Introduction: readings of Carr and Zimmern
‘My impression is that his vogue will not last long. There is not enough substance to him.’Footnote 1 So wrote Sir Alfred Zimmern, Professor of International Relations at Oxford, to Sir Norman Angell, another leading internationalist, early in 1940, 3 months after the publication of E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis. Zimmern was responding to Angell’s review of the book in the League of Nations Union (LNU) journal Headway, which Angell had sent along with a letter warning that ‘he goes for you’ and promising to continue his criticisms in a book.Footnote 2 In his reply, Zimmern wrote that he had himself published a review in the Spectator making many of the same points, though less effectively.Footnote 3 He also approved Angell’s plan for a book, despite his suggestion that Carr’s vogue would be short-lived. His letter as a whole showed no premonition that the realist critique of Carr’s book would shape his own reputation as a utopian idealist.
The Twenty Years’ Crisis has continued to be one of the most discussed works in the International Relations (IR) canon. Historians of IR have analysed its role after the end of the Second World War in constructions of disciplinary history, especially in relation to the supposed ‘great debate’ between Idealism and Realism.Footnote 4 Scholars have rightly looked beyond the textbook classification of Carr as a realist and exposed how that image was the self-interested creation of theorists in the United States in the early years of the Cold War.Footnote 5 They have looked, too, beyond the labelling as idealists (or utopians, in Carr’s terms) of the thinkers and statesmen he criticised, among them Zimmern and Angell.Footnote 6 These readings have led to a sophisticated appreciation of the rhetorical strategies deployed in The Twenty Years Crisis and to the discussion of how it fits Carr’s postwar theorising in works such as his bestseller What is History? Footnote 7
This article has two main goals: to shed light on Carr’s method in writing The Twenty Years’ Crisis and on the book’s intellectual context, above all its relation to Zimmern’s thought. Both goals are served by a thick analysis of the book itself and of its immediate reception, including one area neglected in previous treatments, the similarities contemporary readers found in the realisms of Carr and Zimmern. The form of this analysis will be an innovative close reading of how Carr cites – and misrepresents – one of his chief targets. By this formulation, I mean not a general survey of Carr’s presentation of Zimmern but a systematic analysis of all of Carr’s quotations from Zimmern against the argumentative contexts from which they are extracted.Footnote 8 This reading will gain further depth from juxtaposition of Carr’s reading of Zimmern with Zimmern’s response to The Twenty Years’ Crisis and from the comparison of Carr’s analysis with Zimmern’s writings in the interwar years. The analysis will be bolstered by the use of archival and published material that has not been discussed in earlier scholarship, drawn from an ongoing biographical and bibliographical project on Zimmern. This detailed exploration will show that, though Carr was more revolutionary than Zimmern, there are notable similarities in their interpretations of history and in their approaches to current problems. It will show, too, that Carr was extraordinarily careless in his engagement with the authors he criticised. My conclusion will raise the question of why this was so.
This article seeks to makes a contribution to international theory too. Detailed exposure of Carr’s sloppiness takes further the criticisms that scholars such as Peter Wilson have made of the lack of clarity and rigour in interwar theoretical arguments about IR, particularly in their use of terms such as Realism and Utopianism (or Idealism).Footnote 9 Besides this, this article sheds new light on the stronger discourse of Realism that, according to Ian Hall, emerged in the late 1930s.Footnote 10 Peter Marcus Kristensen and Ole Wæver have recently identified a version of the Realism–Idealism debate in the International Studies Conferences at that time, as heightening tensions led scholars from Germany and Italy to defend their nation’s policies in the name of Realism.Footnote 11 My analysis of Carr’s use of the language of Realism lends substance to their political analysis, even if those earlier arguments were more a dispute about power than a debate over theory. Amidst the global uncertainties of the 2020s, revisiting these discussions may also invite reflection on modern international theory, especially about the basis for some supposedly scientific theories of IR.
Zimmern is an ideal testcase for exploring Carr’s reading of interwar internationalism. One reason for this lies in their backgrounds. Born 13 years apart (Zimmern in 1879, Carr in 1892), both men were products of intensive classical educations at leading public schools and universities: Winchester and Oxford in Zimmern’s case, Merchant Taylors’ and Cambridge in Carr’s.Footnote 12 That apparent similarity belies significant differences, notably between the ambitions of the Classics courses at the two universities: Literae Humaniores (‘Greats’) at Oxford involved a broad study of ancient literature, history, and philosophy that aimed both to penetrate the spirit of ancient culture and understand its differences from the modern world, while the Classical Tripos at Cambridge had a narrower philological focus, though it did allow some specialisation in philosophy or ancient history in Part II (Carr excelled at the latter).Footnote 13 Both men also had Foreign Office experience, Carr having entered the service immediately after finishing at Cambridge in 1916 and stayed for 20 years, while Zimmern joined the Political Intelligence Department in early 1918 (via stints as Oxford Ancient History don and civil servant in the Board of Education and Ministry of Reconstruction) and left after little more than a year. Both men, moreover, moved from the Foreign Office to the Wilson Professorship of International Politics at Aberystwyth, and both were involved in Chatham House in the late 1930s.Footnote 14 Given these similarities, a comparative study may provide revealing clues to their distinctive intellectual trajectories.
Zimmern’s status as the most important figure in interwar IR in Britain makes him still more suitable for comparison with Carr. After leaving the Wilson Chair and some years in Paris as Deputy Director of the League of Nations’ Institute of International Intellectual Cooperation, he moved to Oxford in 1930 as the first holder of the Montague Burton Professorship in International Relations. First from Paris, then from Oxford, he helped organise the series of International Studies Conferences that fostered the disciplinary formation of IR.Footnote 15 He also published what was widely hailed as the most authoritative analysis of the League of Nations during the interwar period; Carr himself wrote an enthusiastic review praising its ‘brilliant and original analysis.’Footnote 16
Zimmern has also played a prominent role in the reception of The Twenty Years’ Crisis. Reviewers at the time picked him out as one of Carr’s main targets.Footnote 17 This verdict has been echoed in recent claims that Zimmern was ‘the only person criticised more than Norman Angell’ or that Carr ‘ridiculed him in numerous footnotes.’Footnote 18 For a long time, Carr’s criticisms were viewed by many as justified. In the 1980s, for instance, William Fox spoke of ‘the Zimmerns and the Toynbees and the lay publics with naïve faith in simplistic prescriptions for an end to war.’ A 1999 textbook could still present Zimmern as typical of ‘the kind of “idealism” that was subject to so much criticism from “realists” such as Carr and Morgenthau in the 1930s and 1940s,’ and even add that while such criticism was ‘unwarranted’ in the case of Angell, ‘the same cannot be said of Zimmern.’Footnote 19
The task of assessing the fairness of such accounts has been made easier by Tomohito Baji’s monograph on Zimmern’s international thought.Footnote 20 In dealing with the interwar period, Baji rightly notes that Zimmern turned away in the 1930s from the global internationalist hopes embodied in the League of Nations and emphasised the potential of regional cooperation among like-minded states. He also emphasises Zimmern’s new involvement in ecumenical Christianity and the increasing pessimism of his thought, which he aligns with the turn to Augustinian doctrines of original sin in other international thinkers at this time. This article will take Baji’s analysis further by exploring in depth how Zimmern and Carr read each other’s works and how their works were compared by other international thinkers, including Christian Realists.Footnote 21
Carr’s Mannheimian vision: utopia and reality
The assumption that Zimmern was one of Carr’s chief targets seems to be supported by a number of passages where Carr disparages his writings and implies that he was a utopian.Footnote 22 These passages relate to the following topics: Zimmern’s explanation for the breakdown of international stability; his opposition of ‘welfare’ and ‘power’ states; and his conception of international morality. Analysis of Carr’s allusions to Zimmern will show that he was not uniformly negative. Read against Zimmern’s writings, it will indicate, too, that Carr consistently misconstrued his thought. First, however, Carr’s reading of Zimmern must be set in the context of his overall argument.
Carr closes the first chapter of The Twenty Years’ Crisis by identifying ‘Utopia and Reality’ (his original choice of title) as ‘the two facets of political science’: ‘Sound political thought and sound political life will be found only where both have their place.’Footnote 23 He proceeds in Chapter 2 to align this dichotomy with other oppositions (free will and determinism, theory and practice, intellectual and bureaucratic, left-wing and right-wing, ethics and politics). This analysis prepares for his claim in Part Two, ‘The International Crisis,’ that interwar thinkers were utopian in neglecting the importance of power in interstate relationships, in their faith in public opinion and in rational solutions, and in their belief that laissez-faire economics created a harmony of interests among nations – an extension of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ to the international sphere. Carr’s ‘Realist Critique’ in Chapter 4 brings an awareness of the realities of power politics to bear on liberal schemes for a new world order. Nonetheless, after outlining this critique, he ends the section by reaffirming the importance of utopianism: ‘Every political situation contains mutually incompatible elements of utopia and reality, of morality and power.’Footnote 24 Parts Three and Four then analyse key ingredients of international politics: first ‘Politics, Power and Morality’ (Part Three), then ‘Law and Change’ (Part Four). This analysis promotes the formulation of practical policies based on an understanding of international politics that attends both to the forces of power and morality and to the historicity of the moment in which policies are formulated – most pressingly, to the collapse of the nineteenth-century world order and the new economic and political forces unleashed by the war. A short ‘Conclusion’ outlines some of the steps Carr sees as necessary, in particular the extension ‘from the national to the international sphere’ of ‘frank acceptance of the subordination of economic advantage to social ends.’Footnote 25
The opposition of utopia and reality was picked up in reviews and other discussions of Carr’s book. Leonard Woolf and Susan Stebbing subjected it to detailed scrutiny, claiming that Carr’s definition of reality was restrictive and that his use of ‘utopian’ could be applied to any form of political planning, including Hitler’s.Footnote 26 Gilbert Murray more bluntly told the LNU Secretary Maxwell Garnett that ‘the more I think over Carr’s book, the worse it seems to me’: ‘Utopian and Realist are question-begging epithets, not suitable to a serious book.’Footnote 27 One feature of these discussions was that ‘utopian’ and ‘realist’ were often placed in quotation marks.Footnote 28 It is not that the opposition was unknown in IR: ‘Utopia and Reality,’ for instance, were used by Frederick Schuman in the title of a chapter on the League of Nations in International Politics, which has been described as ‘arguably the first academic realist international relations text.’Footnote 29 But while ‘utopian’ had a long vintage, ‘realist’ emerged as a label for hardheaded international thinkers during the turmoil in 1935–36 over the League’s failure to confront Italy and Germany. Zimmern reflected in 1939 that it was at this time that those ‘disinclined to range themselves with the believers [in the League] were driven into a camp of their own – the Adullam of the so-called “realists” – and a cleavage was set up in our public opinion upon lines hitherto unfamiliar,’ for previously it had been an axiom of political life that ‘all who took part in it should be realists,’ and ‘neither realism nor idealism should be the monopoly of any particular group.’Footnote 30 The concept had not yet been systematised into the ‘Six Principles of Political Realism’ that Hans Morgenthau enunciated in the second edition of Politics among Nations (arguably the most influential twentieth-century IR treatise).Footnote 31 Indeed, ‘realist’ was still used in quotation marks in a 1941 monograph whose title gives away its orientation, Georg Schwarzenberger’s Power Politics. Footnote 32 Even with ‘utopian,’ however, there seemed to be something unusual about Carr’s applying the term to progressive liberalism rather than to transparent fictions such as H. G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia. Footnote 33
The unfamiliarity of Carr’s usage was due to the sociologist Karl Mannheim.Footnote 34 Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia is cited in Carr’s preface as one of two books which, ‘though not specifically concerned with international relations, seem to me to have illuminated some of the fundamental problems of politics.’Footnote 35 For Mannheim, ‘ideological’ and ‘utopian’ are dialectical terms applicable to states of mind that transcend reality:
Every age allows to arise (in differently located social groups) those ideas and values in which are contained in condensed form the unrealized and the unfulfilled tendencies which represent the needs of each age. These intellectual elements then become the explosive material for bursting the limits of the existing order. The existing order gives birth to utopias which in turn break the bonds of the existing order, leaving it free to develop in the direction of the next order of existence.Footnote 36
While utopianism is conditioned by the existing order, its ‘explosive’ potential explains why Carr strips away Mannheim’s category of ‘ideology,’ creating a dichotomy of ‘utopia’ and ‘reality’ that could all too easily be aligned with other oppositions such as ‘idealism’ and ‘realism.’Footnote 37 Hence, perhaps, what Seán Molloy has claimed is ‘the fundamental problem with all of Carr’s early critics’ – ‘their inability to detect the dialectical framework employed by Carr.’Footnote 38
What did Zimmern’s review make of Carr’s book? He starts by defining Carr’s subject as ‘the disturbance in the realm of thought’ caused by the new-found concern for foreign affairs after the war. A ‘combination of inexperience and intense concern’ resulted, Zimmern notes, ‘in a prolonged mood of wishful thinking, or what Professor Carr calls “utopianism.”’ He then explains that Carr’s object is ‘to bring “realist criticism” to bear on this “utopian edifice”’ – and so ‘in spite of its arrangement in the form of a treatise, the volume is really what Matthew Arnold would have called “an essay in criticism.”’Footnote 39 Zimmern here draws on the opening sentence of Chapter 6 (‘The exposure by realist criticism of the hollowness of the utopian edifice is the most urgent task of the moment in international thought’) while gesturing to the title of various volumes of essays by Arnold as well as to the subtitle of Culture and Anarchy – An Essay in Social and Political Criticism. Footnote 40 His allusion implies a reading of Carr’s work along the lines of Stefan Collini’s gloss on Arnold’s: ‘It is an “essay,” intended to be readable and stimulating: it is neither a treatise nor a text book. And it is a work of “social and political criticism,” closely engaging with the beliefs and assumptions manifested in the public life of its time: it is neither a policy proposal nor a work of systematic theory.’Footnote 41 Zimmern, that is, suggests that Carr was doing for current IR what Arnold did for the domestic affairs of Victorian Britain. He points, moreover, to a tension in The Twenty Years’ Crisis between the specific title, which suggests a contribution to present-day political problems, and the universalising, textbook-style subtitle – An Introduction to the Study of International Relations. Footnote 42
Thus far, we have the picture of Carr as the realist basher of utopianism that became enshrined in IR historiography. In line with conventional accounts, Zimmern’s review has indeed been seen as negative by those scholars who have taken notice of it.Footnote 43 As we shall see, that verdict does not tell the full story.
Zimmern’s review, in fact, praises the ‘zest and gusto’ of an onslaught that is ‘constantly enlivened by shrewd and well-documented thrusts at the representatives of the different varieties of “utopian” doctrine.’ Though he complains that ‘the flash of Professor Carr’s sabre is so dazzling that it is not very easy to distinguish’ those representatives, he does specify that Woodrow Wilson is the object of ‘the most concentrated attack,’ before, more precisely than Carr, dividing that attack into four charges – with the comment that ‘three-quarters of it is justified’:
Firstly, he was a bad psychologist. He regarded man as primarily an intellectual being. This ensnared him in a double fallacy – the belief that men form their opinions on politics rationally, and the belief that when they have formed them they will action them. Hence his confidence in the power of public opinion to restrain the wickedness of politicians. Secondly, he was a bad sociologist. He thought the world was much more united than in fact it was in 1918, or is today. Hence his confidence in the existence of ‘the international community’ and in the power of ‘world public opinion.’ Thirdly, he was a bad political scientist. He thought that the interest of States, and particularly of the Great Powers, formed a natural harmony. Hence his confidence in the League of Nations as an agency of international co-operation. Fourthly, he was a bad philosopher. He thought that international relations could be subjected to moral judgements, whereas, for the present at least, there is no standard to which such judgements can be referred.Footnote 44
The force of this critique, Zimmern concludes, is ‘weakened by the inadequacy of the remaining quarter.’
Zimmern’s review, by focussing on the dead Wilson, bypasses Carr’s living targets such as Toynbee, Angell, and Zimmern himself. Others, as we have seen, named Zimmern as a target and accepted Carr’s suggestion that he was a Utopian. Particularly biting for being directed against two fellow Winchester Scholars were the words of Richard Crossman: ‘In his first job of dealing with the Utopians, Professor Carr is brilliantly successful. With admirable dexterity, he picks up Professors Zimmern and Toynbee as though they were delicate butterflies …’Footnote 45 Zimmern, by contrast, removes himself from the line of attack by writing of Carr being ‘on firm ground when he criticises the Utopians … for not knowing what they are talking about – for their blindness to “human nature in politics.”’ While the earlier mention of ‘spiritual values’ nods to his recent book Spiritual Values and World Affairs, Zimmern here presupposes that he is not himself a Utopian. In praising Carr’s critique of the Utopians’ neglect of ‘human nature in politics,’ moreover, he alludes to a famous book by one of his own intellectual mentors, the social psychologist Graham Wallas, which Carr himself cited in his Aberystwyth inaugural.Footnote 46
Contrary to the orthodoxy that the two thinkers stood ‘at opposite ends of the theoretical and political spectrum,’ Zimmern’s review supports Carr’s attack on the ‘Utopians.’Footnote 47 His reservations apply to Carr’s closing section:
It is when the ex-Foreign Office official has concluded his survey and the teacher of international relations comes on the scene that his guidance begins to fail us … He takes our breath away by advising us to try to beat the Utopians at their own discredited game. ‘Having demolished the current Utopia with the weapons of realism,’ he tells us (p. 118), ‘we still need to build a new Utopia of our own which will one day fall to the same weapons.’ The thorough-going relativism – not to say scepticism – here revealed undermines the force of his expert criticism.Footnote 48
Carr’s attack on Wilson was unjust, it seems, in making him a bad philosopher. His relativism blinded him to the merits of Wilson’s belief in moral judgements.
Zimmern is here commenting on Carr’s dialectical framework – his move from criticism of utopianism to the limits of realism and the need to construct a new utopia. This structure is caught in the review’s title, ‘A Realist in Search of a Utopia.’Footnote 49 While this title undermines Molloy’s claim that Carr’s early critics were unable to detect his dialectical framework, it is true that Zimmern hardly gives an adequate account of Carr’s dialecticism, for he ignores the fact that from the first Carr has insisted on the necessity for both utopianism and realism: it is the need to clear away the utopian confusion of the moment that creates the impression that Carr is a ‘realist.’Footnote 50
Zimmern’s correspondence shows that he paid more attention to Carr’s sociological model than his review (published in a popular weekly) might suggest. Speaking more unguardedly, he told Angell that ‘some devil at [Carr’s] elbow persuaded him to write something that resembled a small treatise and to deck it out with a sociological theory, drawn apparently from Mannheim, though I do not know whether the latter would acknowledge his child’: ‘The result is a confusion beneath a surface of fausse clarté.’Footnote 51 Zimmern, it seems, objected to the ‘false clarity’ of Carr’s topical arrangement, with sections devoted to utopianism and realism and to morality and power. The resulting ‘confusion’ presumably refers to what he termed in his review the contrast between the ‘thorough-going relativism’ of the conclusion and the well-founded critique of Wilson. In addition, Zimmern was perhaps thinking of the tension between Carr’s Mannheimian stress on knowledge as socially conditioned and his moral judgements.Footnote 52
Zimmern offered fuller comments on Mannheim in a letter to the American critic Lewis Mumford at the end of the Second World War. Addressing the perceived ‘failure of liberalism,’ Zimmern protested that the approach in universities was not to help students ‘to deepen their own lives and discover the eternal values,’ but to provide them ‘with some ready-made “frame of reference,” provided that it is superior to Hitler’s.’ He went on: ‘Karl Mannheim, with his doctrine of “the sociology of knowledge,” is a good deal responsible for this line of thought in this country. I find him a verbose and confusing writer – in spite of his good intentions.’ His conclusion was that it was time to ‘stop wasting time over arguments between competing ideologies and get down once more to old fundamentals.’Footnote 53 This essentialism recalls Zimmern’s suggestion in his review that Carr ought to have defined his task as applying to the twentieth-century world ‘the traditional standards of Western civilisation, as embodied in the old watchwords of justice and liberty.’ If this attitude seems idealist, then it is worth setting that impression against another comment Zimmern made in his letter: ‘the writer nearest to our age is Thucydides: he lived through the same experience and kept sane. In my own special line of country, I have learnt more from him than from Plato.’ This comment was written when the Greek historian was being enthroned as a foundational realist. For Zimmern, then, the point was to apply the standards of justice and liberty to the demands of the moment. Arguably, Carr’s polemic concealed the fact that much the same was true of Carr himself: Carr could write that liberty was ‘historical and relative,’ but Zimmern had an equally historical sense of how liberty could best be realised in current social, political, and economic conditions.Footnote 54
We have seen, then, that Carr aligns Zimmern with the utopians who had false expectations of the possibilities of international organisation in the aftermath of the First World War. Equally, however, we have seen that Zimmern rejects the charge of utopianism while raising against Carr the charge of relativism. Let us now see whether Carr’s assessment of Zimmern is supported by the evidence he cites.
The critique of Zimmern in The Twenty Years’ Crisis
The foundations of utopianism and the problem of diagnosis
Carr, as we have seen, starts his analysis of ‘The International Crisis’ in Part II with ‘The Utopian Background’ (Chapter 3), before moving on to one cardinal utopian failing, the doctrine of ‘The Harmony of Interests.’ It is in the final section of Chapter 3, ‘The Problem of Diagnosis,’ that his attack on Zimmern starts. He claims that the utopians’ attempts to explain why ‘mankind in its international relations has signally failed to achieve the rational good’ have either focused on the treachery of individual statesmen or else argued that mankind ‘must either have been too stupid to understand that good, or too wicked to pursue it.’ He then singles out Zimmern as leaning to ‘the hypothesis of stupidity’ and Toynbee as blaming ‘human wickedness,’ before berating ‘the simplicity of these explanations’ and insisting that it is ‘not true’ that we are living in ‘an exceptionally stupid one’ (pace Zimmern) or ‘an exceptionally wicked age’ (pace Toynbee).Footnote 55 By presenting Zimmern as ‘repeating almost word for word the argument of Buckle and Sir Norman Angell,’ moreover, Carr links him with the optimistic rationalists he attacks earlier in the chapter, where he poured scorn on Buckle’s argument in his History of Civilisation that dislike of war grew with humankind’s intellectual development and on Angell’s pre-war diagnosis of The Great Illusion (the harmful effects of war in an age of economic interdependence).Footnote 56
The passage that Carr cites to support this reading is taken from the lecture series mentioned earlier that Zimmern delivered in Chicago in 1936. It is highlighted by being set as a block quotation:
The obstacle in our path … is not in the moral sphere, but in the intellectual…. It is not because men are ill-disposed that they cannot be educated into a world social consciousness. It is because they – let us be honest and say ‘we’ – are beings of conservative temper and limited intelligence.
Citing the same lecture, Carr continues: ‘The attempt to build a world order has failed not through “pride or ambition or greed” but through “muddled thinking.”’Footnote 57
Carr here combines two passages that address different points. The first passage (second in the lecture) is about the failure of attempts to build a world-consciousness strong enough to make a world superstate feasible. The passage about ‘muddled thinking,’ which occurs 10 pages earlier, is, by contrast, about the forces that have brought humankind to ‘our present pass of mutual fear and suspicion.’ Carr further obscures Zimmern’s argument by not citing his explanation of ‘muddled thinking’ – namely a failure to ‘make the effort to relate our good will to the facts of the world in which we live, to harmonise our sentiments with our intelligence, and thus to marry the ideal with the real.’Footnote 58 What Zimmern is targeting is the utopianism against which Carr rails.
Equally misleading is Carr’s presentation of Zimmern’s idea that the failure to build world-consciousness is due to conservatism and limited intelligence. Zimmern did not claim that the main obstacle was in the intellectual sphere. He added at once: ‘– or, as has already been hinted, in the psychological.’ His argument is that this psychological obstacle is linked to humans’ ‘conservative temper’ – a phrase which Carr does not gloss. With recourse (as often) to Henri Bergson and Graham Wallas, Zimmern argues that ‘man … still remains bound by the limitations of his inherited nature’: ‘the inherited nature of man makes (and always will make) it more congenial to him to live in a “closed society,” associating with those whose minds and spirits are attuned to his own.’Footnote 59 This ‘limited intelligence’ is quite different, then, from the ‘muddled thinking’ with which Carr aligns it. Zimmern is arguing from the psychological realities that utopians ignore.
The problem with Carr’s analysis is not just his carelessness in citing Zimmern. It is also, as we shall see, that stupidity is scarcely a fitting summary of Zimmern’s thought about the League’s failure. A more astute reading was offered in a review by the international lawyer Hersch Lauterpacht, who called Zimmern’s talk of ‘muddled thinking’ a ‘somewhat tautologous argument,’ but noted that he ‘soon abandons’ it ‘in order to expound his main theme.’Footnote 60 To the extent that Zimmern does invoke stupidity, moreover, the same charge can be thrown against Carr and other ‘realists’ (though Carr’s accusations tended to be more specific).Footnote 61 Carr’s Reference Carr1942 monograph Conditions of Peace denounces the ‘stupidity and vindictiveness’ exhibited in the Versailles treaty.Footnote 62 Early in The Twenty Years’ Crisis, moreover, he notes that the League was initially hampered by its neglect by ‘the most influential European politicians,’ which enabled ‘abstract rationalism’ to gain the upper hand: in effect, a diagnosis of the wishful thinking both of those who stayed away from Geneva and of those who did not.Footnote 63 And later he suggests that one of the ‘obstacles to the establishment of a new international order’ is ‘failure to recognise the fundamental character of the conflict’ – another intellectual failing.Footnote 64 Stupidity was prominently invoked, too, by one of Carr’s intellectual inspirations, the American Reinhold Niebuhr.Footnote 65 If we allow that Carr and Niebuhr supplement claims of stupidity with more complex analysis, the same charity should be shown to Zimmern.
The harmony of interests
Carr’s discussion of ‘The Problem of Diagnosis’ forms a bridge to his critique in the next chapter of ‘The Harmony of Interests’ – the doctrine that it is reasonable for the individual (person or state) to submit to rules made in the interest of the (national or international) community, on the grounds that the highest interests of the individual and the community coincide. According to Carr, ‘any apparent clash of interests’ must on this line of reasoning ‘be explained as the result of wrong calculation.’ Returning to the thinkers he criticised in the previous chapter, he sarcastically concludes: ‘If people or nations behave badly, it must be, as Buckle and Sir Norman Angell and Professor Zimmern think, because they are unintellectual and short-sighted and muddle-headed.’Footnote 66 Rather than citing any texts where Zimmern supports the harmony of interests, however, Carr resorts to insinuation by claiming that that doctrine is ‘a necessary corollary of the postulate that moral laws can be established by right reasoning,’ since ‘admission of any ultimate divergence of interests would be fatal to this postulate.’Footnote 67
Carr’s main criticism of the ‘harmony of interests’ doctrine was that it neglected inequalities among states, above all economic ones based on varying access to raw materials. That is to say, the fiction that all states have an equal interest in preserving peace masks the selfishness of powerful states that have a greater interest in maintaining the existing order. Carr proceeds to elaborate this ‘realist critique’ in the following chapter, where he contrasts ‘satisfied’ and ‘dissatisfied’ powers, or, adopting the language of nineteenth-century intra-state disputes, the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots.’Footnote 68
The terms in which Carr attacked the satisfied powers were familiar. Carr suggests that it is hard to find ‘any clear exposition of the real problem’ owing to the dominant ‘harmony of interests’ doctrine, but he does quote extracts from speeches by a Yugoslav Foreign Minister and the President of the Columbian Republic protesting against the assumption that laissez-faire economics favour the weak.Footnote 69 Parallels for Carr’s critique of the League can, however, easily be found in writings known to Zimmern. A book he reviewed, Douglas Jerrold’s They That Take the Sword (1936), protested (another reviewer wrote) that the League was ‘merely an instrument of Anglo-French power-policy to maintain the status quo, instead of a means to growth and peaceful change,’ while Zimmern summarised a 1935 book by two American journalists, The Price of Peace, as follows:
The world consists of Haves and Have-Nots. The Haves are in favour of Peace and the Have-Nots are in favour of Justice. Their demand for Justice is engendering fear among the Haves and insecurity everywhere. The only way to get rid of this insecurity is for the Haves to pay the ‘price of peace,’ which involves large sacrifices on their part.Footnote 70
There was nothing original, then, in Carr’s arguments for adjustment by the satisfied powers in the interests of the dissatisfied. Indeed, the very familiarity of the terms ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ in the 1930s undermines Carr’s claim that utopians naively defended the status quo by appealing to the harmony of interests.Footnote 71
Carr’s critics replied that defenders of the League were alive to power politics and that Carr (in Angell’s formulation) was giving ‘aid and comfort in about equal measure to the followers of Marx and the followers of Hitler.’Footnote 72 As evidence of the first claim, at least, they could have pointed to a letter in The Times in 1936 signed by Angell and Zimmern along with other notable figures from across the political spectrum (including Clifford Allen, Harold Macmillan, Arthur Salter, Robert Cecil, and Gilbert Murray). The letter declared that ‘because Great Britain is not only a world-wide Empire but is also concerned with the defence of a whole group of virtually independent States – the Dominions – she, more than any other Power whatsoever, is interested in the establishment of the rule of law throughout the world, and of a system through which the burden of supporting it would be shared by others’ (my italics).Footnote 73 It acknowledged, that is, that the unequal distribution of power brings different levels of benefit and so of responsibility. Even if all the signatories thought that peace was in the world’s interest, they did not detect the automatic working of a principle of harmony. In the Chicago lecture series that Carr cites, moreover, Zimmern assumed this principle was universally discredited.Footnote 74
That Carr was wrong to charge Zimmern with belief in a harmony of interests is confirmed by Zimmern’s earlier writings.Footnote 75 In a 1922 article for the Workers’ Educational Association journal Highway, he addressed the demands on ‘progressive’ British opinion in the present world-situation:
Nobody grudges Britain the right to pursue her own selfish interests. But what does infuriate the public opinion of other countries is, firstly, our calm assumption that what is to our own interest must also be to the interest of all other nations, and, secondly, our attempt to impose our polices, conceived in our own interest, upon the rest of the world, especially when the attempt is accompanied by fine idealistic phrases.Footnote 76
Elsewhere, too, Zimmern denounced the assumption of a harmony of interests as British hypocrisy.Footnote 77
A twist on this theme is found in a newspaper article Zimmern wrote soon after the 1924 General Election, in which he stood unsuccessfully as a Labour candidate. In this article, Zimmern criticised Conservative Party objections to the Geneva Protocol, British ratification of which was now threatened by the Labour defeat. The slyness of his argument lay in his suggesting that Conservatives might be expected to support the Protocol on the grounds that it ‘stereotypes the status quo.’ Zimmern asked in return: ‘What if it did? Are we not, both as Britons and as white men, among the Haves of this world?’ Not that Zimmern thought that Britain should pursue selfish interests without the hypocrisy. What the ‘brilliant team of Socialists’ who helped draft the Protocol had in mind was to create ‘the necessary conditions for the League of Nations to turn its attention to international economic problems,’ and so ‘to open the way for exploring peaceful methods for improving’ the existing order.Footnote 78 This sort of progressive argument is occluded by Carr’s claim that liberal internationalism rested on the false belief in a harmony of interests and defined morality in accordance with self-interest. If anything, it has something in common with the collectivist utopian aspirations Carr himself expressed during the Second World War, even if the mechanism Carr envisaged for realising them was different.Footnote 79
Power in international politics
In the preface to the second edition of The Twenty Years Crisis, Carr explained that the book ‘was written with the deliberate aim of counteracting the glaring and dangerous defect of nearly all thinking, both academic and popular, about international politics in English speaking countries from 1919 to 1939 – the almost total neglect of the factor of power.’Footnote 80 That message was clear in the first edition and resented by Carr’s targets: Delisle Burns, for instance, responded that ‘the whole purpose of the despised “utopians” has been not to disregard power but to make it an instrument of morality.’Footnote 81 My discussion of the harmony of interests already suggests that Carr’s critics were right to object. This conclusion is reinforced by the third passage where Carr’s book takes issue with Zimmern. This passage comes in a section on ‘Economic Power’ where Carr argues that ‘economics must properly be regarded as an aspect of politics,’ and that ‘economic power is pressed into the service of national policy’ either through ‘measures whose purpose is defined by that convenient word autarky’ (i.e., self-sufficiency) or through ‘economic measures directly designed to strengthen the national influence over other countries.’Footnote 82 The importance of power is accentuated by the fact that this section is part of a long chapter on ‘Power in International Politics’ in the third part of the book, itself entitled ‘Politics, Power and Morality.’
It is in discussing the fallacy of the ‘separation of politics and economics’ that Carr turns to Zimmern:
the neatest exposure of this fallacy comes from the pen of Professor Zimmern; and the exposure is none the less effective for being unconscious. Having divided existing states on popular lines into those which pursue ‘welfare’ and those which pursue ‘power,’ Professor Zimmern revealingly adds that ‘the welfare states, taken together, enjoy a preponderance of power and resources over the power states,’ thereby leading us infallibly to the correct conclusion that ‘welfare states’ are states which, already enjoying a preponderance of power, are not primarily concerned to increase it, and can therefore afford butter, and ‘power states’ those which, being inferior in power, are primarily concerned to increase it, and devote the major part of their resources to this end. In this popular terminology, ‘welfare states’ are those which possess preponderant power, and ‘power states’ those which do not.Footnote 83
As with previous citations, Carr misrepresents his source – here a public lecture Quo Vadimus? that Zimmern delivered in Oxford in February 1934. Zimmern’s distinction between ‘welfare’ and ‘power’ states does not obscure the role of power: the distinction is between power as an instrument and power as an object in itself. As Zimmern put it in his 1936 Chicago lectures, ‘welfare politics remain power politics but power politics raised to a higher level, the level of moral responsibility.’Footnote 84 Nor did he equate power-states with states that do not enjoy preponderant power. He speaks of a preponderance of power enjoyed by the welfare states ‘taken together’ – including, that is, states such as Czechoslovakia and Switzerland which could themselves be considered ‘Have-Nots.’Footnote 85 Zimmern’s claim in the Oxford lecture, moreover, that ‘fortunately … power-states are no longer the dominant states of the world’ (my emphasis) undermines Carr’s argument that Zimmern’s ‘power states’ seek power as an object in itself because of their own relative weakness. As he made still clearer in 1936, Zimmern was pointing to a historical progression towards greater cooperation in the policies pursued by powerful states.Footnote 86 In both lectures, Zimmern’s distinction between ‘welfare’ and ‘power’ is designed to promote cooperation rather than evidence of his failure to understand the interlinking of economics and politics.Footnote 87
What of Carr’s allegation that Zimmern’s exposure of the fallacy of the ‘separation of politics and economics’ was ‘unconscious’? The problem with this dismissive claim is not just that it is tied to Carr’s misreading of Zimmern’s welfare–power opposition. It is also that it is hard to square with the reflections throughout Zimmern’s corpus on the necessary connections between politics and economics. This interlinking is central, for instance, to the plot of Zimmern’s 1911 work The Greek Commonwealth, in which the long section on ‘Economics’ artfully deconstructs the image of the city-state built up in the section on ‘Politics.’Footnote 88 It appears throughout the 1920s in his warning that the ‘Haves’ (at that time the white peoples) face a race-war if they do not promote greater equality with the non-white peoples.Footnote 89 And the Quo Vadimus? lecture itself contains a historicising analysis of how the industrial revolution and the consequent increase of wealth through free enterprise created a misleading ideological separation of economics and politics. In retrospect, British sea-power could be seen as the binding force – or as Zimmern puts it, it was not the ‘so-called laws of political economy’ which ‘were the real policemen but the system of political control which enabled them to function with the minimum of interruption and instability.’Footnote 90 Zimmern’s stress on the contrast of nineteenth- and twentieth-century political and economic conditions is exactly matched by Carr’s analysis.
Where Zimmern differed from The Twenty Years’ Crisis was in his assessment of the policies required to meet the political and economic challenges of the late 1930s. Both Zimmern and Carr favoured an equality of opportunities among peoples, as among citizens. But while Carr supported Chamberlain’s appeasement of Nazi Germany, Zimmern adopted a different view of the psychology of power: the Have-Nots, he protested, were using the resources they did have for military ends, and they would not be satisfied with concessions. A conflict of moral systems could not be solved by a mechanical economic rearrangement.Footnote 91
Morality in international politics
Carr does turn to ‘Morality in International Politics’ in the final chapter in Part III. The discussion forms part of his progressive exposure of the limitations of a narrowly defined realism, leading towards the utopian turn of his conclusion. Among other topics, Carr treats the gap between the private morality of the individual and the public morality of the state. This theme was prominent in interwar IR, especially in Niebuhr’s writings. As he picks up on this debate, Carr takes aim not just at Zimmern but also at the leading American philosopher John Dewey. Most people, Carr writes, ‘while believing that states ought to act morally, do not expect of them the same kind of moral behaviour which they expect of themselves and one another.’ But ‘utopian thinkers have been so puzzled by this phenomenon that they have refused to recognise it,’ or else ‘have sincerely confessed their bewilderment’: ‘“Men’s morals are paralysed when it comes to international conduct,” observes Professor Dewey and Professor Zimmern detects “a rooted prejudice against law and order in the international domain.”’Footnote 92 Presumably it is the language of ‘paralysed’ and ‘rooted prejudice’ that leads Carr to speak of ‘bewilderment.’
A more charitable reading of Dewey and Zimmern would be that they were making the same point as Carr, but for different purposes. Rather than feeling bewildered, Dewey proceeded to probe the psychological, social, and economic causes for the disparity of private and state morality. He made, too, a positive proposal (outlawing war) for the further development of international morality. Even though wars between states could no more be stopped by law than stealing, he felt that legal prohibition would gradually affect attitudes towards war.
Zimmern was no more bewildered than Dewey. He was attempting to overturn opposition to the idea that the British Commonwealth and the United States could cooperate to remove global insecurity. Opposition to a collective system of security among the English-speaking peoples, Zimmern suggested, came from a persistent association between peace and anarchy. While continental states with a tradition of liberty such as Sweden and Czechoslovakia would welcome a worldwide police force led by the United States and Britain, some in Britain saw any such cooperation as despotic. Far from throwing up his hands in bafflement, Zimmern was arguing against idealists who refused to recognise the importance of power in maintaining world order.
Thus far, we have seen Carr criticising Zimmern while misrepresenting his arguments for his own ends. As he moves towards his own proposals, however, Carr’s references to Zimmern become less polemical. Towards the end of this same chapter, he cites Zimmern’s pamphlet The Prospects of Civilization:
When Professor Zimmern urges ‘the ordinary man’ to enlarge his vision so as to bear in mind that the public affairs of the twentieth century are world affairs, the most concrete meaning which can be given to this injunction is that the recognition of the principle of self-sacrifice, which is commonly supposed to stop short at the national frontier, should be extended beyond it.Footnote 93
Carr’s interpretation seems to go beyond what is envisaged in Zimmern’s pamphlet. Its overarching argument is that it is counterproductive to preach internationalism while ignoring the difficulties in its path. The best approach is to apply the least possible change – in this case, to enlarge citizens’ outlook so that they are world-minded some of the time. Zimmern is merely stressing the desirability of more people having an informed interest in the interdependent relations among states. Wilfully disregarding this modest argument, Carr extracts from Zimmern’s text a message of self-sacrifice that chimes with his own vision of ‘peaceful change’ as sacrifices by the ‘Haves’ to satisfy the concerns of the ‘Have-nots.’ It is not that Zimmern was against self-sacrifice per se: indeed, he argued early in 1939 (presumably as a provocation) that any past wrongs to Germany in the Versailles Treaty should be made up not by conceding African colonies but by sacrifices at home.Footnote 94 Carr, however, by offering what he calls ‘the most concrete meaning’ of Zimmern’s injunction to the ordinary man to enlarge his vision, does seem to intimate that that injunction is vague and ill-suited at a time when specific adjustments are necessary.
The foundations of international law
Carr’s next citation of Zimmern occurs in the chapter ‘The Foundations of Law’ that opens Part IV (‘Law and Change’) of The Twenty Years’ Crisis. In this section, Carr addresses the question of legal procedures for peaceful change broached in the chapter on morality. His analysis drew praise from supposed adversaries such as Angell, who thought the chapter on the relation of law to peaceful change ‘a brilliant and most useful piece of work,’ and Zimmern, who commended Carr’s treatment of international law to ‘all who are tempted to indulge in amateur projects of world-order.’Footnote 95 In keeping with the trend noted above, the allusions to Zimmern he makes in this section are more positive – as well as fairer – than his earlier citations.
Carr starts this chapter by discussing ‘naturalist’ and ‘realist’ (or ‘positivist’) views of law. According to those views, law either derives from nature or is imposed by the state. Carr opts for a middle ground according to which law is a function of society. This definition allows for international law even in the absence of a centralised world power, but it is a conception more moderate than that proposed by international lawyers in the Grotian tradition. In the course of establishing this position, Carr approves Zimmern’s definition of the relation of law to society: ‘Law is regarded as binding because, if it were not, political society could not exist and there could be no law. Law is not an abstraction. It “can only exist within a social frame-work… . Where there is law, there must be a society within which it is operative.”’Footnote 96 In applying this definition beyond the state, moreover, Carr agrees with Zimmern that there is no international society strong enough to support widespread legal mechanisms, but there is a form of international society, and with it a form of international law based largely on ‘custom’ (Carr) or ‘etiquette’ (Zimmern).Footnote 97
Carr’s final citation of Zimmern occurs in Part IV at the end of Chapter 12. Entitled ‘The Judicial Settlement of International Disputes,’ this chapter outlines the limitations of international law in current conditions: ‘An international tribunal, once it has left the comparatively solid ground of international law and legal rights, can find no foothold in any agreed conception of equity or common sense or the good of the community. It remains, in Professor Zimmern’s words, “an array of wigs and gowns vociferating in emptiness.”’Footnote 98 Carr here quotes a vivid phrase from Zimmern’s discussion of international law in his book on the League of Nations. One of the leading British IR academics, S. H. Bailey, found that discussion too sceptical. Rather than taking the opposite line, Carr ends his engagement with Zimmern in The Twenty Years’ Crisis by endorsing Zimmern’s anti-utopian position.Footnote 99
The League of Nations Covenant
Carr’s disingenuousness towards Zimmern throughout The Twenty Years’ Crisis emerges still more if we include implicit allusions in our survey. In the early chapter ‘The Utopian Background,’ Carr admits that ‘the founders of the League,’ ‘some of whom were men of political experience and political understanding,’ had ‘recognised the dangers of abstract perfection,’ citing in support of this claim the official British Commentary on the Covenant.Footnote 100 Later in the book, he again stresses that the League founders had no illusion about the elimination of power from politics: the earliest British and American drafts of the Covenant ‘contemplated that membership of the Council of the League would be limited to Great Powers.’Footnote 101 At no point, however, does Carr note that it was Zimmern who drafted the British proposal for the Covenant. And while open exposure of that fact would have breached Foreign Office protocol, Zimmern’s interwar writings are full of complaints that the Council’s usefulness was weakened by its expansion beyond the small group of Great Powers.Footnote 102
Zimmern and Carr compared
My analysis in this article has suggested that there is good reason to question Carr’s placing Zimmern among the utopians, not least because he misrepresented Zimmern’s arguments and failed to acknowledge, except briefly with international law, the many points of contact in their ideas. This section sets this sparring in its intellectual context by asking how Carr and Zimmern were viewed by their contemporaries and by probing further points of similarity in their interpretations of history and politics.
The reputation Zimmern built during the interwar years bears no relation to Carr’s depiction. The New Statesman saw his angry monograph Europe in Convalescence (1922) as the work of a ‘disappointed idealist’ who ‘has no more fondness for “sentimental Liberals” than for hard-faced Conservatives.’Footnote 103 Carr, too, would speak in The Twenty Years’ Crisis of ‘disappointed utopians,’ but he locates this disappointment in the 1930s.Footnote 104 For Zimmern, by contrast, disillusionment set in with the Paris peace conference, and already in the early 1920s he was claiming that the war has ‘cured us of Utopianism’ and warning that ‘the transition of thought and practice’ involved in the collective system is ‘difficult and full of danger.’Footnote 105 Even if later Zimmern sometimes felt a qualified optimism, his Reference Zimmern1928 monograph Learning and Leadership, written while he was a League employee to promote intellectual cooperation, was described as ‘un-Utopian,’Footnote 106 and the following year a review of a collection of his essays called him an ‘idealist,’ but ‘far from being Utopian in outlook’: ‘he has a very acute knowledge of the forces, political, social, and economic, which lie behind the outer face of the modern world.’Footnote 107
This reputation was solidified by Zimmern’s 1936 monograph The League of Nations and the Rule of Law. A radio broadcast on the book in Canada claimed that Zimmern ‘is a believer in the League of Nations, not because he is an idealist but because he is a realist.’Footnote 108 Another reviewer started by citing a quotation Zimmern included from Thucydides (‘War is a forcible teacher’), before opining that Zimmern is ‘a realist, but with that he is so far an optimist as to believe in the fundamental common sense of the nations.’Footnote 109 If anything, these reviews offered too rosy an assessment of Zimmern’s view of the prospects of the League. More insightful was a review by Leonard Woolf which made much the same points against Zimmern that he and other critics later used against The Twenty Years’ Crisis. Just as Zimmern lamented Carr’s demoralising effect, Woolf, while allowing that Zimmern’s book was ‘extraordinarily clever and brilliant,’ could ‘only hope that he was, in writing it, completely unaware of the effect that it must have upon the reader.’ Zimmern’s ‘main object,’ Woolf continued, ‘seems to be to prove that the League has been a failure, that it was bound to be so, and that anyone who “believes in” or “supports” it is one of a “discordant congregation” of impossible “idealists.”’ The arguments Woolf attributes to Zimmern foreshadow Carr’s attack on utopianism, while Woolf’s critique echoes his later charge that Carr inferred that the League’s failure was inevitable merely from its failure. So too a ‘confusion’ Woolf found in Zimmern, namely ‘the assumption that there is something more real in violence and power and force … than there is in law, justice, order,’ matches his protest against Carr’s skewed and self-fulfilling definition of reality which saw force as more real than public opinion. Far from seeing Zimmern as a utopian, Woolf levelled against both Zimmern and Carr the charge of being too realist.Footnote 110
Zimmern’s reputation is also revealed by explicit comparisons with Carr. The two men are grouped in a letter from Gilbert Murray to Robert Cecil in 1938 in which he wrote that he was ‘a good deal troubled by the schism which is losing the LNU the support of so many of its old friends, such as Bevan, Fischer Williams, Esme Howard, as well as Carr, Manning and Zimmern.’Footnote 111 Carr’s own memories of the League confirm that he shared in the optimistic mood of the 1920sFootnote 112; it was amidst the growing crisis of the 1930s that he became disillusioned. In due course, David Davies, founder with his sisters of the Wilson Chair at Aberystwyth which both Zimmern and Carr held, could write that ‘all the professors from Zimmern onwards opposed these ideas with the result that we have been landed in another bloody war which is going to ruin most of us.’Footnote 113 That is, he tarred Zimmern and Carr with the same brush.
The realisms of Carr and Zimmern were linked, too, by the British theologians J. H. Oldham and William Paton, both of whom were adherents of Christian Realism, a movement associated with Reinhold Niebuhr. On 29 November 1939, Oldham printed in his small journal The Christian News-Letter a paper entitled ‘Preliminaries to the Consideration of Peace Aims.’ Prior to publication, he sent the piece to Zimmern, who criticised a paragraph about a negotiated peace as ‘sentimental.’Footnote 114 The piece ended with recommendations of ‘some relevant books,’ starting with ‘a little book that has just been published by one of our collaborators, Sir Alfred Zimmern,’ Spiritual Values and World Affairs, which he called ‘the best treatment of the relation of Christianity to international affairs that I have seen.’ He immediately proceeded to ‘a larger volume, which strongly reinforces at many points the line taken in the supplement’ – The Twenty Years’ Crisis. Paton similarly drew those two books together by reviewing them along with two other books that explored the intersection of Christianity and politics, T. S. Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society and L. J. Shafer’s The Christian Alternative to World Chaos. Paton initially identified the concern of Zimmern’s book as being ‘to help those especially who are to be Christian ministers to understand some of the things necessary to them if they are to think and speak with intelligence about international affairs,’ while Carr’s ‘much larger and more solid’ book was devoted to ‘“debunking” of utopianism.’ Though noting these different goals, Paton insisted that Zimmern ‘is sound on the need to face realistically the fact of power in the life of states,’ and noted too that ‘he does not spare the British talk of a “League policy” which was really a policy harmonious with British interests’ – another way of framing Carr’s critique of the harmony of interests. Some of Paton’s strongest remarks, however, were brought against Carr’s presentation of Zimmern: ‘It is piquant,’ he wrote, ‘to read [Zimmern’s] remarks about utopianism in view of the fact that in Professor Carr’s book he is cast for the role of Utopian Number One (or if not Number One, then certainly Number Two or Three).’ And he ends by suggesting that Carr gives too much weight to realism and not enough to its dangers: ‘The continual jibing at Professors Toynbee and Zimmern is so unfair and, indeed, taken in relation to the bulk of their work, so preposterous, that it may be taken as more indicative of Professor Carr’s mind than the verbal acknowledgment he makes of the dangers of a consistent realism.’Footnote 115
The comparison with Zimmern made by Oldham and Paton is the more striking given that the two thinkers to whom Carr acknowledged a debt in The Twenty Years’ Crisis were Niebuhr, the inspiration for their Christian Realism, and Mannheim, a member of Oldham’s ‘Moot’ (discussion group).Footnote 116 What Oldham understood by Christian Realism he outlined in the first issue of his Christian News-Letter, dated 1 November 1939:
The authentic Christian outlook is characterised by an extreme realism. It is this that distinguishes it from an optimistic humanitarian idealism, with which it is often confused. The Christian mind knows the radical nature of evil. This knowledge should save it from the illusions to which a rosy view of human nature is prone.
Similar themes were broached in Paton’s writings. In his 1941 monograph The Church and the New Order (which Zimmern read in draft), Paton quoted some of Oldham’s comments on the exercise of political power in The Christian News-Letter, and compared them in a footnote with Carr’s ‘realist critique’ in The Twenty Years’ Crisis. Footnote 117 Though Zimmern never used the term of himself, he was undoubtedly close in the late 1930s to the approach of these self-avowed Christian Realists.Footnote 118
That Zimmern could be seen as a better realist than Carr is shown, too, by a review in an American journal that read Spiritual Values and World Affairs alongside The Twenty Years’ Crisis. The reviewer was Hans Kohn, a Jewish exile in the United States and, like Zimmern, a prominent thinker on Nationalism. Kohn saw in Carr’s work the Foreign Office thinking behind Chamberlain’s doomed policy – a type of realism that ‘easily becomes unrealistic by its underestimation of the moral element.’ If that judgement echoes Woolf’s complaint, Kohn diverged from Woolf in finding in Zimmern a true realism which offered the best hope of avoiding war:
There are few contemporary pieces of as expert and truly realistic writing as the lecture on peace which Professor Zimmern delivered before theology students in February 1939, which implied an attitude that has been amply justified by subsequent events. Had it dominated the mind of the English and other democratic peoples, instead of the prevailing moral and mental confusion, it could in all probability have averted those events.Footnote 119
My discussion above of Carr’s citations of Zimmern already gives good reason to understand why informed contemporaries were prepared to consider Zimmern as much a realist as Carr, and perhaps even a more prudent one in the policies he favoured in the 1930s. It remains to support this claim with an overview of their larger visions.
First, Zimmern resembles Carr in his insistence that policymaking requires both utopianism and realism (even if he did not use that antithesis). Already in a school essay he wrote that the function of ‘fanaticism’ is ‘to carry the ideal into the real,’ since ‘if the foundation is not real, then the superstructure will fall.’Footnote 120 In the late 1920s, he argued in a lecture in Geneva that the idea for a Universal Library is ‘obviously a Utopian ideal, but we are trying to realise it in a more practicable way.’Footnote 121 Some years later, in the Chicago lectures cited above, he praised Lord Bryce, Lord Acton, Woodrow Wilson, Elihu Root, and Jan Masaryk as ‘realists in observation, idealists in aims and motive.’Footnote 122 Of most personal interest is a passage in Zimmern’s League of Nations monograph that lauds the initial British proposals for the Covenant as ‘an attempt to meet both the demands of the moment, the practical and the idealistic.’Footnote 123 As we have seen, their drafter was Zimmern himself.Footnote 124
Second, Zimmern and Carr are similar in their historical frames of mind. Their approach to current international problems typically involved a survey of changes in international contacts since the eighteenth century, often with a clear division into distinct periods.Footnote 125 Both recognised that previous solutions would no longer be effective in new political and economic constellations: many parallels in Zimmern could be cited for Carr’s formulation that ‘a twentieth-century malady cannot be cured by nineteenth-century specifics.’Footnote 126 They were alike, too, in their developmental historicism. Both stressed the political immaturity of Germany by contrast with countries with settled national traditions such as Britain and France,Footnote 127 and both anticipated the political and economic development of ‘backward’ peoples who had been subjected by European powers, while being critical of capitalist exploitation of colonies and of racial inequality.Footnote 128
Other links in the thought of Zimmern and Carr can be traced. Both were sceptical of the nation-state.Footnote 129 Both supported this scepticism with admiring references to the Cambridge historian Acton, and both further praised Acton for his commitment to liberty; Zimmern’s admiration of Acton is the more striking given Carr’s verdict that Acton was unpopular in the first third of the twentieth century and that ‘the collapse of the Liberal utopia brought him back into his own.’Footnote 130 Both men moved, too, towards functionalist and regional approaches to international cooperation.Footnote 131 Both highlighted the role of public opinion in the formation of an international social conscience.Footnote 132 Both stressed the responsibilities and obligations (including self-sacrifice for the common good) that came with power for the state and with rights for the individual.Footnote 133
While more specific comparisons can be drawn,Footnote 134 any assessment of Zimmern and Carr must point to differences too. Carr remained a strong advocate of progress, but an Augustinian pessimism appears in Zimmern’s writings in the 1930s.Footnote 135 Related to this difference is the contrast adumbrated above between Zimmern’s gradualism and Carr’s belief (which emerged more clearly in his writings in the 1940s) in the need for revolutionary overhaul of the political and economic order in an age of mass democracy. While Carr sometimes seems to belittle human suffering in the name of progress, Zimmern in a 1933 article inveighed against ‘revolutionaries’ as ‘doctrinaires who are prepared to make light of the sufferings of millions of men, women and children because they have persuaded themselves that, among the diminished survivors after the Deluge, there will be a more equal distribution of such wealth as remains.’Footnote 136 Zimmern was nonetheless far from a laissez-faire liberal: in that same 1933 article he was equally critical of non-revolutionaries, arguing instead that it was the League’s job to promote economic co-operation internationally,Footnote 137 and his work on industrial reconstruction during World War I was guided by a belief similar to Carr’s in World War II that war might be a catalyst for a reshaping of labour conditions.Footnote 138 Contrary to Carr’s implication, moreover, Zimmern did not hypocritically use moral language to justify preserving the status quo. It was because he could see that ‘the status quo is unjust’ that he thought that ‘the old watchwords of justice and liberty’ sufficed as a spring for progressive political action, even as that action required pragmatic knowledge of the forces old and new at work in the world.Footnote 139
Conclusion: the devil at Carr’s elbow
While the inadequacy of the opposition between the realist Carr and the utopian Zimmern is well-established in scholarship, the reading of The Twenty Years’ Crisis in this article has shown that Carr’s comments on Zimmern are far fewer and less uniformly hostile than usually imagined. This article has shown, too, that the criticisms Carr did include are based on a slipshod reading of Zimmern’s writings. Carr failed to disclose accurately the contexts of the quotations he selects. Had he done so, he would have had to admit that the image of Zimmern’s utopianism he constructs is a self-interested fantasy. His rhetoric might have been better directed against the unworldly targets of Zimmern’s Spiritual Values and World Affairs or against ambitious schemes for world government.
The similarities we have observed through our commentary on The Twenty Years’ Crisis make one question inescapable: Why did Carr misrepresent Zimmern as much as he did? The canonicity of Carr’s book has ensured that he has received much more attention than the thinkers he criticises. At the time of writing, however, Carr must have known that his aggression towards major figures such as Zimmern and Toynbee was not likely to win him friends; later, indeed, it may well have contributed to his failure to be appointed to the Montague Burton Chair at Oxford previously held by Zimmern.Footnote 140
Carelessness is a more charitable answer than malice or the anxiety of influence. Carr was busy in the late 1930s not just with The Twenty Years’ Crisis but also with a short book on British foreign policy and the report of the Chatham House committee on Nationalism that he chaired;Footnote 141 amidst these larger projects, he found time, too, for dozens of reviews for the Times Literary Supplement and for other journalistic pieces. Further explanations may lie in Carr’s high intellectual self-esteem and his awareness of his own Foreign Office expertise, especially if he set his twenty years’ service against Zimmern’s brief tenure.
Some wilfulness on Carr’s part is nonetheless suggested by the contrast with the praise he previously bestowed on Zimmern’s book on the League of Nations.Footnote 142 Indeed, the contrast between that 1936 review and the 1939 book suggests a political reason for Carr’s treatment.Footnote 143 The thinkers whom he brands Utopian – Angell, Murray, Toynbee, Zimmern – had pondered the possibility of ‘peaceful change’ earlier in the 1930s, but were all firmly against appeasement by the late 1930s. Carr, that is, called on Mannheimian theory to position the anti-appeasers as Utopian, even as the ‘realism’ he identified with appeasement was being shown up as a fantasy.Footnote 144
Beyond this political subtext, it is tempting to see Carr’s tone as instantiating a conflict of academic style. In his later years, Carr suggested that he learned from the Cambridge Latinist A. E. Housman ‘something of his flair for cutting through a load of nonsense and getting straight to the point.’Footnote 145 If Housman can be claimed as a model for the polemical style of The Twenty Years’ Crisis, then the structure of that book may also be seen as an attempt at replicating a distinctively Cambridge style of ‘scholarship with no nonsense about it’ of which Housman spoke in his inaugural lecture, a few months before Carr’s arrival as an undergraduate.Footnote 146 Carr’s aspirations for a ‘science of international relations’ (the title of Part I of his book) contrasted with the approach of Zimmern, who preferred to see IR as an art, albeit one that required knowledge of many other disciplines.Footnote 147 Zimmern offered a more radical take on the tough idealism of his own mentor, Gilbert Murray, whose concern with imaginatively reconstructing the ‘spirit’ of ancient Greece Housman’s inaugural implicitly attacked.Footnote 148 A hint of this clash of approaches can be heard in the letter from Zimmern to Angell with which we began. Zimmern, we saw, regretted that a ‘devil’ at Carr’s elbow made him cast his analysis in the form of a treatise decked out with sociology. This decision gave The Twenty Years’ Crisis its systematic appearance, but its rigorous look was, we have seen, largely based on a misrepresentation of the utopians against whom the realist critique was directed. Zimmern’s diagnosis of Carr’s ‘false clarity’ might in turn be applied to the postwar realism that, fed on a myth of interwar utopianism crudely extracted from Carr, flexed its intellectual muscles on ahistorical models of power politics.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Scarlett Kingsley, Jonathan Lingard, Alex Middleton, Daniel Sutton, and Rachel Wong for comments on a draft; to the reviewers; to the archivists in the Bodleian and the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies Library, Becky Marangelli at the Ball State University archives, Sarah Heim at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, University of Pennsylvania, and Ted Jackson at the Booth Family Center for Special Collections, Georgetown University, for their help; and to Martha Stonequist for permission to quote from the Zimmern papers.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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