E.H. Carr vs. Idealism: The Battle Rages On

This article is an almost verbatim version of the E.H. Carr Memorial Lecture delivered at Aberystwyth on 14 October 2004. I argue that Carr’s central claims in The Twenty Years’ Crisis are still relevant today. He maintained in that classic realist work that states are the main actors in world politics and that they are deeply committed to pursuing power at each other’s expense. He also argued that British intellectual life in his day was dominated by idealists who largely ignored power politics. Despite the great changes that have taken place in the world since 1939, when The Twenty Years’ Crisis was published, states still dominate the international system and they still pay careful attention to the balance of power. Furthermore, idealists now dominate international relations scholarship in Britain, more so than they did in the late 1930s. Indeed, it is hard to find a realist theorist in the contemporary British academy, a situation that would almost surely shock Carr were he alive today. This powerful bias against realism, I argue, is intellectually foolhardy and hurts not only students but the idealist scholars who so dislike realism.