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

Abstract

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 genealogical critiques regarding the trajectory of global politics under European hegemony (Getachew 2019; Valdez 2019). Utopia and reality, in other words, should also be historicized as terms that link the legacies of colonial power with the possibilities of global progress.

My argument is divided into three sections. The article begins by outlining the parameters for a reflexive approach to utopia and reality. I do so by placing realist-utopian debates in political theory in conversation with IR theory. Section two analyzes E.H. Carr's realistic hermeneutics as proposed in The Twenty Years' Crisis (1939) and places in conversation with his other writings on colonialism, “Enlightenment idealism” (Carr 2016, 208), and the progress narratives of modernity that framed liberal international frameworks. The article concludes by addressing the value of realist-utopian reflexivity beyond Carr's context. I do so by suggesting that Carr's call for a realistic break from Enlightenment idealisms holds much in common with postcolonial thought as a tradition that similarly contends with the possibility of progress from within the realm of power politics.

It is no longer polemical to claim that reality and utopia, as well as realist and utopian thought, are related lenses. It is the conditions of their relation that remain in flux. Nonetheless, some methodological assumptions are mostly settled and prove helpful in refining this analysis. For example, in realist political philosophy, Ugur Aytac and Enzo Rossi make strong arguments for the possibility of engaging in realist ideology critique in a way that is devoid of the “moralisms found in much of analytic political philosophy” by targeting practices and beliefs that are a “product of self-justified power” (Aytac and Rossi 2022, 1; Rossi 2016, 2019). These interventions move academic debate beyond questions of whether realism embraces ethical investments and moral responsibility. As these contributions show, philosophical realism holds a particularly high commitment to moral responsibility once it has adequately addressed the justifiability of power. Similar principles hold in relation to ideal politics. Greta Favara (2022, 5–6) move the field away from characterizations that situate ideal theory and realism in contention by demonstrating that realist approaches benefit from ideal “models” that guide normative expectations. In short, realist politics understands normative models as narrowly justified observations rather than broad expectations of how the world operates.

A realistic study of politics does not prescribe the elimination of utopian visions, but it does require that the pursuit of knowledge target the “real motivation” behind political phenomena (Geuss 2008, 9). An “actual” understanding of politics, in a realist sense, starts from the recognition that “politics is in the first instance about action and the contexts of action” rather than belief or proposition (Geuss 2008, 9). Thus, meaning becomes a relational and contingent construct: “Understanding politics means seeing that [generalist statements] have clear meaning at all only relative to their specific context, and this context is one of historically structured forms of action” (Geuss 2008, 14).

This emphasis on relational meaning and the historical contingency of political action holds similar grounding among theorists of utopia. The main difference, it seems, lies in the avenues taken to problematize moral and political ontologies. Theorists such as Mathias Thaler, for example, argue for the importance of “critical and antinomian” utopias as tools that “productively unsettle” politics (Thaler 2018, 672). This wave of scholarship builds on the work of Judith Shklar, another postwar theorist who has inspired research in both realist and utopian politics and, in that way, offers an example of how the two terms became connected in the early 20th century. As Katrina Forrester (2011) shows, while Shklar is conventionally portrayed as a realist and supporter of the liberal state, this is a reductive portrayal. Forrester's account of hope in Shklar's realism is helpful in shifting readers away from Shklar's treatment of the term “utopia” and toward an appraisal of the links between realistic interpretation and critical-aspirational politics (2011, 595). This, by extension, situates the compatibility of realist and utopian practices as centered on improving the world. As Shklar concedes, moving beyond utopia meant ridding ourselves of universalist ideals—uncritical assumptions about the world. However, this move had to preserve the importance of emancipatory visions within a social criticism that eliminated “erroneous and destructive beliefs” as a dimension of realist interpretation (Shklar 1998b). While her assessment of utopia maintains some of its universalist demands for truth, it is mostly characterized by an investment in the “elimination of erroneous and destructive beliefs”—a task that holds much in common with contemporary realism (Shklar 1998b, 177).

Perhaps the primary change at hand among utopian politics lies in moving beyond blueprint utopias—both in pejorative and idealist terms—to define the forward-looking dimensions of this lens. As Shklar suggests, the analytical confusion surrounding utopia emerges from its deployment to “label projects as both undesirable and impossible” (Shklar 1998b, 176). This assessment remains somewhat true today, especially where the language of “realistic utopias” or “utopian realism” is deployed to reconcile the otherwise uncomfortable relation between transformative programs and present conditions (Booth 1991; Bregman 2017). As Shklar shows, however, even classical and early modern utopian frameworks such as Thomas More's Utopia and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile assumed a deeply “pessimistic” form of critique that aspired to illustrate the space between moral psychology and reality (Shklar 1998b, 179). Approaching utopia as transformative critique, rather than a plan to be accomplished, centers the social-theoretical components of aspirational politics while limiting the teleological character sometimes associated with it. Thus, the emphasis in this critical utopian approach lies in the problematization of assumed beliefs, the contention with power as a subjecting force, and a search for avenues of political imagination that allow for transformative programs (Shklar 1998b; Harvey 2000; Moylan 2014; Thaler 2018).

The hermeneutic and methodological interventions of realist political philosophy have not directly folded into debates on realism in IR. While the IR realist literature is certainly broad in scope and methodologically diverse, it holds onto shared ontological assumptions surrounding the terms of global order that help situate a generalizable, if limited, characterization. The first, to use Jennifer Pitts' account, is that of a “community of states that respect one another's autonomy, while offering assistance when needed,” which mostly operates as an “aspiration couched as a description” (Marwah et al. 2020, 280). This ontology—conventionally referred to as the anarchy problématique (Ashley 1988; Waltz 2001; Deudney 2010)—builds on the political thought of Topian European theorists such as Nicolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau regarding human nature as well as the social and material conditions of political life (Ochoa Espejo 2020, 123). This genealogy matters insofar as it reveals shared figures in the canon of critical-utopian and realist paradigms. In this case, Jean-Jacques Rousseau appears as a prominent interlocutor on the corrupting character of society and the ambitions of humanity, but his hermeneutic utility lands on both sides. For Shklar, Rousseau offers a reminder of the deconstructive power of utopia—an appeal to a parallel reality that by association reveals the preventable evils of human society (1969b). For Waltz, Rousseau and his contemporaries offer an absolute assessment of the realities of political life that then formulate the conditions for the social scientific study of international politics (Waltz 2001; Deudney 2010, 23).

This realist ontology is far from unanimous in the field of IR, but it is certainly characteristic in the sense that many pressing questions must respond to structural and neoclassical realism. This leads us to the second prominent characteristic of IR realist interpretation. Namely, the anarchic nature of politics propels a need to assess threats to international order as a nation-state centered system through the balance of power (Waltz 1979, 2001; Mearsheimer 2001). By extension, these ontologies lead scholars of liberal internationalism to call for the protection of an assumed fragile global order (Deudney 2010; Ikenberry 2020). In this regard, notions of international progress and security are generally bound with the preservation of classical and neo-liberal frameworks of international peace and interstate cooperation—two principles that Carr was broadly skeptical of, as I show in the following section. IR theorists have certainly critiqued this position and, in this regard, have turned toward utopian lenses as a way to revitalize the role of political imagination in the field (Brincat 2009, 583). Even these approaches, however, tend to position utopia in contradistinction to realism—usually as a dialectical exercise between what is and what could be (Brincat 2009, 584). Thus, the critical dimensions of utopia remain overlooked, and by extension, so are the utopian dimensions of realist lenses.

The scope and histories of realist debates across political philosophy and IR, as well as the varied definitions of utopia and realism within them, make settling the two categories an almost tangential endeavor. Instead, I emphasize the shared political stakes that the above analysis reveals between the ostensibly separate investments of realist and utopian lenses. Both traditions are invested in problematizing the use and justification of power as an irreplaceable component of political life. To do so, the two frameworks emphasize reflexive feedback between humanity's social condition (reality) and its political aspirations (utopia). Bridging these areas of work opens avenues to interpret reality and utopia as reflexive categories that provide cyclical feedback between realistic observation and transformative critique. Rather than treating utopian and realistic lenses as entirely separate approaches, a reflexive understanding of the two allows for a recognition that empirical analysis is not devoid of normative investments or assumptions, as political philosophers show. Rather, in a Bourdieuian sense, a realism that builds from the aspirational license of utopian politics extends the reach of realistic thought by recognizing that social knowledge is always constructed from a standpoint that intersects our lived realities and aspirational futures. In other words, reintroducing utopia to realistic politics allows the interpreter to locate the connection between the present political moment and contending visions of a future, improved conditions for humanity, both of which are contextually bound and historically contingent.

For theorists living during the early 20th century, the First and Second World Wars created an unavoidable dilemma: how did regional conflict in Europe alter the normative expectations for progress in the world? The urgency of this question propelled the development of realistic frameworks that could simultaneously attend to the permanence of power while preserving the guiding role of moral responsibility. The ideological premises of these debates—of the antithesis between utopian and realist interpretation—continue to influence the way political science thinks about international politics and progress. Given their priming power, it is worthwhile to return to these debates from the premise of historical contingency. That is, from the assumption that the debates, problems, and conclusions surrounding utopia and realism were not generalizable frameworks, but rather contextual outcomes related to contemporaneous experiences of power that emerged during the First and Second World Wars.

For E.H. Carr and his contemporaries, establishing the nascent priorities of social science interpretation was a matter of global trajectory. In his view, the problem of utopian idealism was connected to a broader crisis of modernity that put in question the normative trajectory of European hegemony and the viability of liberal internationalism as the leading framework of international relations. By modernity in this sense, I refer to the system of global order that assumed and reified European rule throughout the world, and which developed from the advent of colonialism as well as the exportation of Enlightenment political thought. This “planetary consciousness,” in Mary-Louise Pratt's terms, emerged multiplicitly across colonial systems but also linked European rule through the establishment of international institutions such as the global market, international colonial law, racial caste systems, and imperial boundaries (Pratt 2007, 15; Valdez 2019, 24; Habermas 1990, 12; Pratt 2007, 15; Quijano 2000; Eisenstadt 2000). In so doing, these colonial institutions produced a self-referential system for gauging and regulating progress that subjected colonized publics and propped European ideals as the guiding post for progressive concepts such as civilization, scientific inquiry, and religious practice. Modernity, in other words, is relevant to this argument because, as a system of global international order undergirded by colonial legacies, it links the precarious stability of state relations with a transcendental notion of ethics bound to European hegemony. With the rise of the two World Wars, as peace in Europe fell, so did the teleological validity and normative license of modernity.

The link between the problematization of utopian thought and the crisis of modernity is, nonetheless, far from idiosyncratic to Carr. As Judith Shklar writes, literary and political utopias linked an “adventurous imagination” with the “discovery of the Americas” (Shklar 1998b, 177). The exploratory and imaginative dimensions of utopia rose to popularity with the distribution of travel and conquista writings on the “New World,” which in turn redefined the markers of “possible” and “impossible” among European observers (Cañizares-Esguerra 2002, 12–13; Pratt 2007, 23). These narratives of exploration, foundation, and settlement not only centered Europe in an incipient global order but also opened novel hermeneutic and epistemic problems surrounding history, natural science, politics, and commerce (Cañizares-Esguerra 2002, 24–26; Quijano 2007, 169). In this regard, enlightenment conceptions of utopian imagination operated paradoxically by projecting self-referential narratives of exploration and wonder that nonetheless protected European rule as the standard of global progress. For Carr, the colonial legacies of European modernity hindered foreign policy because liberal internationalists were too bound to the moral prescriptions and “optimism” of enlightenment theorists (Carr 2016, 27). Thus, the future of global international order required a critical assessment of the ethics of progress that became associated with European hegemony and the imperial state. Carr's science of politics has been mischaracterized at times as diminishing the normative features of inquiry entailed in “utopian” thought by advocating for a “realistic” lens (Morgenthau 1948; Mearsheimer 2005; Kenealy and Kostagiannis 2012). To some extent, this reflects Carr's own ambiguous position in The Twenty Years' Crisis (1939), where he calls utopia the “antithesis” of reality while also conceding their “necessary combination” as the “interdependence of theory and practice” (Carr [1939] 2016, 14, 19). Recent work in IR has fruitfully explicated these ambiguities to offer a more thorough understanding of Carr's realism at both a conceptual and historical level. Scholars of E.H. Carr, including Paul Howe (1994), Peter Wilson (1998), Adam Lerner (2022), Haro Karkour (2022a), Michael Cox (2016), and Tim Rood (2026), have shown that Carr's work certainly responded to the rise of nationalism, capitalism, and social science in the world. Haro Karkour (2022b) and Seán Molloy (2021), in particular, have, respectively demonstrated the importance of crisis and liberal modernity in defining Carr's epistemic and ontological concerns—namely, that liberal internationalism proceeded despite clear flaws in its assumptions about international cooperation. This article builds on these contributions by suggesting that Carr's trepidations surrounding modernity, international progress, and capitalism addressed problems that preceded liberalism. Namely, he viewed the rise of liberal internationalism alongside competing nationalist sentiments as a repeat mistake of colonial modernity—the first universalist framework that attempted to reconcile international peace and a competitive powers system in Europe. Indeed, Carr called these factions the “Siamese Twins” born of the Enlightenment—language he uses in “Nationalism: The World's Bane” under his pseudonym John Hallet, to contend that nationalists and liberal democrats were inheriting the “excesses of the modern history” that led to international wars in the first place (Hallet 1933, 697). Thus, far from markers of innovation in international progress, Carr anticipated that these projects would lead to a “functional internationalism” that remained utopian in the sense that it abandoned the “unresolved issue of power” for presumed cooperation, as he later wrote in Nationalism and After (1945).

Given Carr's own account of enlightenment “excess” and its influence on the international politics of the early 20th century, my contention is that attending to the crisis of modernity in Carr's political thought helps elucidate the role of colonial critique in his skepticism of both nationalist and liberal internationalist projects. Accounting for his genealogy of enlightenment legacies, for example, elucidates his vacillating conceptual language regarding the possibilities for international progress following the two World Wars. This is especially true of his use of utopia, which operates along two registers in The Twenty Years' Crisis (1939), Nationalism and After (1945), and Conditions of Peace (1942). The first is a utopian form that manifests as an appraisive morality detached from the contingency of reality—an absolute idealism premised on distant perfection. In this conception, colonial modernity (Carr most commonly uses the “enlightenment”) appears at once. On this register, Carr targets theorists such as Rousseau, Kant, Comte, and the Abbé Saint Pierre, who “devote themselves whole-heartedly to the elaboration of visionary projects…whose simplicity and perfection give them an easy and universal appeal” (Carr [1939] 2016, 27). This “infantile” period of utopianism, beyond the merits of Carr's account of early modern political thought, illustrates his skepticism of the most prominent figures of European modernity. Importantly, Carr does not treat enlightenment utopianism as a concern of the past but rather as a living legacy that continued to influence “popular preaching” and “political oratory” among liberal internationalists (Carr [1939] 2016, 27).

Carr's rejection of enlightenment utopianism, however, did not mark a rejection of utopia in toto. The Twenty Years' Crisis was originally titled Reality and Utopia, after all, and the first chapter of the text is devoted to concept (Carr [1939] 2016, 6; Cox 2016, xxvii). In contrast, as Paul Howe (1994, 286) shows, moral responsibility is a central factor for Carr in developing a realistic approach to knowledge production. Here, the distinction between contentious versus reflexive interpretations of the utopia-reality binary becomes useful for understanding the political exercise of reconciling the historical contingency of political action with a responsibility for progress. The second utopian form—the one Carr holds in favor—is a critical lens that views moral judgment as a necessary component for a social scientific pursuit of realistic progress. As Carr reminds his readers, “political science is the science not only of what is, but of what ought to be” (Carr [1939] 2016, 6). It is precisely this form of “utopianism” that leads Carr to use the language of “social justice” in Nationalism and After to argue for the necessity of “equality of opportunity,” “freedom from want,” and a “world which rejects the principle of discrimination on grounds of nationality” (Carr [1945] 2021, 51, 53). For Carr, these visions of international progress were necessary and far from “utopian.” Rather, it would be utopian, as he writes, to assume that international peace could be achieved through a singular solution (Carr [1945] 2021, 53). While fundamental to his realism, the “social justice” dimensions of Carr remain largely overlooked in favor of interpretations that center power but lose sight of equity as one of the central goals of international politics.

Recovering these facets of Carr's thought is important for settling some of the hermeneutic debates regarding the role of progress within the classical realism now attributed to his political thought. For Carr, the study of politics requires a precise understanding of our historical positionalities, present conditions, and from there, it demands that we move toward a clearer set of normative conclusions. Reflexively speaking, these factors operate as a set of feedback points that simultaneously reveal the present conditions of political life and the ideal trajectory to be pursued through collective action, all while remaining attentive to the inescapability of power as a facet of humanity's political condition. Interpreted in this way, Carr's method situates him closer to the philosophical realism of Bernard Williams (2005) and Raymond Geuss (2008), as well as Rossi (2019), Aytac and Rossi (2022), and Favara (2022).

Given the prominence of the utopian language in Carr, the question remains of why his commitment to aspirational politics remains a point of debate. As recent reassessments of Carr show (Howe 1994; Molloy 2009; Cox 2016; Karkour 2022b), this is likely because his own evaluation of utopia is relatively limited. Attending to the colonial legacies behind Carr's assessment of utopian politics, however, shows that he falters linguistically but not necessarily substantively. Carr's critique of “infantile” thought problematizes the moral naiveté of modernity as a universalist conception of linear progress precisely because it lost track of the contingency of knowledge and ethics. In contrast to the transcendental ethics of Hans Morgenthau, the critical–theoretical value of Carr's framework resides in a recognition that both morality and political knowledge are precarious (Morgenthau 1948; Molloy 2009; Babík 2013). In this regard, Carr's critique of Enlightenment principles and the universalist vision of modernity was not only a historical problematization but also a concern regarding the blanket continuation of its ethical vision into liberal-international frameworks.

Carr's conception of utopian thought also produced a dual temporality that powered his critique of the trajectory of international order. By linking colonial legacies with liberal internationalism, Carr made a case for the importance of historical materialism in the incipient fields of social science and IR—a move that likely stemmed from his self-professed investment in “applying” Marxist “ways of thinking” in novel studies of politics (Cox 2016, xxxv). Carr's depiction of liberal internationalism as an extension of enlightenment naivete allowed him to point to the precarity of regional cooperation in European history and, further, to argue that these hurdles would only worsen with the rise of nationalism and capitalism. The priming power of colonial legacies for the emergence of the nation-state system is especially clear in “Nationalism: the World's Bane” (Hallett 1933), which Carr wrote under his pseudonym, John Hallett.

As “Hallett” writes, European political thought was replete which “eternal verities” that “no longer abide thought or question”—nationalism, like the dynastic and monarchic politics of the 18th century, was only the latest organizing myth that moved “like a golden thread” from the 19th century and into the 20th (Hallett 1933, 694). During the interwar period, the proposal of “international peace” inherited an “almost mystical” character that sought to reconcile the “intoxicating qualities” of nationalism with the “queer and slightly paradoxical ingredient” of Wilsonian liberalism (Hallett 1933, 694, 697). The novelty of liberal internationalism, along with its promise to complete the universalist ideals of modernity, offered a “tonic” which assumed a “transatlantic label” but offered only a repetition of what had been “invented and freely used by its [Europe's] own grandfathers and grandmothers.” Not only did postwar Europeans take the tonic with “uncritical enthusiasm,” as Hallett writes, they also believed that the 20th century “vindicated the wisdom” of their Enlightenment predecessors (Hallett 1933, 696). Carr would later say as much, under his own name, in the Conditions of Peace (1942), where he characterizes European powers as “looking back on the past” with “pardonable self-satisfaction” and with a “belief in progress as a normal condition of civilized human existence” (Carr 1944, ix–xi).

While John Hallett was particularly honest about his concerns, a contextualist reading of the Twenty Years' Crisis proves similarly revealing for understanding why and how Carr linked colonial legacies and liberal internationalism.6 Carr wrote the book following his time in the British Foreign Office and as a response to Woodrow Wilson's proposal for the establishment of a League of Nations, as well as to British “Left” politicians who advocated for liberal internationalist frameworks (Lamb 2014). Like his account of utopia, the analysis relied on a caricature that nonetheless proved useful as a framing device. Carr's portrays British foreign policy in the early 20th as operating from a breach between idealists and realists debating the future of international order. Recent scholarship has complicated this history by demonstrating that Carr overstated the homogeneity and polarity of foreign policy stances and at times even overlooked commonalities he held with the British Left (Ashworth 2008; Lamb 2014). With that in mind, it is more fruitful to approach Carr's homogenized targets genealogically—that is, through the legacies at play in critiquing them.

Utopian politics of the kind premised on an extension of modernity's universalist vision committed three primary errors, according to Carr. First, it assumed that state cooperation could become more likely than interstate conflict (Carr [1939] 2016, 50). Second, the prominence of global capitalism led to assumptions that private and collective interests would naturally overlap and thus that free trade would universally benefit state interests (Carr 2000, xvii). Third, the two previous conditions would then lead to a “natural harmony” of interests at local, national, and international levels—a claim that Carr calls the “paradoxical” premise of the “paradise of laissez-faire” (Carr [1939] 2016, 44). Thus, the crux of Carr's concerns targets the necessary and realistic outcomes of capitalist and nation-state orders as the two most influential conditions of global politics in the early 20th century. Carr's skepticism regarding the possibility of international cooperation did not rely on ontological claims surrounding the nature of politics but instead responded to the way these two systems incentivized individual and national interests.

Carr's reception of global capitalism and foreign policy shows that his pejorative conception of utopian politics was not exclusive to leftist politics. Rather, it was primarily concerned with the transition and connection between intellectual frameworks and the practical burdens of governance. For example, as Peter Lamb shows (Lamb 2014, 535), Carr was broadly supportive of the Bolshevik Revolution, which he considered a superior “Left” movement, and he also had a positive reception of Stalin's vision for the Soviet Union. Once in power, however, Carr viewed the movement as having transitioned toward a “Right” conservatism that ideologically deteriorated as it struggled to implement its ideals. Carr's reception of the Bolshevik revolution proves a helpful example of the reflexive dimensions of his utopia-reality binary. In this case, the revolution's utopian visions should frame a realistic implementation of its goals via governance as an outcome from the interaction between moral ideals and realistic political assessment. Far from a dialectical operation or a contradictory relationship, Carr's vision of utopia and reality assumed cyclical feedback that linked material, social, and political realities with transformative political action. The question, then, is how to best ensure a productive relationship between these two interpretive markers. Here, the crisis of modernity becomes useful for understanding the genealogical premises behind the Twenty Years' Crisis's critique of stagnated moralistic politics.

Carr viewed organizations that advocated for cooperative principles under the League of Nations, such as the Geneva Institute of International Relations, as little more than a mimicry of 19th-century ideals of regional peace (Lamb 2014, 532). What began as utopian visions of “exploration,” as Judith Shklar (1998b, 177) characterizes them, quickly evolved into a framework of transcendental ethics premised on European hegemony that mapped onto the transition from imperial to nation-state systems. Thus, the “moralistic façade” of international cooperation as deployed by early 20th-century liberals, as Carr calls it, sought to update the frameworks of the Abbé Saint-Pierre, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. Carr's critique is not generous to his contemporaries, but as Inés Valdez demonstrates (2019), Enlightenment principles of international and regional cooperation did play a prominent role in early 20th-century political movements vying for the future of the nation-state system. My suggestion is that one should read Carr's turn to Enlightenment politics not as an accurate historical or theoretical assessment but rather as a genealogical account of the power of colonial legacies in framing the development of contemporary proposals for international cooperation and global order. The link between colonial orders and international politics has been established by John Hobson (2012), Margaret Kohn and Keally McBride (2011), and Patricia Owens (2017). Haro Karkour (2022a) also places Carr within the extant scholarship on empire and liberalism. The framing power of colonialism in Carr's genealogical critique, however, remains overlooked as an important concern related to the potential failures of liberal international politics.

The divergence between Carr and British liberals resided in the terms of international order and the sources of moral guidance that would ultimately lead foreign policy. In this case, Carr rejected extending Enlightenment principles of cosmopolitan peace into the era of power politics and economic crisis, which he believed put liberal democracy in a position to fail. As he writes, “nobody has ever been able to make gold in a laboratory, so nobody has ever been able to live in Plato's republic or in a world of universal free trade o in Fourier's phalansteries… it is, nevertheless, perfectly right to venerate Confucius and Plato as founders of political science, Adam Smith as the founder of political economy, and Fourier and Owen as the founders of socialism…The initial stage of aspiration toward an end is an essential foundation of human thinking” (Carr 2016, 8).

Carr's discursive and intellectual context reveals a seemingly paradoxical position that reflects the vacillating interpretive stance found in the Twenty Years' Crisis. On the one hand, we find Carr, the skeptic of the British “Left” and his “sweeping criticism of western liberalism” and its vision for a cooperative international sphere that nonetheless assumed the inevitability of conflict (Carr 2000, xvii). On the other hand, we find the historical materialist Carr, who viewed the turn to social science as a tool for revolutionary political action—one that could operate with parallel ambition to the Bolshevik revolution. This form of realistic interpretation does not abandon the premise of ideal progress. Rather, it amends political progress so that it is no longer conceptualized in unidirectional and universalist terms, as it was in modernity. This move is realist in itself given that Carr amends his own expectations of utopia in response to the contingent character of state power in the early 20th century.

Carr's “exposure” of the “hidden foundations of utopian theory” is most concerned with the relation between fact and imagination, as well the practical conclusions we can reach in response to them. In methodological terms, his concern is that utopia reverses the order of knowledge production, beginning first with natural and moral presuppositions that are devoid of history the contextual practices they intend to understand. Progress, as Carr argues, cannot be achieved if we do not begin with the immediate realities of our political condition, which in turn guide not only what is true in the present but also what is possible in the future.

Carr's methodological intervention seeks to balance the extreme realist and extreme utopian by reconciling his audience with the unpredictable nature of the world. Carr demonstrates that both the utopian and realist approaches run the risk of obscuring the human limitations of politics by means of impulsive moralizations (utopia) or by rendering political activity simplistic (realism). Drawing on recent work working through the premise of utopian realism, it is helpful to move away from dichotomous and dialectical premises by instead emphasizing the reflexive character of reality and political imagination (Booth 1991, 527; Kenealy and Kostagiannis 2012). It is not that reality is in constant pitting against utopias but rather that the two only produce meaning in conjunction. The uniting concern in The Twenty Years' Crisis and Carr's broader realistic premise is the prevalence of deterministic lenses (realist or utopian) in the study of politics, which in turn negate self-reflective questions about what we are doing, for what reason, and what we hope might come from our actions in the world.

Thinking from the living legacies of colonialism and modernity helps situate the subjection to power as both an ontological condition and a historically contingent fact that manifests among the political struggles of anti-colonial and postcolonial movements. While Carr did not identify as a postcolonial thinker, his thought has been fruitfully analyzed in those terms (Karkour 2022a). Here, I build on Haro Karkour's work by suggesting that Carr's realism holds common principles with postcolonial thought. The centrality of colonial critique in framing his skepticism of both liberal internationalism and nationalist self-determination, for example, certainly points us in that direction. Like many postcolonial theorists, Carr was invested in interrogating the permanence of power politics and its role in producing universalist moral structures that proved insufficient in guiding the normative trajectory of the world. Insofar as this article is invested in more accurately defining the relationship between aspirational and realistic politics, it is equally important to situate Carr's politics within the postcolonial tradition and thus illustrate otherwise missed points of overlap.

Postcolonial and anti-colonial critique emerged parallel to the IR realism of the early 20th century. In this regard, there were two parties invested in attending to the crisis of modernity and the primacy of colonial legacies for defining the global order of the postwar era. On the one hand, we have the realism of European observers, such as Carr, who reflected on the longevity and sustainability of modernity's principles as the foundation for colonial and interstate governance. This is especially clear in the case of Carr, who, as a former British state official, was pushed to reconcile his national and imperial investments alongside his more radical, revolutionary reception of Marxist critique (Carr 2000, xviii). On the other hand, we have figures invested in fomenting junctures within colonial order as a means toward destabilizing the holding power of modernity from a realistic account of their subjection to power. These thinkers have recently been reinterpreted as standing within the realist tradition. Among these are Mahatma Gandhi, Kwame Nkrumah, and W.E.B. Du Bois, each of whom were relatively contemporary to Carr and who were reacting to similar structural shifts in the balance of power throughout the world (Mantena 2012; Getachew 2019, 102; Valdez 2019, 103; Karkour 2022a). Similar to these 20th-century anti-colonial thinkers, Carr's realism emerged from a simultaneous recognition about the primacy of colonial power for contemporary politics. The first was that colonialism indeed brought a “social revolution” to the world, as he writes in The New Society (Carr 1951, 91), which permanently altered the realities of politics. The second was that the postwar period surfaced the fallacies of colonial modernity and, as such, that the world could not rely on the Enlightenment tradition to define the politics of the future. In this regard, Carr's fruitful overlap with the post- and anti-colonial tradition resides in clarifying the critical dimensions of his realistic politics.

Beyond a matter of ideological or intellectual overlap, bringing colonial subjection and postcolonial theory into this analysis allows for an account of the different branching off points of realist-utopian reflexivity and its concrete political investments. On this point, I offer two primary guideposts from which to identify the cyclical feedback between realistic and transformative interpretation. First, there is a recognition of humanity's subjection and dependence on power—material, social, political, ideological—and the need to continuously assess the use of power such that its deployment does not become a self-justified act. Second, in recognition of this reality is a commitment to transformative politics as a practice that links aspirational visions with political action. This reflexive conception of reality and utopia, more than resolving the tension between power and progress, instead assumes a necessary interaction between what is and what may yet come to be.

Importantly, however, situating this reflexive interaction among similar postcolonial critiques of modernity illustrate that these questions operate more as a political program than a hermeneutic or ontological question. Here, one might think of the future-oriented visions of the Haitian Revolution, Indigenous Latin American revolutions, or more contemporarily, of recent episodes of popular organizing that speak to the links between colonial legacies and the possibility of emancipatory futures (Getachew 2016; Chang and Garcia Montoya 2021; Chang and Rodriguez 2021; Chang 2023). Like these movements, a reflexive account of the relation between utopia and reality hinges largely on the political act of attempting to establish the space between unending subjection and absolute ideals. In this regard, Carr's pessimism vis-à-vis the possibility of successfully mediating these vectors of social critique also holds much in common with how postcolonial theorists have discussed the holding power of coloniality (Quijano 2000; Lugones 2016; Rivera Cusicanqui 2020).

This is not to say that realist and utopian reflexivity is bound to be a kind of universalism that similarly frames the imaginaries of the colonial world. In contrast, as Carr shows, realist critique situates power within historical contingency, and as more contemporary realists argue, any normative conclusions should operate within that contextual specificity. The reflexive framework—perhaps what Carr calls a “realist utopia”—nonetheless demonstrates the importance of attending to a broader set of political experiences that humanity acts upon continuously: collectivity, appeals to progressive futures, and the preservation of a common world. In this regard, the unavoidability of power and its deployment, more than ontological reality, is also an imperative toward a realist ethics of care. Carr himself seems to go in this direction in the latter half of The Twenty Years' Crisis by suggesting that the permanence of power in political change has been misguidedly understood as a primarily moral question of “just” and “unjust” uses of force: “Every effective demand for change, like every other effective political force, is compounded of power and morality.” The object of realistic interpretation—at least one that does not absolve itself of the importance of moral progress—must concede, as Carr writes, that “peaceful change can be expressed in terms neither of pure power nor of pure morality” (Carr 2016, 192).

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.