Carr argued that individuals should be judged only in terms of the values of their time and place, not by the values of the historian's time and/or place. In Carr's opinion, historians should not act as judges. Carr quoted Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era.He called economics "the dismal science", wrote articles for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia, and became a controversial social commentator.Coming from a strict Calvinist family, Carlyle was...
's remark on the British reaction to the French Revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
: "Exaggeration abounds, execration, wailing and on the whole darkness"...", and complained that exactly the same could be said about too much of Western commentary and writing on the Russian Revolution
October Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
. Likewise, Carr quoted Carlyle on the Reign of Terror
Reign of Terror
The Reign of Terror , also known simply as The Terror , was a period of violence that occurred after the onset of the French Revolution, incited by conflict between rival political factions, the Girondins and the Jacobins, and marked by mass executions of "enemies of...
as a way of confronting Western complaints about Soviet terror:
"Horrible in lands that had known equal justice-not so unnatural in lands that had never known it".Thus, Carr argued that within the context of the Soviet Union, Stalin was a force for the good. In a 1979 essay, Carr argued about Stalin that
"He revived and outdid the worst brutalities of the earlier Tsars; and his record excited revulsion in later generations of historians. Yet his achievement in borrowing from the West, in forcing on primitive Russia the material foundations of modern civilisation, and in giving Russia a place among the European powers, obliged them to concede, however reluctantly his title to greatness. Stalin was the most ruthless despot Russia had known since Peter, and also a great westerniser".Though Carr made it clear that he preferred that historians refrain from expressing moral opinions, he did argue that if the historian should find it necessary then such views should be best be restricted to institutions rather than individuals. Carr argued that such an approach was better because the focus on individuals served to provide a collective alibi for societies. Carr used as examples those in United Kingdom who blamed appeasement
Appeasement
The term appeasement is commonly understood to refer to a diplomatic policy aimed at avoiding war by making concessions to another power. Historian Paul Kennedy defines it as "the policy of settling international quarrels by admitting and satisfying grievances through rational negotiation and...
solely upon Neville Chamberlain
Neville Chamberlain
Arthur Neville Chamberlain FRS was a British Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from May 1937 to May 1940. Chamberlain is best known for his appeasement foreign policy, and in particular for his signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938, conceding the...
, those Germans who argued that Nazi-era crimes were the work of Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
alone or those in the United States who blamed McCarthyism
McCarthyism
McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by...
exclusively upon Senator Joseph McCarthy
Joseph McCarthy
Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957...
. In Carr's opinion, historians should reject concepts like good and Evil
Evil
Evil is the violation of, or intent to violate, some moral code. Evil is usually seen as the dualistic opposite of good. Definitions of evil vary along with analysis of its root motive causes, however general actions commonly considered evil include: conscious and deliberate wrongdoing,...
when making judgements about events and people. Instead, Carr preferred the terms progressive or reactionary as the terms for value judgements. In Carr's opinion, if a historical event such as the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture in the early 1930s led to the growth of the Soviet heavy industry and the achievement of the goals of the First Five Year Plan, then the collectivisation must be considered a progressive development in history, and hence all of the sufferings and millions of deaths caused by collectivisation, the "dekulakisation" campaign and the Holodomor
Holodomor
The Holodomor was a man-made famine in the Ukrainian SSR between 1932 and 1933. During the famine, which is also known as the "terror-famine in Ukraine" and "famine-genocide in Ukraine", millions of Ukrainians died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of...
were justified by the growth of Soviet heavy industry. Likewise, Carr argued that the suffering of Chinese workers in the treaty ports and in the mines of South Africa in the late 19th-early 20th centuries was terrible, but must be considered a progressive development as it helped to push China towards the Communist revolution. Carr argued that China was much better off under the leadership of Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
then it was under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek
Chiang Kai-shek was a political and military leader of 20th century China. He is known as Jiǎng Jièshí or Jiǎng Zhōngzhèng in Mandarin....
, and hence all of the developments that led to the fall of Chiang's regime in 1949 and the rise to power of Mao must considered progressive. Finally, Carr argued that historians can be "objective" if they are capable of moving beyond their narrow view of the situation both in the past and in the present and write historical works that helped to contribute to progress of society.
At the end of his lectures, Carr criticized a number of conservative/liberal historians and philosophers such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, Sir Karl Popper
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRS FBA was an Austro-British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics...
, Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison
Samuel Eliot Morison
Samuel Eliot Morison, Rear Admiral, United States Naval Reserve was an American historian noted for his works of maritime history that were both authoritative and highly readable. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1912, and taught history at the university for 40 years...
, Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier
Lewis Bernstein Namier
Sir Lewis Bernstein Namier was an English historian. He was born Ludwik Niemirowski in Wola Okrzejska in what was then part of the Russian Empire and is today in Poland.-Life:...
and Michael Oakeshott
Michael Oakeshott
Michael Joseph Oakeshott was an English philosopher and political theorist who wrote about philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and philosophy of law...
, and argued that "progress" in the world was against them. Carr ended his book with the predication that "progress" would sweep away everything that Popper, Morison, Namier, Trever-Roper and Oakeshott believed in the 20th century just the same way that "progress" swept away the Catholic Church's opposition to Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei , was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism...
's astronomical theories in the 17th century. Elaborating on the theme of "progress" inevitably sweeping away the old order of things in the world, in a 1970 article entitled "Marxism and History", Carr argued that with the exception of the Mexican Revolution
Mexican Revolution
The Mexican Revolution was a major armed struggle that started in 1910, with an uprising led by Francisco I. Madero against longtime autocrat Porfirio Díaz. The Revolution was characterized by several socialist, liberal, anarchist, populist, and agrarianist movements. Over time the Revolution...
, every revolution in the last sixty-odd years had been led by Marxists. The other revolutions Carr counted were the revolutions in Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
, China, Russia, and a half-revolution in Vietnam
Vietnam
Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...
(presumably a reference to the then on-going Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
). This together with what Carr saw as the miserable condition of the Third World
Third World
The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either capitalism and NATO , or communism and the Soviet Union...
, which comprised most of the world led Carr to argue that Marxism had the greatest appeal in the Third World, and was the most likely wave of the future. Carr expanded on this thesis of "progress" being an unstoppable force in September 1978 when he stated:
"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 his notes for a second edition of What Is History?, Carr remarked on recent trends in historiography. Carr wrote about the rise of social history that:
"Since the First World War the impact of the materialist conception of history on historical writings has been very strong. Indeed, one might say that all serious historical work done in this period has been moulded by its influence. The symptom of this change has been the replacement, in general esteem, of battles, diplomatic manoeuvres, constitutional arguments and political intrigues as the main topics of history-'political history' in the broad sense-by the study of economic factors, of social conditions, of statistics of population, of the rise and fall of classes. The increasing popularity of sociology has been another feature of the same development; the attempt has sometimes been made to treat history as a branch of sociology."About the rise of social history as a subject at the expense of political history, Carr wrote:
"Social history is the bedrock. To study the bedrock alone is not enough; and becomes tedious; perhaps this is what happened to Annales. But you can't dispense with it".Through Carr himself had insisted that history was a social science, he regretted the decline of history as a discipline relative to the other social sciences, which he saw as a part of a conservative trend. Carr wrote:
"History is preoccupied with fundamental processes of change. If you are allergic to these processes, you abandon history and take cover in the social sciences. Today anthropology, sociology, etc., flourish. History is sick. But then our society too is sick".Carr deplored the rise of Structuralism
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
. Carr wrote there was the structuralist approach, which Carr called a "horizontal" way of understanding history that "analyses a society in terms of the functional or structural inter-relation of its parts". Against it, there was what Carr called the "vertical" approach that "analyses it [society] in terms of where it has come from and where it is going". Through Carr was willing to allow that a structural approach had some advantages, he wrote:
"But it makes a lot of difference which attracts [the historian's] main emphasis and concern. This depends partly, no doubt, on his temperament, but largely on the environment in which he works. We live in a society which thinks of change chiefly as change for the worse, dreads it and prefers the "horizontal" view which calls only for minor adjustments".Repeating his attack on the empirical approach to history, Carr claimed that those historians who claimed to be strict empiricists like Captain Stephen Roskill
Stephen Roskill
Captain Stephen Wentworth Roskill, CBE, DSC, FBA, DLitt was a career officer in the Royal Navy, serving during the Second World War and, after his enforced medical retirement, served as the official historian of the Royal Navy from 1949 to 1960...
who took a just-the-facts approach would resemble a character named Funes
Funes the Memorious
"Funes the Memorious" is a fantasy short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. First published in La Nación in June 1942, it appeared in the 1944 anthology Ficciones, part two . The first English translation appeared in 1954 in Avon Modern Writing No. 2...
in a short story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
who never forgot anything he had seen or heard, so his memory was a "garbage heap" Thus, Funes was "not very capable of thought" because "to think is forget differences, to generalise, to make abstractions" In his introduction to the second edition of What is History? written shortly before his death in 1982, which was all that Carr had finished of the second edition, Carr proclaimed his belief that the western world was in a state of despair, writing:
"The Cold War has resumed with redoubled intensity, bringing with it the threat of nuclear extinction. The delayed economic crisis has set in with a vengeance, ravaging the industrial countries and spreading the cancer of unemployment throughout the Western world [Carr is referring to the recession of the early 1980sCarr went on to declare his belief that the world was in fact getting better and wrote that it was only the West in decline, not the world, writing that:Early 1980s recessionThe early 1980s recession describes the severe global economic recession affecting much of the developed world in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The United States and Japan exited recession relatively early, but high unemployment would continue to affect other OECD nations through at least 1985...
here.]. Scarcely a country is now free from the antagonism of violence and terrorism. The revolt of the oil-producing states of the Middle East has brought a significant shift in power to the disadvantage of the Western industrial nations [a reference on the part of Carr to the Arab oil shock of 1973-741973 oil crisisThe 1973 oil crisis started in October 1973, when the members of Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries or the OAPEC proclaimed an oil embargo. This was "in response to the U.S. decision to re-supply the Israeli military" during the Yom Kippur war. It lasted until March 1974. With the...
and to the Iranian oil shock of 19791979 energy crisisThe 1979 oil crisis in the United States occurred in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. Amid massive protests, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, fled his country in early 1979 and the Ayatollah Khomeini soon became the new leader of Iran. Protests severely disrupted the Iranian oil...
]. The "third world" has been transformed from a passive into a positive and disturbing factor in world affairs. In these conditions any expression of optimism has come to seem absurd".
"My conclusion is that the current wave of scepticism and despair, which looks ahead to nothing but destruction and decay, and dismisses as absurd any belief in progress or any prospect of a further advance by the human race, is a form of elitism-the product of elite social groups whose security and whose privileges have been most conspicuously eroded by the crisis, and of elite countries whose once undisputed domination over the rest of the world has been shattered".
The claims that Carr made about the nature of historical work in What Is History? proved be very controversial, and inspired Sir Geoffrey Elton to write his 1967 book The Practice of History in response, defending traditional historical methods. Elton criticized Carr for his "whimsical" distinction between the "historical facts" and the "facts of the past", arguing that it reflected "...an extraordinarily arrogant attitude both to the past and to the place of the historian studying it". Though Elton praised Carr for rejecting the role of "accidents" in history, he maintained that Carr's philosophy of history was merely an attempt to provide a secular version of the mediaeval view of history as the working of God's master plan with "Progress" playing the part of God. In response to Elton's book, Carr wrote a letter to him that began with a warning about suing him for libel. However, the libel threat was just a practical joke as Carr wrote "Nobody before has accused me of having been an undergraduate at Oxford, and my solicitors might, I fear take a low view of this". Carr was referring here to the sentence in The Practice of History where Elton had written that Carr's knowledge of ancient Greece were based on "the fifty-year memories of an Oxford undergraduate" (Carr had of course attended Cambridge).
The British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper argued that Carr's dismissal of the "might-have-beens of history" reflected a fundamental lack of interest in examining historical causation. Trevor-Roper asserted that examining possible alternative outcomes of history was far from being a "parlour-game" was rather an essential part of the historians' work. Trevor-Roper argued that only by considering all possible outcomes of a given historical situation could a historian properly understand the period under study. In Trevor-Roper's opinion, only by looking at all possible outcomes and all sides could a historian properly understand history, and those historians who adopted Carr's perspective of only seeking to understand the "winners" of history, and treating the outcome of a particular set of events as the only possible outcome were "bad historians". In a review in 1963 in Historische Zeitschrift, Andreas Hillgruber
Andreas Hillgruber
Andreas Fritz Hillgruber was a conservative German historian. Hillgruber was influential as a military and diplomatic historian.At his death in 1989, the American historian Francis L...
wrote favourably of Carr's geistvoll-ironischer (ironically spirited) criticism of conservative, liberal and positivist historians A more positive assessment of What is History? came from the British philosopher W.H. Walsh who in a 1963 review endorsed Carr's theory of "facts of history" and "facts of the past", writing that it is not a "fact of history" he had toast for breakfast today. Walsh went on to write that Carr was correct that historians did not stand above history, and were instead products of their own places and times, which in turn decided what "facts of the past" they determined into "facts of history".
The British historian Richard J. Evans
Richard J. Evans
Richard John Evans is a British academic and historian, prominently known for his history of Germany.-Life:Evans was born in London, of Welsh parentage, and is now Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and President of Wolfson College...
credited What Is History? with causing a revolution in British historiography in the 1960s. The Australian historian Keith Windschuttle
Keith Windschuttle
Keith Windschuttle is an Australian writer, historian, and ABC board member, who has authored several books from the 1970s onwards. These include Unemployment, , which analysed the economic causes and social consequences of unemployment in Australia and advocated a socialist response; The Media: a...
, a critic of Carr noted regretfully that What Is History? has proved to be one of the most influential books ever written about historiography, and that there were very few historians working in the English language since the 1960s who had not read What Is History? Against Carr's theory of "facts of the past" and "facts of history", Winschuttle wrote:
"Another contender for historical truth might be the proposition: 'The United States defeated Japan in the Second World War.' Now this is something that we know not simply from the historical record. It is no mere interpretation derived from an examination of the documents of surrender signed aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Harbour in 1945. It is not an interpretation that future generations might overturn after they have scoured the nuances of the texts for so far undiscerned ideological meaning. The fact that the United States defeated Japan has shaped the very world that all of us have inhabited since 1945. The relations between states, the world economy, the employment market of every industrial country are all consequences in various ways of this historical truth. The world itself confirms the proposition.The conservative British historian Andrew Roberts was to write in 2005 in defence of counter-factual history that: ‘anything that has been condemned by Carr, Thompson and Hobsbawm must have something to recommend it"
Of course, E.H. Carr might argue the defeat of Japan is a mere 'fact' and the really interesting discussions are the interpretations historians make and the conclusions they draw from facts of this kind. Well, one man's fact can be another man's conclusion. For someone writing a narrative history of the war in the Pacific, the defeat of Japan is a very big conclusion indeed. There is no event that is inherently confined to the status of a mere fact, that is, a building block of a much larger conclusion. Every fact can itself be a conclusion and every conclusion can itself be a fact in someone else's explanation."
Contribution to the theory of International relations
Carr contributed to the foundation of what is now known as classical realismRealism (international relations)
In the study of international relations, Realism or political realism prioritizes national interest and security over ideology, moral concerns and social reconstructions...
in International relations theory
International relations theory
International relations theory is the study of international relations from a theoretical perspective; it attempts to provide a conceptual framework upon which international relations can be analyzed. Ole Holsti describes international relations theories act as a pair of coloured sunglasses,...
. Through study of history (work of Thucydides
Thucydides
Thucydides was a Greek historian and author from Alimos. His History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the 5th century BC war between Sparta and Athens to the year 411 BC...
and Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was an Italian historian, philosopher, humanist, and writer based in Florence during the Renaissance. He is one of the main founders of modern political science. He was a diplomat, political philosopher, playwright, and a civil servant of the Florentine Republic...
) and reflection and deep epistemological disagreement with Idealism
Idealism (international relations)
In the American study of international relations, idealism usually refers to the school of thought personified in American diplomatic history by Woodrow Wilson, such that it is sometimes referred to as Wilsonianism, or Wilsonian Idealism. Idealism holds that a state should make its internal...
, the dominant International relations theory between the World Wars, he came up with realism. In his book The Twenty Years' Crisis
The Twenty Years' Crisis
The Twenty Years' Crisis': 1919-1939 is a book on international relations written by Edward Hallett Carr . The book was written in the 1930s shortly before the outbreak of World War II in Europe and the first edition was published in September 1939, shortly after the war' s outbreak. Carr...
, Carr defined three dichotomies of realism and utopianism (Idealism), derived from Machiavellian realism:
Carr's distinctions of Realism and Utopianism
In the second part of the book The Twenty Years' CrisisThe Twenty Years' Crisis
The Twenty Years' Crisis': 1919-1939 is a book on international relations written by Edward Hallett Carr . The book was written in the 1930s shortly before the outbreak of World War II in Europe and the first edition was published in September 1939, shortly after the war' s outbreak. Carr...
, 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
Social reality
Social reality is distinct from biological reality or individual cognitive reality, and has been defined as 'a level of phenomena that emerges through social interactions and that cannot be reduced to the intentions of individuals'....
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 predominates. For Carr, the ability to see from both angles is the right way to go about.
Works
- "Turgenev and Dostoyevsky" pp. 156–163 from The Slavonic and East European Review, Volume 8, Issue # 22 June 1929.
- "Was Dostoyevsky an Epileptic?" pp. 424–431 from The Slavonic and East European Review, Volume 9, Issue # 26, December 1930.
- "Review: The Brother of Dostoyevsky" review of Vospominaniya A. M. Dostoevskogo pp. 753–754 from The Slavonic and East European Review, Volume 9, Issue # 27, March 1931.
- Dostoevsky (1821–1881): a New Biography, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931.
- The Romantic Exiles: a Nineteenth Century Portrait Gallery, London: Victor Gollancz, 1933 and was also published in paperback by Penguin in 1949 and again in 1968.
- Karl Marx: a Study in Fanaticism, London: Dent, 1934.
- "The League of Peace and Freedom: An Episode in the Quest for Collective Security" pp. 837–844 from International Affairs, Volume 14, Issue # 6, November–December 1935.
- Review of International Socialism and the World War by Merle FainsodMerle FainsodMerle Fainsod was an American political scientist best known for his work on public administration and as a scholar of the Soviet Union...
pages 131-132 from International Affairs, Volume 15, Issue # 1, January - February 1936. - Review of The Way of a Transgressor by Negley Farson pages 441-442 from International Affairs, Volume 15, Issue # 3, May - June 1936.
- Review of Cheerful Giver The Life of Harold Williams by Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams pages 442-443 from International Affairs, Volume 15, Issue# 3, May - June 1936.
- Review of Inside Europe by John Gunther page 458 from International Affairs, Volume 15, Issue# 3, May - June 1936.
- Review of Diplomacy and Peace by R. B. Mowat pages 576-577 from International Affairs, Volume 15, Issue 4, July - August 1936.
- Review of Balkan Holiday by David Footman page 618 from International Affairs, Volume 15, Issue # 4, July - August 1936.
- Review of Marxism and the National and Colonial Question by Joseph Stalin page 623 from International Affairs, Volume 15, Issue # 4, July - August 1936.
- Review of Selected Works Volume I-The Prerequisites of the First Russian Revolution (1894-99) by V. I. Lenin pages 624-625 from International Affairs, Volume 15, Issue # 4, July - August 1936.
- Review of Nicholas II: Prisoner of the People by Essad BeyLev NussimbaumLev Nussimbaum was a writer and journalist, a Jew, born in Kiev, who spent his childhood in Baku before fleeing the Bolsheviks in 1920 at the age of 14...
page 625 from International Affairs, Volume 15, Issue # 4, July - August 1936. - Review of Britain and the Soviets pp. 625–626 from International Affairs, Volume 15, Issue # 4, July–August 1936.
- Review of Problems of Soviet Literature by Andrei Zhdanov page 626 from International Affairs, Volume 15, Issue # 4, July–August 1936.
- Review of Istoriya Grazhdanskoi Voiny S.S.S.R pp. 780–781 from International Affairs, Volume 15, Issue # 5, September -October 1936.
- "Public Opinion As a Safeguard of Peace" pp. 846–862 from International Affairs, Volume 15, Issue # 6, November–December 1936.
- Review of Friedrich Engels: A Biography by Gustav Mayer pages 907-908 from International Affairs, Volume 15, Issue # 6,November – December 1936.
- Review of Dmitroff's Letters from Prison p. 909 from International Affairs, Volume 15, Issue # 6, November–December 1936.
- Review of Letters from Prison by Ernst TollerErnst TollerErnst Toller was a left-wing German playwright, best known for his Expressionist plays and serving as President of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, for six days.- Biography :...
page 909 from International Affairs, Volume 15, Issue # 6, November - December 1936. - Review of The Catholic Tradition of the Law of Nations by John Eppstein page 910 from International Affairs, Volume 15, Issue # 6, November - December 1936.
- Review of Der Proletarische Sozialismus ("Marxismus"): Darstellung und Kritik by Werner SombartWerner SombartWerner Sombart was a German economist and sociologist, the head of the “Youngest Historical School” and one of the leading Continental European social scientists during the first quarter of the 20th century....
page 914 from International Affairs, Volume 15, Issue # 6, November – December 1936. - Review of Moscow Admits a Critic by Sir Bernard ParesBernard ParesSir Bernard Pares KBE was an English historian and academic known for his work on Russia.-Early Life:Pares was educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated in Classics taking a third...
page 958 from International Affairs, Volume 15,Issue # 6, November – December 1936. - "Bakunin's Escape from Siberia" pp. 377–388 from The Slavonic and East European Review, Volume 15, Issue # 44, January 1937.
- Review of The Coming World War by T. H. Wintringham pages 128-129 from International Affairs, Volume 16, Issue # 1, January – February 1937.
- Review of Farewell to Rousseau: A Critique of Liberal Democracy by Claud Sutton page 132 from International Affairs, Volume 16, Issue # 1, January - February 1937.
- Review of Weltgeschichte der Gegenwart in Dokumenten, 1934-35 Teil I by Michael Freund pages 132-133 from International Affairs, Volume 16, Issue # 1, January – February 1937.
- Review of Hitler over Russia? by Ernst Henri page 158 from International Affairs, Volume 16, Issue # 1, January - February 1937.
- Review of Dawn over Samarkand: The Rebirth of Central Asia by Joseph Kunitz page 161 from International Affairs, Volume 16, Issue # 1, January - February 1937.
- Review of Défense du Terrorisme by Leon Trotsky page 163 from International Affairs, Volume 16, Issue # 1, January - February 1937.
- Michael Bakunin, London: Macmillan, 1937.
- Review of Which Way to Peace? by Bertrand Russell pages 283-284 from International Affairs, Volume 16, Issue # 2, Mach - April 1937.
- Review of Constitution of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics pp. 309–310 from International Affairs, Volume 16, Issue # 2, March–April 1937.
- Review of The Case of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre: Report of Court Proceedings of the Zinoviev Trial by D. N. PrittDenis Nowell PrittDenis Nowell Pritt , usually known as D.N. Pritt, was a British barrister and Labour Party politician. Born in Harlesden, Middlesex, he was educated at Winchester College and London University....
page 311 from International Affairs, Volume 16, Issue # 2, March - April 1937. - Review of The Future of Bolshevism by Waldemar Gurian page 481 from International Affairs, Volume 16, Issue # 3, May - June 1937.
- Review of Big Horse's Flight: The Trail of War in Central Asia by Sven HedinSven HedinSven Anders Hedin KNO1kl RVO was a Swedish geographer, topographer, explorer, photographer, and travel writer, as well as an illustrator of his own works...
pages 482-483 from International Affairs, Volume 16, Issue # 3, May - June 1937. - Review of Geneva Scene by Norman Hillson pages 618-619 from International Affairs, Volume 16, Issue # 4, July 1937.
- Review of Der Krieg um Genf by Oscar Bam page 621 from International Affairs, Volume 16, Issue # 4, July 1937.
- Review of Selected Works Volume VII: After the Seizure of Power 1917-1918 by V. I. Lenin page 641 from International Affairs, Volume 16, Issue # 4, July 1937.
- Review of Intervention, Civil War and Communism in Russia, April–December 1918: Documents and Materials by James Bunyan page 642 from International Affairs, Volume 16, Issue # 4, July 1937.
- International Relations Since the Peace Treaties, London, Macmillan, 1937.
- Review of Italy against the World by George Martelli pages 113-115 from International Affairs, Volume 17, Issue # 1, January–February 1938.
- Review of Dusk of Europe by Wythe Williams pages 121-122 from International Affairs, Volume 17, Issue # 1, January – February 1938.
- Review of A History of Russia by Bernard Pares pages 122-123 from International Affairs, Volume 17, Issue # 1, January – February 1938.
- Review of Soviet Justice and the Trial of Radek and Others by Dudley Collard page 124 from International Affairs, Volume 17, Issue # 1, January – February 1938.
- Review of For Peace and Friendship: Being a Verbatim Report of the Second National Congress of Peace and Friendship with the U.S.S.R p. 125 from International Affairs, Volume 17, Issue # 1, January–February 1938.
- Review of History of Anarchism in Russia by E. Yaroslavsky page 454 from International Affairs, Volume 17, Issue # 3, May - June 1938.
- Review of Soviet Tempo by Violet Conolly pages 289-290 from International Affairs, Volume 17,Issue # 2, March - April 1938.
- Review of Moscow 1937 by Lion FeuchtwangerLion FeuchtwangerLion Feuchtwanger was a German-Jewish novelist and playwright. A prominent figure in the literary world of Weimar Germany, he influenced contemporaries including playwright Bertolt Brecht....
pages 456-457 from International Affairs, Volume 17, Issue # 3, May - June 1938. - Review of International Studies in Modern Education by S. H. Bailey pages 541-543 from International Affairs, Volume 17, Issue # 4, July - August 1938.
- Review of The Origins of the Foreign Policy of Woodrow Wilson by Harley Notter pages 594-595 from International Affairs, Volume 17, Issue # 4, July - August 1938.
- Review of Unto Cæsar by F. A. Voigt pages 699-700 from International Affairs, Volume 17, Issue # 5, September–October 1938.
- Review of Geneva and the Drift to War: Lectures Delivered at the Geneva Institute of International Relations, August 1937 pp. 701–702 from International Affairs, Volume 17, Issue # 5, September–October 1938.
- Review of Foreign Affairs, 1919 to 1937 by E. L. Hasluck page 703 from International Affairs, Volume 17, Issue # 5, September–October 1938.
- Review of G.P.U. Justice by Maurice Edelman page 739 from International Affairs, Volume 17, Issue # 5, September- October 1938.
- Review of The Crumbling of Empire by M. J. Bonn pages 828-829 from International Affairs, Volume 17, Issue # 6, November - December 1938.
- The Twenty Years Crisis, 1919–1939: an Introduction to the Study of International Relations, London: Macmillan, 1939, revised edition, 1946.
- Review of The History of The Times Volume II: The Tradition Established, 1841–1884 pp. 404–405 from International Affairs, Volume 18, Issue # 3, May–June 1939.
- Review of The Communist International by Franz BorkenauFranz BorkenauFranz Borkenau was an Austrian writer. Borkenau was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of a civil servant. As a university student in Leipzig, his main interests were Marxism and psychoanalysis...
pp. 444–445 from International Affairs, Volume 18, Issue # 3, May–June 1939. - Review of Germany's Next Aims by Oswald Dutch pages 528-529 from International Affairs, Volume 18, Issue # 4, July - August 1939.
- Britain : A Study Of Foreign Policy From The Versailles Treaty To The Outbreak Of War, London ; New York : Longmans, Green and Co., 1939.
- Review of Prelude to Victory by E. L. Spears pages 39–40 from International Affairs Review Supplement, Volume 19, Issue # 1, June 1940.
- Review of Unfinished Victory by Sir Arthur BryantArthur BryantSir Arthur Wynne Morgan Bryant, CH, CBE , was a British historian and a columnist for the Illustrated London News. His books included studies of Samuel Pepys, accounts of English eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history, and a life of George V...
page 40 from International Affairs Review Supplement, Volume 19, Issue # 1, June 1940. - Review of British Foreign Policy since Versailles, 1919-39 by W. N. Medlicott page 50 from International Affairs Review Supplement, Volume 19, Issue # 1, June 1940.
- Review of Down River: A Danubian Study by John Lehmann pages 53–54 from 'International Affairs Review Supplement, Volume 19, Issue # 1, June 1940.
- Review of Stalin: Czar of All the Russias by Eugene LyonsEugene LyonsEugene Lyons was an American journalist and writer. A fellow traveler of the Communist Party in his younger years, Lyons became highly critical of the Soviet Union after having lived there for several years as a correspondent of United Press International...
pages 59–60 from International Affairs Review Supplement, Volume 19, Issue # 1, June 1940. - Review of The War Crisis in Berlin, July–August 1914 by Horace RumboldHorace RumboldSir Horace George Montagu Rumbold, 9th Baronet, GCB, GCMG, KCVO, PC was the son of Sir Horace Rumbold, 8th Baronet, PC diplomat and was educated at Eton and went on to become a well-travelled diplomat, learning Arabic, Japanese and German...
pages 106-107 from International Affairs Review Supplement, Volume 19, Issue # 2, October 1940. - Review of The Development of Modern France (1870–1939) by D. W. Brogan page 128 from International Affairs Review Supplement, Volume 19, Issue # 2, October 1940.
- Review of Living Space: The Story of South-Eastern Europe by Stoyan Pribichevich page 130 from International Affairs Review Supplement, Volume 19, Issue # 2, October 1940.
- Review of Stalin's Russia and the Crisis in Socialism by Max Eastman page 136 from International Affairs Review Supplement, Volume 19, Issue # 2, October 1940.
- Review of Sea Power pp. 209–211 from International Affairs Review Supplement, Volume 19, Issue # 3–4, December 1940 – March 1941.
- Review of Britain and France between Two Wars Conflicting Strategies of Peace since Versailles by Arnold Wolfers page 407 from International Affairs Review Supplement, Volume 19, Issue # 6/7, December 1941 - March 1942.
- Reviews of New Horizons by J. T. Murphy and Russia on the March by J. T. Murphy pages 415-416 from International Affairs Review Supplement, Volume 19, Issue # 6/7, December 1941 - March 1942.
- Conditions of Peace, London: Macmillan, 1942.
- Review of A Survey of Russian History by B.H. Summer pp. 294–295 from International Affairs, Volume 20, Issue # 2, April 1944.
- Review of The Future of Economic Society A Study in Group Organization by Roy Glenday pp. 563–564 from International Affairs, Volume 20, Issue # 4, October 1944.
- Nationalism and After, London: Macmillan, 1945.
- Review of Eastern Europe between the Wars 1918–1941 by Hugh Seton-Watson from International Affairs, Volume 22,Issue # 1, January 1946.
- Review of Patterns of Peacemaking by David Thomson, Ernst Mayer and Arthur Briggs p. 277 from International Affairs, Volume 22, Issue # 2 March 1946.
- Review of Building Lenin's Russia by Simon Liberman p. 303 from International Affairs, Volume 22, Issue # 2, March 1946.
- The Soviet Impact on the Western World, 1946.
- Review of The Idea of Nationalism A Study in Its Origins and Background by Hans KohnHans KohnHans Kohn was a Jewish philosopher and historian. Born in Prague during the Habsburg Empire, he was captured as a prisoner of war during World War I and held in Russia for five years...
pp. 555–556 from International Affairs, Volume 22, Issue # 4, October 1946. - "Two Currents in World Labor" pp. 72–81 from Foreign Affairs, Volume 25, Issue # 1 October 1946.
- "From Munich to Moscow I" pp. 3–17 from Soviet Studies, Volume 1, Issue # 1, June, 1949.
- "From Munich to Moscow II" pp. 93–105 from Soviet Studies, Volume 1, Issue # 2, October 1949.
- A History of Soviet RussiaA History of Soviet RussiaA History of Soviet Russia was a 14-volume work by Edward Hallett Carr, covering the first twelve years of the history of the Soviet Union. It was first published from 1950 onwards, and re-issued from 1978 onwards....
, Collection of 14 volumes, London: Macmillan, 1950–1978. The first three titles being The Bolshevik Revolution (3 volumes), The Interregnum (1 volume), Socialism In One Country (5 volumes) and The Foundations of A Planned Economy (5 volumes). - Review: The Road to Rapallo Review of Sovetskaya Rossiya i Kapitalisticheskie Gosudarstva v Gody Perekhoda ot Voiny k Miru (1921–1922 gg.) (Soviet Russia and the Capitalist States in the Years of Transition from War to Peace: 1921–22) by N. Rubinstein pp. 231–234 from Soviet Studies, Volume 1, Issue # 3, January 1950. '
- "Review: Russian and German Communism" Review of Stalin and German Communism by Ruth FischerRuth FischerRuth Fischer was a German Communist, a co-founder of the Austrian Communist Party in 1918. According to secret information declassified in 2010, she was a key agent of the American intelligence service known as "The Pond."-Life and work:Born in Leipzig, Ruth Fischer was the daughter of the...
pp. 347–353 from Soviet Studies, Volume 1, Issue # 4, April 1950. - The New Society, London: Macmillan, 1951.
- Review of Bakounine et le Panslavisme Revolutionnaire by Benoit-P. Hepner pp. 227–229 from American Slavic and East European Review, Volume 10, Issue # 3, October 1951.
- Review of Lénine et la IIIme Internationale by Branko Lazitch pp. 268–270 from The Slavonic and East European Review, Volume 30, Issue # 74, December 1951.
- "Review: The Diplomatic Dictionary" review of Diplomatichesky Slovar pp. 316–318 from Soviet Studies, Volume 3, Issue # 3, January 1952.
- "Radek's 'Political Salon' in Berlin 1919" pp. 411–430 from Soviet Studies, Volume 3, Issue # 4, April 1952.
- German-Soviet Relations Between the Two World Wars, 1919–1939, London, Geoffrey Cumberlege 1952.
- "Stalin" pp. 1–7 from Soviet Studies, Volume 5, Issue # 1, July 1953.
- Review of Zwischen Berlin und Moskau Zur Geschichte der deutsch-sowjetischen Beziehungen by Albert NordenAlbert NordenAlbert Norden was a German communist politician. He went into exile during Nazi rule. He returned to Germany after the war, and became an important politician in the German Democratic Republic...
p. 513 from International Affairs, Volume 31, Issue # 4, October 1955. - Review of An Outline of Modern Russian Historiography by A. G. Mazour p. 529 from International Affairs, Volume 31, Issue # 4, October, 1955.
- Review of Labour Policy in the U.S.S.R., 1917–1928 by Margaret Dewar pp. 182–183 from The Economic History Review, Volume 9, Issue # 1, 1956.
- "'Russia and Europe' As A Theme of Russian History" pp. 357–393 from Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier ed. Richard Pares and A.J.P. Taylor, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1956, 1971, ISBN 0-8369-2010-4.
- "Some Notes on Soviet Bashkiria" pp. 217–235 from Soviet Studies, Volume 8, Issue # 3 January 1957.
- "The Origin and Status of the Cheka" pp. 1–11 from Soviet Studies, Volume 10, Issue # 1, July 1958.
- "Pilnyak and the Death of Frunze" pp. 162–164 from Soviet Studies, Volume 10, Issue # 2 October 1958.
- "Correspondence" pp. 319–320 from Soviet Studies, Volume 10, Issue # 3, January 1959.
- What is History?, 1961, revised edition ed. R.W. Davies, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
- Review of Conversations with Stalin by Milovan Đilas pp. 326–327 from Soviet Studies, Volume 14, Issue # 3, January 1963.
- "Editorial Changes in Stalin's Speech of 9 July 1928" pp. 339–340 from Soviet Studies, Volume 16, Issue # 3, January 1965.
- 1917 Before and After, London: Macmillan, 1969; American edition: The October Revolution Before and After, New York: Knopf, 1969.
- "Introduction" pages 2–6 to Heretics and Renegades and Other Essays by Isaac Deutscher, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1969.
- Review of Lenin's Last Struggle by Moshe Lewin page 442 from The English Historical Review, Volume 85, Issue # 335, April 1970.
- Review of The Trial of Bukharin by G. Katkov pages 876-877 from The English Historical Review, Volume 85, Issue # 337, October 1970.
- Review of The Making of the Soviet State Apparatus by O. A. Narkiewicz page 224 from The English Historical Review, Volume 88, Issue # 346, January 1973.
- Review of Socialism in India by B. R. Nanda pp. 118–119 from Modern Asian Studies, Volume 7, Issue # 1, January 1973.
- Review of Lénine by Gerard Walter page 937 from The English Historical Review, Volume 88, Issue # 349, October 1973.
- Review of In the Name of the People: Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia by Adam B. Ulam pages 126-127 from Slavic Review, Volume 37, Issue # 1, March 1978.
- "The Zinoviev Letter" pp. 209–210 from The Historical Journal, Volume 22, Issue # 1, March 1979.
- The Russian Revolution: From Lenin to Stalin (1917–1929), London: Macmillan, 1979.
- From Napoleon to Stalin and Other Essays, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980.
- Review of Turgenev: His Life and Times by Leonard Schapiro pp. 432–434 from The Slavonic and East European Review, Volume 58, Issue # 3, July 1980.
- Review of Die auswärtige Kulturpolitik der Sowjetunion in ihren Auswirkungen auf Deutschland, 1921–1929 by Edgar Lersch p. 461 from The Slavonic and East European Review, Volume 58, Issue # 3, July 1980.
- Review of Bakounine: combats et débats p. 317 from The Slavonic and East European Review, Volume 59, Issue # 2, April 1981.
- The Twilight of the Comintern, 1930–1935, London: Macmillan, 1982.
- The Comintern and the Spanish Civil War, 1984.
External links
- The Vices of Integrity: E H Carr
- E. H. Carr: historian of the future
- Review of What is History?
- The Two Faces of E.H. Carr by Richard J. EvansRichard J. EvansRichard John Evans is a British academic and historian, prominently known for his history of Germany.-Life:Evans was born in London, of Welsh parentage, and is now Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and President of Wolfson College...
- E.H. Carr Studies in Revolutions
- E. H. Carr and Isaac Deutscher: A Very Special Relationship
- E.H. Carr The Historian As A Marxist Partisan
- Review of The Vices of Integrity
- Review of E.H. Carr: A Critical Appraisal by Alun Munslow
- E.H. Carr vs. Idealism: The Battle Rages On by John MearsheimerJohn MearsheimerJohn J. Mearsheimer is an American professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is an international relations theorist. Known for his book on offensive realism, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, more recently Mearsheimer has attracted attention for co-authoring and publishing...
The Papers of E. H. Carr are held at the University of Birmingham
University of Birmingham
The University of Birmingham is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Birmingham Medical School and Mason Science College . Birmingham was the first Redbrick university to gain a charter and thus...
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