International Progress and Colonial Critique in E.H. Carr's Reflexive Realism

As ecological, material, and social crises converge on the global stage, research in political theory has returned to debates on the importance of utopian critiques that remain attentive to the inescapability of power (Brincat 2009; Butler 2015; Thaler 2018, 2024; Wagle 2022). This wave of scholarship centers on the transformative dimensions of critical imagination—as manifested in both popular politics and individual works—to problematize the notion that aspirational politics produce little more than an appeal to change. These interventions emerge as others call for “realistic” utopias, a term that assumes the relative impracticality of ideal proposals and seeks to ground ideal proposals in “real-world” politics (Wright 2010; Bregman 2017). In other words, the field continues to situate utopia and reality in contention to one another. As a result, the value of ideal politics as a dimension of critique remains unsettled.1 While the linguistic bannisters that surround political change span appeals to “ideal,” “aspirational,” “imaginative,” “objective,” and “empirical” lenses, they have importantly mapped onto the binary of “realistic” and “idealistic” interpretation. These categories are particularly salient in international relations (IR) theory and political theory, two research areas with overlapping concerns but largely segregated conversations. In IR, structural and neoclassical realism have taken hold as central frameworks in the discipline that operate on the assumption that aspirational politics must be displaced in favor of “objective” accounts of power (Waltz 1979; Booth 1991; Mearsheimer 2005, 2019; Booth 2010). These ontologies have been critiqued in IR theory, but they remain fundamental to the field's macrostructural understanding of both international order and the justification of power (Booth 1991, 2010; Mearsheimer 2005; Brincat 2009; Kohn and McBride 2011). Simultaneously, theories of utopia and reality among political philosophers contend for the importance of normative models within realistic lenses (Aytac and Rossi 2022; Favara 2022; Rossi 2019; Sigwart 2013). Similarly, scholars of utopia argue for the critical dimensions of imaginative and aspirational politics (Wagle 2022; Thaler 2018; Shklar 1969a, 1998a, 1998b; Moylan 2014). As the separation between realist IR and realist political philosophy endures, so do methodological, interpretive, and political problems regarding the relation between ideal politics and the justification of power in international politics.2 The tension between utopia and reality perseveres when the two categories are primarily treated as analytical and ontological problems. That is, on the one hand, as interpretive lenses invested in the “empirical” study of power and its deployment (Aytac and Rossi 2022; Favara 2022; Rossi 2016, 2019). On the other hand, there is an assumption about the nature of international politics and the structural conditions that mediate power within the nation-state system (Mearsheimer 2005; Booth 2010; Ikenberry 2020). This article argues for a reflexive understanding of realism and utopia that assumes that the two categories operate as mutually necessary facets of critique regarding the role of power in international politics. This reflexive framework assumes a necessary interaction between a realistic assessment of the use of power and the transformative visions that guide its justification. This emphasis on reflexivity draws on the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu, which approaches the production of knowledge as resulting from the convergence between the objectification of reality as the normative contingency of humanity's collective condition.3 A reflexive theory of utopia and reality maintains the comparative value of open-dialectical approaches (Brincat 2009, 583) but reduces the antithetical space between the two concepts. The result is a framework that moves away from the “empirical” versus “normative” distinction; instead, it links realism and utopia as fundamental lenses for the recognition, as well as response, to the inescapability of power. To illustrate this reflexive turn, I look to Edward Hallett Carr's foundational realism, as it sought to reconcile the “realistic” premises of international power with the importance of international progress as a guide for political action. I contend that the realistic hermeneutics deployed throughout Carr's political thought, especially as illustrated in works like The Twenty Years' Crisis (1939), Nationalism and After (1945), The New Society (1951), and Conditions of Peace (1944), leveraged a reflexive connection between utopia and reality that reconciled humanity's progressive aspirations with their subjection to power politics. In particular, I argue that the importance of colonial critique in framing Carr's reflexive realism as well as his critique of liberal internationalists has been largely overlooked. I demonstrate that Carr's concerns with the premises of liberal progress resided, not in a dismissal of progressive politics but in liberalism's inheritance of Enlightenment ontologies, and thus colonial logics, of linear progress. While scholars of Carr, such as Paul Howe (1994), Haro Karkour (2022a, 2022b, 2023), Michael Cox (2000, 2016), and Tim Rood (2026), the hermeneutic and political importance of colonial critique in Carr's thought remains largely overlooked. Attending to colonial politics in Carr helps clarify the scope of his rejection of utopia as a project of European modernity. Carr did not view realism as antithetical to utopian thinking. Rather, his realism calls for a break from modernity in the sense that, with new parameters for realistic inquiry, so emerged a need for novel utopias.4 Thus, for Carr, liberal frameworks that adopted the aspirational politics of the Enlightenment were also willingly replicating the already-apparent failures of colonial modernity—what he called the “beginning of the end of Western Civilization,” under his pseudonym, John Hallett (1933). This rejection of Enlightenment idealism in turn fueled Carr's skepticism of nationalism and liberalism as the foundations for a nascent global order—two principles that he called the “children” and “Siamese twins” of the Enlightenment tradition (Carr 1945 2021, xxxiv, xxxix). Beyond Carr, returning to the realism-utopia debates of the early 20th century proves useful for contextualizing the importance of colonial power in framing both the normative and realistic premises of liberal international politics writ large. This article situates Carr and his interlocutors within a broader moment of epistemic, political, and social crisis that responded to the decay of European hegemony, rise of anti-colonial movements throughout the world, and more broadly, to the apparent failure of modernity as a project of global order.5 Carr and his contemporaries demonstrate that appeals to utopia and reality during the early 20th century operated as critiques regarding the of global politics under European 2019; 2019). and in other words, also be as that the of colonial power with the of global progress. is The article the parameters for a reflexive to utopia and I do so debates in political theory in with IR two Carr's realistic hermeneutics as in The Twenty Years' Crisis and in with his other on (Carr 2016, and the progress of modernity that liberal international The article the value of reflexivity Carr's I do so that Carr's call for a realistic break from Enlightenment in with thought as a tradition that with the of progress from within the of power politics. is to that reality and as well as realist and utopian thought, are is the conditions of their relation that remain in are and in this in realist political and Rossi for the of in realist critique in a that is of the in of political and that are a of (Aytac and Rossi Rossi 2016, 2019). 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