Theories as weapons: E.H. Carr and international relations

Abstract

E.H. Carr would have been more comfortable with the self-description ‘intellectual activist’ rather than ‘international theorist’. His interest in international relations was motivated by his desire to influence policy, whether it related to the response of the West to the Soviet Union or the economic imperative of reconstructing post-war British economy and society. This concern to shape the course of history in the early 1940s led to something of a collision between his two worlds of academe and policy-making when it came to the attention of the Woodrow Wilson board that their Professor was more engaged in the politics of The Times than the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth. Compared to the controversies within the English-speaking academic world that his writings on International Relations and Soviet history were to generate, this fall-out at Aberystwyth was no more than a little ‘local’ difficulty.