Review of E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1946)

Professor Carr relies on an antithesis: ‘Every political situation contains mutually incompatible elements of Utopia and reality, of morality and power.’ Carr provides ‘the most comprehensive modern restatement, other than Marxist or Fascist, of the Hobbesian view of politics. It is from politics that both morality and law derive their authority. For Hobbes, the kingdom of the fairies was the Roman Catholic Church, seducing mankind with its enchantments. For Professor Carr, it is the League of Nations, which is no other than the ghost of the deceased Pax Britannica.’ Carr’s tome is ‘the one lasting intellectual monument of the policy of appeasement’. The first edition, published in 1939, praised Chamberlain’s policy as ‘a reaction of realism against Utopianism’, and defended the 1938 Munich agreement whereby Britain, France, Germany, and Italy agreed to the cession to Berlin of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. In the 1946 second edition ‘these passages are omitted’, Wight notes. ‘Wielding the realist critique at the expense of the moral critique, it is natural that Professor Carr should have moved since 1939 from support of collaboration with Germany to support of collaboration with Russia. But the Teheran–Yalta theory of world relationships is itself being swept from present realism into past Utopianism.’ In Wight’s view, ‘The student could have no better introduction to the fundamental problems of politics, provided always that he reads it side by side with Mr. Leonard Woolf’s deadly reply in “The War for Peace”.’