‘The old world is dead. The future lies with those who can resolutely turn their back on it and face the new world with understanding, courage and imagination’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 275).
The revival of interest in what is now referred to as Classical Realism is one of the most significant developments in IR theory since the turn of the millennium. This resurrection is due to the impact of seminal contributions from leading theorists such as Richard Ned Lebow, Michael C. Williams and William E. Scheuerman. Returning to the texts of key members of the Realist tradition such as Thucydides, Hobbes, Rousseau and Clausewitz, these authors have highlighted the enduring relevance of Realism to contemporary questions of war and peace, international order, and the reform of international society. Unsurprisingly, at the centre of these intersecting research agendas is the figure of Hans J. Morgenthau, the German-Jewish émigré scholar who in many respects laid the foundation of Realist IR in the United States. The successful recovery and application of Morgenthau’s thought is a most important development in the discipline, but is not without certain attendant difficulties. Perhaps the most serious is the extent to which Realist ethics is now synonymous with Morgenthau, particularly as he is read by Lebow (2003) and Williams (2005). While extremely valuable, the success of their pioneering endeavours obscures the extent to which different and complementary approaches to Realist ethics are possible.
Perhaps the most significant figure to be side-lined by the identification of Realist ethics with Morgenthau is E.H. Carr. The relegation of Carr to the side-lines of IR’s contemporary debates about the relationship between politics and ethics is due to the prevailing idea that Carr was ‘uninterested’ (Scheuerman Reference Scheuerman2011, 25) or dismissive (Elshtain 2008, 153) of ethics in IR. These readings of Carr echo Morgenthau’s (Reference Morgenthau1948) influential critique, in which Carr is ultimately dismissed as a ‘utopian of power’, who wishes to establish a new morality but is too in thrall to those who possess power to do so.Footnote 1 Such has been the influence of the idea that Carr was either uninterested in or dismissive of ethics in IR that less than a handful of the books and articles dedicated to Carr and his legacy in IR have addressed this dimension of his texts at any length.Footnote 2
This relative silence on Carr’s ethics, however, presents an intriguing opportunity for reinvestigation. As Friedrich Kratochwil has argued in relation to The Twenty Years’ Crisis, its enduring value lies ‘as with every classic’, in the fact that ‘different readings are possible’ (Kratochwil Reference Kratochwil1998, 193). The particular reading to be explored in this article is the extent to which Carr’s political and ethical project parallels the American philosophy of pragmatism, especially that of William James – a parallel that when drawn in detail may point to deeper aspects of Carr’s understanding of the relationship between politics and ethics than have heretofore been recognized.Footnote 3
The decision to juxtapose James and Carr is not arbitrary or unjustified. James is mentioned only twice by Carr, but on each occasion (2001, 20; 1942, 253), Carr compares his work either directly or indirectly with the American philosopher: that he does so twice, and in two different works, legitimizes the effort to read their projects as parallel in some important respects and to draw out the implications of these parallels. It is important to stress that what is at issue in this article is not whether James influenced Carr, which is properly the domain of disciplinary or intellectual history, but rather that it is profitable to examine Carr in the light of James’ work and by doing so reveal that Carr’s approach is, contrary to the accusation of Morgenthau (Reference Morgenthau1948, 134), philosophically well-equipped to deal with the complex interplay of politics and morality in global politics. Carr does not identify himself as a pragmatist, but as William James argued one does not have to make a profession of pragmatist faith in order to be a pragmatist or to practice pragmatist methods. Pragmatism, or significant elements of pragmatism, was already present in Western philosophy long before its articulation by Peirce: ‘Socrates was an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley and Hume made momentous contributions to truth by its means’ – without being card-carrying members of the pragmatist movement (James Reference James1975, 30). Likewise, as Jörg Friedrichs has shown in relation to James Rosenau, one may be a pragmatist type thinker after the era of Peirce, James and Dewey without consciously or explicitly subscribing to its tenets (Friedrichs Reference Friedrichs2009, 646). Reading Carr and James in this manner is advantageous because ‘there is considerable heuristic utility in stretching our concepts through analogies’ (Friedrichs and Kratochwil Reference Friedrichs and Kratochwil2009, 717). Methodologically, the reading proffered here is justified primarily not by reference to history, but rather to hermeneutics – although there is a sense in which this article offers a revisionist account of Carr that, like Scheuerman’s (Reference Scheuerman2011, viii) reading of mid-twentieth century Realism as a progressive theory of institutional reform ‘can help shed light on conventional disciplinary divides and shake up ossified ways of thinking’. The reading offered here though is neither textual nor contextualist (Bell 2003) in history of political thought terms, rather it is a theoretical recontextualization based on Carr’s invitation to read his work analogically with that of William James.
The hermeneutic principle that ‘the wealth of texts far exceeds the intentions of their authors and the cultures that produced them’ (Lebow 2003, 52) is the lodestar of this article. This perspective allows the interpreter to recognize that ‘good texts … invite readers to enter into a dialogue and to create a “community” between author and reader that transcends generations’ (Lebow 2003, 52). Over time this community can ‘establish a tradition that provides readers with insights and understandings that were unavailable to their predecessors or even to the author’ (Lebow 2003, 56). It is the capacity of the text to provoke thought and dialogue, rather than any attempt to establish a reconstruction of the intention of the author, that guides the reading of The Twenty Years’ Crisis and Conditions of Peace undertaken in this article. Such an approach is focused on deriving the maximum benefit for the community of readers – in this case the presentation of a hybrid theory of pragmatism and Realism – rather than trying to reconstruct the thought-world of E.H. Carr. A reading of this kind, according to Williams (2005, 9), ‘presents a direct challenge to many of the conceptual foundations, categorical distinctions, and doctrinal divisions that structure contemporary IR theory’.
The primary advantage of reading Carr as a pragmatist in the Jamesian sense is the achievement of a greater understanding of the internal workings of The Twenty Years’ Crisis and Conditions of Peace that a syncretistic reading can provide – this is not a causal claim that James influenced the content of either book, but rather that Carr’s project is similar enough to that of a pragmatist – as understood by James – to warrant investigation in those terms, that is, Carr may, like Rosenau, be treated as a pragmatist après la lettre, whether or not he is consciously following James’ model. This is also not to claim that Carr is a pragmatist in a manner identical to James or the other American pragmatists (e.g. he was notably critical of John Dewey in The Twenty Years’ Crisis), or that his implicit pragmatism rises to the level of James. What is important is that at the most fundamental level both authors display similar attitudes towards the perception of truth, the mutable nature of reality, and what is ethically and politically possible in these contexts. Reading Carr as a pragmatist then allows greater understanding of his idea of truth and his notoriously controversial peace focused ethics, which led him to support appeasement in the 1930s. Indeed, it is Carr’s ethical commitment to peace in the differing forms explored in The Twenty Years’ Crisis (which was dedicated ‘to the makers of the coming peace’) and Conditions of Peace that perhaps most marks him as a pragmatist in the normative sense outlined by James Bohman.Footnote 4
A second advantage to be gained from this reading is a greater insight into why and how Carr shifted his focus from the limited adjustment of international society advocated in The Twenty Years’ Crisis to the more radical structural transformation of Conditions of Peace, that is, the pragmatist sense that all is mutable and in flux helps to explain the shift in emphasis in Carr’s thought from the ethics of adjustment and advantage explored in The Twenty Years’ Crisis to the ethics of transformation and integration in the later book. Carr’s pragmatism accounts for his evolution as an IR theorist and the solutions that he proposes to the problems of international politics. By tracing Carr’s political–ethical projects as they evolved from a concern with peaceful change and appeasement through to his theorization of European integration, the pragmatism of his approach to IR becomes evident from his commitment to ‘an active engagement with actual problems and strategies through creative experimentation, accepting the always incomplete nature of our knowledge’ (Kratochwil Reference Kratochwil2009, 12).
Currently, to employ a Robert Frost metaphor, Carr’s approach is the road less travelled in the ‘yellow wood’ of Realism – one of IR theory’s largest and densest thickets. Pursuing this path may make ‘all the difference’ to the understanding of what is necessary, possible and desirable in the relationship between politics and ethics in IR theory, both within and outside Realism. The purpose of the article then is to highlight the extent to which Carr, read through the lens of pragmatism, can transform our understanding of Realism, but also of what is possible in international ethics.Footnote 5 To this end, after establishing the nature of pragmatic Realism in the first parts of the article, the final section engages in a critical investigation of both Realist approaches to ethics, the well-travelled Morgenthauian road that leads to the tragic and wilful visions of man and politics and the less travelled road of Carr’s pragmatism. Recontextualizing Carr in this manner allows IR theory to see his thought in a new light and to explore the implication of his ideas ‘for a different understanding of the Realist “tradition”’ (Williams 2005, 17). In more general disciplinary terms, the juxtaposition of Carr’s Realism and James’ pragmatism undertaken in this paper also offers a more general way of thinking about IR, not only in terms of ethics, but also in terms of the epistemology, ontology, and normativity of IR.
The tracing of Carr’s two major attempts to understand the relationship between politics and morality is then of more than simple historical significance. A recovery of his approach provides important theoretical resources in an age when Realism is undergoing not merely a revival, but a renaissance. The intention of this piece is not to displace the valuable work done on Morgenthau and other classical Realists by Lebow, Scheuerman, Williams, and others, rather it seeks to add another dimension to their various projects by illustrating that other powerful approaches to the relationship between politics and morality are possible within the Realist tradition that address this relationship in different and complementary ways and by doing so advance contemporary IR theory’s discourse on ethics.
Marking out the terrain of inquiry: the epistemologies of Carr and James
Carr’s treatment of James in The Twenty Years’ Crisis is intriguing in that he claims that his foundational ‘antithesis of utopia and reality’ may be read analogically with ‘William James’s pairs of opposites: Rationalist-Empiricist, Intellectualist-Sensationalist, Idealist-materialist, Optimistic-Pessimistic, Religious-Irreligious, Free-willist-Fatalistic, Monistic-Pluralistic, Dogmatic-Sceptical’ (2000, 12, 20). This section proposes to tease out the implications of the analogy that Carr proposes. As Carr attests, James and Carr’s projects begin from similar bases in that they both attempt to divide their respective fields of inquiry into competing camps. For James this process is achieved by distinguishing between two predominant groupings defined by a pronounced ‘difference of temperament’ – described in the widest terms as the ‘tender’ and the ‘tough-minded’. In philosophy, this division is manifested in the difference between Rationalism and Empiricism. James identifies the tender-minded rationalists with intellectualism, idealism, optimism, religion, voluntarism, monism and dogma, and the tough-minded empiricists with sensationalism, materialism, pessimism, irreligion, fatalism, pluralism, and scepticism (James Reference James1975, 13). Within the analogy that Carr suggests, Utopianism and Realism are clearly intended to serve as IR specific analogues of the tender and the tough-minded. The Utopian intellectual is described as thinking in a priori terms, whereas the Realist bureaucrat thinks empirically (Carr Reference Carr2001, 12–13). For the Utopian idealist, ‘the moral law of nature could be scientifically established … Reason could determine what were the universally valid moral laws … human beings would conform to them just as matter conformed to the physical laws of nature. Enlightenment was the royal road to the millennium’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 25). The scepticism of Realism is evident from its attitude towards truth claims: paraphrasing Carl Becker, Carr asserts that for the Realist, ‘truth is no more than the perception of discordant experience pragmatically adjusted for a particular purpose and for the time being’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 68).
If the poles of Rationalism/Empiricism and Utopianism/Realism are closely related, then so also are the difficulties associated with each of these positions. The rationalist philosophy for James is problematic because:
‘in point of fact it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and Gothic character which mere facts present. It is no explanation of a concrete universe, it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a remedy, a way of escape’ (James Reference James1975, 18).
James goes on to criticize the tendency of rationalism to try to contain the actual universe within its closed systems and its insistence on assessing reality from its assumption of ‘a perfection eternally complete’, to which reality (which for rationalism is merely ‘the illusion of the finite and the relative’) cannot possibly measure favourably (James Reference James1975, 20). Tough-minded empiricism is also problematic in that the materialistic philosophy results in the ultimate erosion of all things beautiful, uplifting, and even morality itself:
‘That’s the sting of it … nothing, absolutely nothing remains, to represent those particular qualities, those elements of preciousness which they may have enshrined … This utter final wreck and tragedy is of the essence of scientific materialism as at present understood. The lower and not the higher forces are the eternal forces, or the last surviving forces within the only cycle of evolution which we can definitely see … Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes’ (James Reference James1975, 54–55).
Carr’s critiques of both Utopianism and Realism are similar in tone and content. One of the contributory factors of the inter-war crisis was the tendency of ‘the metaphysicians of Geneva’ to take refuge in legal rationalist abstraction and ‘linguistic contortions’ which resulted in ‘the frequent failure to distinguish between the world of abstract reason and the world of political reality’, a situation in which said metaphysicians ‘found it difficult to believe that an accumulation of ingenious texts prohibiting war was not a barrier against war itself’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 31). Carr’s finding that ‘pure’ Realism is also untenable mirrors James’ warning against the corrosion of morality: ‘the impossibility of being a consistent and thorough-going realist’, is linked explicitly to its inability to provide finite goals, an emotional appeal, a ground for action, and perhaps most significant of all, ‘a right of moral judgment’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 84). Contrary to Morgenthau’s assertion that Carr was an adherent of the position that might makes right, Carr is opposed to such a stance: a moral position is a requirement of political theory for Carr as ‘[t]he belief that whatever succeeds is right, and has only to be understood to be approved, must, if consistently held, empty thought of purpose, and thereby sterilize and ultimately destroy it’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 86).
James and Carr pursue the same strategy in relation to the difficulties inherent in the warring camps of Rationalism and Empiricism and Utopianism and Realism, that is, they create a new position for themselves between the opposing factions and take elements of both in order to navigate their way through existence. James’s pragmatism is offered as a philosophy that can satisfy both rationalism’s requirement for a ‘religious’ sense of hope in the future and empiricism’s desire for ‘the richest intimacy with the facts’ (James Reference James1975, 23). Carr, for his part, affirms that ‘sound political thought’ will be found only where both Utopianism and Realism have found their place (Carr Reference Carr2001, 10).
A closer look at the nature of how both authors attempt to corral these opposing elements of discourse is of theoretical importance, as it illustrates the nature of the relationship in each case. The significance lies in the treatment meted out to rationalism and Utopianism. In neither case do James or Carr suggest that the resolution of the warring perspectives in their ‘third way’ formulations is in any way equal. James is explicitly clear in relation to the pragmatist’s defining characteristics: ‘He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins’. Rather, says James, the pragmatist moves towards, ‘concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, toward action, and towards power’. James admits that pragmatism is an attitude of orientation with ‘the empiricist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given up’. Pragmatism, says James, possesses the empiricist attitude but ‘represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed’ (James Reference James1975, 31). Pragmatism is less objectionable than previous empiricist approaches to knowledge because of the ameliorating elements adopted from the voluntarist part of rationalism.
Carr’s treatment of Utopianism is markedly similar, if more complex and less explicitly clear than that of rationalism by James. One has to trace the critiques of both Utopianism and Realism carefully across the chapters of the book in order to determine where Carr stands in relation to the two elements and how he resolves them into ‘sound political thought’. Ultimately, however, there can be little doubt that Carr considers Utopianism, at least in its Benthamite, nineteenth-century incarnation, to be the weaker part of the equation.Footnote 6 It was ‘abstract rationalism’ and the belief that ‘the unruly flow of international politics could be canalized into a set of logically impregnable abstract formulae inspired by the doctrines of nineteenth-century liberal democracy’ of the Utopians that, in gaining the upper hand at the League of Nations, ensured the failure of that organization (Carr Reference Carr2001, 31). Rejecting Zimmern’s accusation that those responsible were too stupid, and Toynbee’s belief that they were too wicked, to implement these good ideas, Carr maintained the ‘foundations of nineteenth-century belief are themselves under suspicion. It may be … that the principles themselves were false or inapplicable’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 38–39). The harmony of interests, the key principle of Benthamite Utopianism for Carr, is an ‘inadequate’ and ‘misleading’ basis for international morality and, Carr concludes, that what ‘confronts us in international politics today is, therefore, nothing less than the complete bankruptcy of the conception of morality which has dominated political and economic thought for a century and a half’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 57–58).
At first glance, Realism comes in for an equally devastating assault upon its pretensions to act as the foundation for ‘sound political thought’. The sterility and fatalism of ‘pure’ Realism are, for Carr, ultimately self-defeating. The consistent application of Realism’s cynicism would lead to a crippling of human agency, ‘the springs of action’ that motivate human progress. The pure Realist ‘conception of politics’ as an infinite struggle for power devoid of any other purpose is, according to Carr, ‘in the long run uncongenial or incomprehensible to the human mind’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 84–85). The key evaluative concepts in Carr’s critique of Realism are consistency and purity. ‘Pure’ and ‘consistent’ Realism is contrasted with Machiavelli, who Carr takes pains to stress ‘is not so consistent’. Machiavelli’s conclusion to The Prince, in which he exhorts Italian unity in order to liberate Italy from the barbarians, represents for Carr simultaneously an ‘impurity’ and a saving grace as, by ‘negating his own postulate’, that is, the desire and pursuit of power for its own sake, Machiavelli assumes an ‘ultimate reality outside the historical process’, that is, the ‘reality’ of an ethical stance outside the political that claims it would be for the greater good if Italy could achieve its liberation. Machiavelli is not alone in professing an ‘impure’ Realism, Carr (Reference Carr2001, 87) introduces a sub-category of Realists ‘who have made their mark on history’, who in contrast to the deterministic pessimism of ‘pure’ Realists believe that ‘human affairs can be directed and modified by human action and human thought’.Footnote 7 Carr’s ‘sound political thought’ bears much in common with this category of Realism in that it accepts the ‘logically overwhelming’ power of Realist analysis of political life but tempers it with the voluntarist and melioristic tendencies of Utopianism. In the final analysis, for Carr ‘sound political thought’ is characterized by (to paraphrase James) the ‘realist temper regnant’: what Carr proposes is a radical Realism akin to James’ radical empiricism. Both theorists may be accused of operating a ‘tinkering, reconstructive, individual-problem solving approach’ as Harvey Cormier recognizes in relation to James, but this does not mean ‘that this approach cannot let us see far enough to address pervasive moral and political problems, or that it cannot result in suitably grand radical theories of the social world’ (Cormier Reference Cormier1997, 360).
Purpose, truth and meliorism: further affinities between James’ pragmatism and Carr’s ‘sound political thought’
Carr’s attempts to build pragmatist theories of the social world of European and global politics in The Twenty Years’ Crisis and Conditions of Peace mark him out as (consciously or not) an inheritor of James in IR. The similarities between the positions of James and Carr do not end with their parallel methods of delineating the differences of temperament or traditions of thought within their disciplines. Pragmatism and Carr’s theory of IR share further resemblances in relation to epistemology, methodology and the overall purpose of theory. In terms of purposiveness, James identifies the ‘pragmatic method’ as being ‘to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences’ (James Reference James1975, 28). The purpose of investigating a concept is to unlock its ‘practical cash-value’, to ‘set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, as a program for more work’. Theories for James are instruments, not answers to enigmas, rather they are thoughts employed to make practical sense of any given reality. The key question posed by pragmatism of any given statement is ‘what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s actual life?’
This centrality of usefulness finds a direct counterpart in Carr’s Realism. The human mind for Carr is driven by purpose – all sciences are driven by necessity. Even abstract sciences like geometry owe their origin to practical requirements. Political science is no exception as it is driven by the pragmatic desire ‘to cure the sickness of the body politic’. Thought has to be directed to some practical purpose for Carr because purpose, ‘whether we are conscious of it or not, is a condition of thought; and thinking for thinking’s sake is as abnormal and barren as the miser’s accumulation of money for its own sake’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 4). The discipline of IR itself takes its impetus from the catastrophe of the First World War, the purpose of its early pioneers being in effect ‘to obviate a recurrence of this disease of the international body politic. The passionate desire to prevent war determined the whole initial course and direction of the study’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 8). This purpose, however, has to be tempered by the critical perspective of Realism because for Carr, ‘no political utopia will achieve even the most limited success unless it grows out of political reality’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 9).
If purpose drives theoretical and philosophical endeavour for James and Carr, their similar concepts of truth are crucial to understanding the nature of both projects. James’ theory of truth is difficult to grasp, and as James himself admitted not always well expressed.Footnote 8 For James a theory’s truth is tied to its utility, not to any inherent quality of ‘Truth’ – ‘Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor: is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally’ (James Reference James1975, 35). New truths and old truths combine and grow over time ‘much as a tree grows by the activity of a new layer of cambium’ (James Reference James1975, 36). In James’ conception of truth, all our theories are instrumental ‘mental modes of adaptation to reality, rather than revelations or Gnostic answers to some divinely instituted world enigma’ (James Reference James1975, 94). Truth for James (Reference James1975, 97) is unfixed and the truth of an idea is not ‘a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events’.Footnote 9 All truth, be it the partial truths which operate in the instrumental sense on a day to day basis, or even the Absolute truth are manufactured by the process of verification. A vital corollary of this condition of truth is that both experience and ‘our psychological ascertainments of truth are in mutation’ (James Reference James1975, 108). That truths are in mutation, however, does not mean that anything goes, as Robert Lacey makes clear, ‘James never said that we can assert any truth that suits our fancy. He subscribed in part to what philosophers call a coherence theory of truth, the notion that new truths must accommodate as many old truths as possible’. According to Lacey, a hypothesis is only true for James if it can combine satisfactorily with all the other working truths that together constitute our world’ (Lacey Reference Lacey2007, 57). Truth must also be scrutinized by reference to reality, ‘it must accommodate both our prior truths and the oblique but unmistakable realities we continually experience’ (Lacey Reference Lacey2007, 61).
Carr’s concept of truth is more difficult to identify and is more antagonistic than that of James in that while both see theories in instrumentalist terms, for James theories are tools, for Carr they are ‘weapons’ (Dunne Reference Dunne2000). In The Twenty Years’ Crisis, Carr’s position is almost identical to that of James. In his analysis of the emergence and eventual decline of the nineteenth-century Utopian mentality, Carr demonstrates that its truth was specific to its time and place and dependent on the power of Britain to create the conditions in which its truths, for example, the benefits of free trade and the harmony of interests, could be made manifest. As the nineteenth-century progressed new ideas about the nature of the world challenged, modified and eventually superseded the truths of Benthamism. Utopianism and Realism constitute and reconstitute what counts as truth over time – the terrain of truth is a contested sphere. In the conflict of ideas and politics, it is the successful who determine what is true (Carr 2000, 65). The ‘outstanding achievement’ of modern Realism, according to Carr is that under the influence of the German ‘sociology of knowledge’ tradition, it has demonstrated that ‘the intellectual theories and ethical standards of utopianism, far from being the expression of absolute and a priori principles, are historically conditioned, being both the products of circumstances and interests and weapons framed for the furtherance of interests’. For Carr, this is the most ‘formidable attack which utopianism has to face; for here the very foundations of its belief are undermined by the realist critique’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 65). This attack, however, has wider implications in that it demonstrates the relativity of all thought – a singular truth cannot be established in a social realm wherein power plays a dominant role and intellectual beliefs shift accordingly (Carr Reference Carr2001, 67). In one of his more Jamesian statements, Carr adds ‘[t]hought is not merely relative to the circumstances and interests of the thinker: it is also pragmatic in the sense that it is directed to the fulfilment of his purposes’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 68). Truth is, therefore, both conditioned and purposive.
Both authors carry the unfixed nature of truth into their analysis of reality itself. On one level James is clear that the pragmatist ‘remains an epistemological realist’ (James Reference James1908, 8). This epistemological standpoint commits James to ‘a standing reality independent of the idea that knows it’ (James Reference James1907a, 405). This level, however, is only one part of James’ theory of reality. Without human thought ‘reality would still be there, though possibly it might be there in a shape that would lack something that our thought supplies’. According to James, ‘thought itself [is] a most momentous part of fact, and the whole mission of the pre-existing and insufficient world of matter may simply be to provoke thought to produce its far more precious supplement’ (James Reference James1904, 463 and 468). The nature of the relationship between fact and the truths men create about these facts is best expressed by James as a process of mutual revelation – ‘Truths emerge from facts; but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on ad infinitum. The facts themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of beliefs that start and terminate among them’ (James Reference James1907b, 151). The interaction of external reality and ‘mental determinations’ constitute a form of growth for reality itself, ‘genuine additions made by our intellect to the world of fact’, not in terms of adding content but by adding more dimensions to our experience of reality, that is, ‘they agree with what pre-existed, fit it; amplify it, relate it and connect it, build it out’ (James Reference James1904, 473).
The most important aspect of James’ idea about the relationship between truth, reality, and our experience of it is that ‘so far as reality means experience-able reality, both it and the truths men gain about it are everlastingly in process of mutation – mutation towards a definite goal it may be – but still mutation’ (James Reference James1975, 107). In addition, according to James, human beings add ‘both to the subject and to the predicate part of reality. The world stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands … Man engenders truths upon it’ (James Reference James1975, 123). For Carr the mutability of reality is used as a stick with which to beat both Utopians and Realists, in that the ‘complete realist, unconditionally accepting the causal sequence of events, deprives himself of the possibility of changing reality. The complete utopian, by rejecting the causal sequence, deprives himself of the possibility of understanding either the reality which he is seeking to change or the processes by which it can be changed’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 12). The implication of this passage is that reality can be changed and that the radical realist, possessor of ‘sound political thought’, is capable of identifying both what that change should be and how it ought to be effected. This is very much tied to Carr’s (Reference Carr2001, 6) idea that political thought is a species of political action with the power to impact on reality, that every ‘political judgement helps to modify the facts on which it is passed … Political science is the science not only of what is, but of what ought to be’.Footnote 10 Carr’s point is that thought and action are inextricably linked, with the theorist enjoined to think about what ought to be as well as what is.
Meliorism: the shared ethical core of James and Carr
The task for James and Carr becomes then, if truth and reality (to a certain extent) are malleable and mutable, what ought to be the function of philosophy and IR theory? The answer for both Carr and James lies in the centrality of meliorism, that is, the promotion of positive change in the human condition. In both cases it is the intermediary nature of their perspective that allows them to argue the meliorist case. For James, meliorism is dealt with in a religious context in the dispute between rationalist and empiricist religion. Meliorism emerges between the two sides and ‘treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a possibility the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become’. In this sense belief in the possibility of salvation by the will of God has a certain pragmatic truth in so far as it can be useful in creating the conditions for salvation. The claim to the absolute Truth is irrelevant to James, it is the useful social consequences of this belief that are true in any meaningful sense.
Like James, Carr is also concerned with salvation, albeit in Carr’s case the salvation is restricted to the political. The Twenty Years’ Crisis and Conditions of Peace are predicated on human nature rejecting the sterility of realpolitik and instead creating targets according to pragmatic realist logic – the ‘conception of politics as an infinite process’ of power seeking, according to Carr, ‘seems in the long run uncongenial or incomprehensible to the human mind’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 85). It is the belief in something ‘more’ than political cynicism that, in a manner similar to James’ accommodation of belief in God, creates the possibility of improvement in human affairs, as it is a ‘basic fact about human nature that human beings do in the long run reject the doctrine that might makes right’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 130). It is this commitment to an accommodation of political analysis and desire for ethical improvement that undergirds the pragmatic ethics of Carr’s Realism.
Pragmatic Realist ethics from The Twenty Years’ Crisis to Conditions of Peace
From a Jamesian perspective, Carr’s commitment to peaceful change in The Twenty Years’ Crisis is eminently pragmatic in the radical empirical sense because Carr is not content to merely ‘understand backwards’ but also professes to ‘think forwards’ by getting to grips with the transitions that affect our ‘moving life’ (James Reference James1976a, 121). Carr’s ethics are based not on some unchanging principle or categorical imperative but rather a working hypothesis imbued with a pragmatic sense of usefulness: ‘So long as statesmen, and others who influence the conduct of international affairs, agree in thinking that the state has duties, and allow this view to guide their action, the hypothesis remains effective’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 139). Writing in 1939, after the collapse of a world predicated upon a Benthamite weltanschauung and which was lurching into a second cataclysm in 20 years, Carr testified to the ineffectiveness of the Utopianism of the interwar period, but also the corrosiveness of Realpolitik. Carr’s historical verdict on the period was that things could not stay the same yet also could not persist mired in the cynicism of the Nazis, Soviets, and Fascists. Carr concludes The Twenty Years’ Crisis with a mental experiment – how to preserve as much of the old order as possible, while still allowing change to occur in a system that had been established on a punitive, as opposed to pragmatic basis. For Carr the ethical question reduced to a simple, stark choice – peace or war? Commenced in 1937, The Twenty Years’ Crisis was conceived and executed as the machines of war and the politics of appeasement ran in tandem. As a witness of the First World War, Carr decided on peaceful change as a practical choice and as a step towards a more pragmatic future order. Carr’s method throughout is pragmatist in that ‘it begins its reflection (abduction) with (political) action as the formal object instead of with pre-conceived ontological notions’ (Kratochwil Reference Kratochwil2007, 62).
Carr’s ethics of growth
The action with which Carr is concerned in The Twenty Years’ Crisis is the political life of Europe in the period 1919–39. Carr’s particular interest is to engage with the failure of the peace settlement and to propose an alternative politics based on peaceful change. In the broadest sense, Carr’s various IR projects reflect what David Owen identifies as pragmatism’s ethic of growth, which is not to specify any given Utopian ideal, but rather ‘takes growth as the end itself’ (Owen Reference Owen2002, 669). Peaceful change for Carr is not defined by any Utopian telos, it is something that emerges and develops as an alternative to war and the failed attempts to institutionalize peace. Carr structures his argument for peaceful change in a particularly Jamesian manner. Carr’s first move is to expose Article 19 of the Covenant of the League of Nations as ‘a lonely monument to the pathetic fallacy that international grievances will be recognized as just and voluntarily remedied on the strength of “advice” unanimously tendered by a body representative of world public opinion’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 193). From Realist and pragmatic perspectives the ideas that underpinned the Covenant failed because they did not acknowledge the empirical facts of power that were in operation in international politics, and no change that is divorced from reality can hope to be achieved. Peaceful change is an exercise in negotiating the difference between power and morality, steering a middle course between the naïve idealism of Utopianism and the morally untrammelled exercise of power. The Utopian project of the League of Nations required legislative and juridical instruments rooted in an international equivalent of a state, which is a ‘discouraging conclusion’ for Carr because no such state is ever likely to materialize and hence the analogy on which the League was founded was bound to fail.
A better analogy for Carr is found in the relationship between labour and capital.Footnote 11 The analogy is better for Carr because industrial relations, like international politics, were conducted in a conflictual manner between ‘haves’ (owners) and ‘have nots’ (workers). After decades of struggle, in which the use of strikes and the threat of force were commonplace, ‘[t]his process eventually produced on both sides a willingness to submit disputes to various forms of conciliation and arbitration, and ended by creating something like a regular system of “peaceful change”’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 195). The conflict produces a bargaining process, in which power, ‘used, threatened or silently held in reserve, is an essential factor’. Pragmatically, power must be part of the equation, and it is only the power of the complainant that could or would serve as the agent for changing the dynamics of the relationship. The same holds true for Carr of the nature of international politics: the status quo powers have a vested interest in resisting change and the revisionist powers have an interest in changing the existing distribution of power. Viewed from the perspective of utility, such a mechanical interpretation of the operation of peaceful change can be harsh on those without power, for example, Carr isolates the treatment of the Bulgarians at the Congress of Berlin, and the infamous example of ‘Czecho-Slovakia’ at Munich in 1938 – yet this kind of peaceful change, according to Carr, ‘performs a function whose utility it would be hypocritical to deny’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 199). Carr then sees the play of power in International Relations in ‘processual’ terms of the attained and the attainable, not in terms of the real and the ideal (Owen Reference Owen2002, 670). With regard to the real/ideal Carr’s task in The Twenty Years’ Crisis can also be interpreted by way of James’ understanding of the task of the moral philosopher, facing the ‘pinch between the ideal and the actual’, which James argues is a ‘tragic situation’ of dealing with a ‘speculative conundrum’ in advance of knowing all the consequences of a decision (James 1891, 344).
For all that justice and morality are influenced by power and self-interest, however, Carr argues that ‘the morality of the transaction’ must also be factored into considerations of peaceful change. An orderly procedure of peaceful change is dependent, according to Carr, ‘on that uneasy compromise between power and morality’, that might be termed a pragmatic Realist ethics of adjustment. Such an ethic of adjustment requires as its foundation, ‘a certain measure of common feeling’ between international actors, ‘as to what is just and reasonable in their mutual relations, a spirit of give-and-take and even of potential self-sacrifice, so that a basis, however imperfect, exists for discussing demands of justice recognized by both’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 200). Consistent with James’ requirement that the pragmatist engage with the concrete, Carr examines two cases wherein the appeal for change was made – successfully, in the case of the Irish independence movement and unsuccessfully in the case of German calls for redress of the Versailles Treaty. Although the Irish case represented only a partial success (‘it would have been a true example of peaceful change achieved’ if it had occurred in 1916 and not 1921) it attained a positive result because it was based on power and force, but also ‘had its necessary moral foundation in the acceptance of a common standard of what was just and reasonable in mutual relations between the two countries, and the readiness of both … to make sacrifices in the interest of conciliation’. In contrast, the relations between the status quo powers of Great Britain and France and a revisionist Germany, were marked by Germany’s initial lack of power to effect change. The widespread acceptance of the legitimacy of German grievances (particularly in Britain) meant that when the Nazis overturned Versailles restrictions, the status quo powers did not intervene with any strength. This acceptance, however, was coupled with ‘official censures and remonstrances which inevitably created the impression that the remonstrating Powers acquiesced merely because they were unable or unwilling to make the effort to resist’, which in turn emboldened the Nazis who pushed for more in the face of what they perceived to be weakness and moral cant, destroying the ‘limited stock of common feeling’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 201). One thing is certain for Carr, ‘the defence of the status quo is not a policy which can be lastingly successful. It will end in war as surely as rigid conservatism will end in revolution’, which is why establishing ‘methods of peaceful change is therefore the fundamental problem of international morality and of international politics’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 201–02). From a Jamesian perspective, Carr’s advocacy of appeasement is understandable as it is an attempt at finding a ‘more inclusive order’ designed to realize the ideals of the satiated and revisionist powers, as James had argued many years earlier than Carr, to ‘satisfy the alien demands, – that and that only is the path of peace’ (James 1891, 346).
Appeasement remains the most controversial aspect of Carr’s ethics for contemporary readers who, with the benefit of hindsight can argue that he ‘had erred in the most profound way’ by assuming that the German problem was tractable and Hitler appeaseable (Conquest 1999, 32). As Haslam (Reference Haslam1999, 59) argues, however, the policy of appeasement was ‘common to most liberals’ and progressive thinkers at the time. Carr may have been particularly committed to the cause, but he was by no means unusual in professing it.Footnote 12 From the evidence of his texts during the 1930s and later reflections on his thinking at the time, Carr’s attitude to Hitler and Germany was ambivalent in that he recognized that something important was occurring in Germany and that Hitler was one of the most significant figures of the age, but the Soviet Union under Stalin was the real concern in contemporary international politics. In his autobiographical sketch to Tamara Deutscher Carr confesses that his ‘preoccupation with the Russian horrors’ led him to neglect German affairs. Having visited both Germany and Russia in the 1930s, he had come to the conclusion that Nazism ‘like Fascism in Italy, was deplorable, but somehow incidental and peripheral’ compared with Stalin’s purges. A further element in his attitude towards Germany was what he considered to be the injustice of Versailles, Hitler’s ‘revolt’ against it ‘seemed to mask or excuse other things’. In the article, ‘A Nationalist Abroad’, Carr (quoted in Haslam, Reference Haslam1999, 79) expresses the opinion that the Nazi regime’s methods ‘invite many comparisons’ with the ‘methods of the Tudor sovereigns, when they were making the English nation’. It was only after the occupation of Austria that Carr realized the full extent of the threat posed by Hitler – ‘No doubt’ he admitted to Deutscher, ‘I was very blind’. (2000, xviii – xix).
There is no doubt that, as Paul Rich (Reference Rich2000, 204) claims, ‘it was morally dubious to try and buy off an aggressive power by sacrificing smaller powers to whom there was a pledge to protect’. Tim Dunne also points to a specific problem with the theory of appeasement by asking ‘how many borders should Hitler have been allowed to change before the element of force was required to counteract the ethical accommodation of Germany’s revisionist demands?’ The problem for Dunne (Reference Dunne2000, 227), is that ‘Carr does not explain how it is possible to have both elements’ of the equation, that is, the ability to judge when to conciliate and when to use force. Perhaps at a certain level Carr could not rid himself of the idea that statesmen were at bottom rational in their behaviour and this accounts for his failure to deal with a figure like Hitler who did not fit this presupposition.
Although his preferred policy for peaceful change ended in failure in 1939, there were sound political and ethical reasons for his endorsement of the policy that emerged from his innate pragmatism. Peter Wilson (2000, 185) correctly identifies Carr’s preference for give-and-take as a ‘necessary condition of all stable and orderly social life’, which might have been more successful if it had been applied in the 1920s.Footnote 13 For Charles Jones (Reference Jones1998, 37), it is the second aspect of pragmatist ethical theory that is missing in Carr’s critics’ analysis of his position, that is, the importance of power. A ‘strategically overextended’ Britain simply ‘could not afford to risk uniting the revisionist powers by resolute and consistent resistance to their demands’. Without the power to actually confront both Germany and Italy (from Carr’s point of view a much more important threat to British interests due to its designs on Mediterranean hegemony) Britain would be forced to bluff, and in such a scenario ‘[e]very time the British bluff was called, credibility and prestige were diminished and the revisionist powers alienated to no good purpose’. Appeasement, in Jones’s (Reference Jones1998, 43) reading of Carr was ‘calculated to placate a potential enemy while lengthening the odds on any grand coalition of dissatisfied powers’. In Carr’s calculation, the sacrifice of the smaller powers was for the greater good of the continent as a whole and Britain in particular. Appeasement may have failed (any policy may have failed in the face of Hitler’s desire for war), but as Richard Overy (Reference Overy1999) has argued, it did at least buy time sufficient for Britain to rearm to an extent where fighting Germany became a realistic option.
Moral Equivalent of War and Conditions of Peace: the ethics of transformation
In the last section of The Twenty Years’ Crisis, Carr presents intriguing speculations about the future of international society but does not move beyond very general outlines. Carr predicts major transformations in both the nature and scope of sovereignty, and also raises the possibility of a de facto post-state international society but concedes that ‘prolonged investigation would be necessary to throw light on the conditions which govern the size of political and economic units’. Carr concludes The Twenty Years’ Crisis with a plea for economic reconstruction and the frank ‘acceptance of the subordination of economic advantage to social ends’. Carr recognizes that this is a Utopian idea, but claims that ‘it stands more directly in the line of recent advance than visions of a world federation or blueprints of a more perfect League of Nations’ (Carr Reference Carr2001, 209).
Carr turns to the task of examining the post-war political system in the remarkable, and comparatively neglected, Conditions of Peace.Footnote 14 Published in the midst of WW2, it is a theoretical and speculative investigation into the logics, dynamics and processes of European integration. It also exhibits a number of continuities with The Twenty Years’ Crisis, not simply in terms of its subject matter but also in relation to the pragmatism that animates its inquiry. The specific failure of peaceful change in appeasing Hitler did not change Carr’s commitment to the idea of a realistic peace as the purpose of IR theory. Carr’s embrace of a pragmatist attitude enabled him to recognize that ‘as we cannot flee from interacting with our environment and as the world keeps interfering with our beliefs, we have to readjust’ and engage with the new realities presented by the profound transformations effected by the war (Hellman Reference Hellman2009b, 639). As James argued in ‘Humanism and Truth Once More’, all beliefs about truth are contingent and subject to change in the observer’s environment (James Reference James1976b, 130). Conditions of Peace can be seen then in pragmatic terms of producing coping strategies in moments of extreme stress and game changing alteration (Puchala Reference Puchala1994, 14). Reference to James is made only once in Conditions of Peace, wherein Carr seeks to identify (via a reference to Staley) the work of reconstruction overseen by his European Reconstruction and Public Works Corporation with James’ argument that a peaceful substitute must be found for war in his essay ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 253). ‘International public works’, argues Carr (Reference Carr1942, 252) in Jamesian fashion, ‘have in the past few years entered the public consciousness as something calculated not merely to remedy unemployment but to promote practical international cooperation. Informative parallels may be drawn between Carr and James’ projects that reveal the second phase of Carr’s development as a pragmatic ethical thinker working at the systemic level of international politics. If The Twenty Years’ Crisis was concerned with an ethics of adjustment and management of the desiderata of conflicting powers, Conditions of Peace is concerned with the transformation of international relations and developing an ethics designed to deal with the tumult of the new. In the midst of the greatest conflict in human history, Carr asks what Patrick Thaddeus Jackson (Reference Jackson2009, 659) recognizes as a typically pragmatist question – ‘how is peace produced in this situation?’ and goes further by asking ‘how might peace be maintained in this situation?’
Contextually, both ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’ and Conditions of Peace were written during conflicts, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 and WW2 respectively. In both cases, the authors begin with a consideration of the social importance of war in international relations and human existence. For James, ‘military feelings’ are ingrained on the human mind and warfare tied to evolution in which the more martial tribes were the winners in the process of natural selection (James Reference James1982a, 162–63).Footnote 15 Civilization itself has its root in war: ‘Our actual civilization, good and bad alike, has had past wars for its determining condition … The blessings we actually enjoy, such as they are, have grown up in the shadow of the wars of antiquity’ (James Reference James1982b, 121). The irrationality of war is part and parcel of its attraction, its horror a part of its fascination – neither irrationality nor horror act as a deterrent. War is the ‘gory nurse’ that led to social cohesion, and the pugnacity of our ancestors cannot be removed from our biological inheritance. Only ‘reflective criticism’ serves to curb the warlike instincts in a discourse between the war party and the peace party. The ‘war party’ argues in favour of the invigorating effects and rejuvenation of nations that military life provides, inculcating the virtues of hardiness. Opposed to the war party are the pacifists, who, James argues, have consistently failed to grasp the aesthetic and ethical power of the war party’s position (James Reference James1982a, 166). Pacifism is unsuccessful, according to James, because it is ‘too weak and tame … mawkish and dishwatery’ to those of a military bent, for whom belonging to such a society would incur nothing but shame (James Reference James1982a, 168–69).
The key to a successful peace movement is to provide a substitute for ‘the disciplinary function of war’ – to incorporate the social benefits of the military life into a society that has peace as its end. The answer lies in developing a ‘preventive medicine’ which acknowledges the warlike elements of human nature, but which seeks to circumvent them (James Reference James1982b, 122). James expresses his own alternative to the militarist doctrine as the foundation of a ‘socialistic equilibrium’.
‘I devoutly believe in the ultimate reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of a socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war-function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction buys an intellectual refinement of the sciences of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity’ (James Reference James1982a, 170).
James’ solution, as outlined in the earlier ‘Remarks at the Peace Banquet’, depends on recognizing both the possibility and the limits of reason developing an alternative to war. The problem is ultimately one of the incommensurability of reason and political reality: ‘Reason assumes to settle things by weighing them against one another without prejudice, partiality or excitement; but what affairs in the concrete are settled by is and always will be just prejudices, partiality and excitements’. For James, this leaves humanity ‘in a sort of forlorn-hope situation, like a small sand-bank in the midst of a hungry sea ready to wash it out of existence’, yet if the conditions are favourable, the sand bank of reason will grow (James, Reference James1982b, 120).
In ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’, establishing a sand bank of reason to serve as an alternative to war involves the creation of a civic order – ‘the state pacifically organised’, which incorporates some aspects of military discipline. The ‘martial virtues’ of ‘intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command’, should, according to James, ‘remain the rock upon which states are built’. Put to civilian use, these military virtues could serve as the foundation for an ethics of civic honour by replicating the solidarity and cooperation of military life into civilian life. In ‘Remarks at the Peace Banquet’, James adds another dimension of social evolution away from the ‘war-function’:
Let the soldiers dream of killing … But organize in every conceivable way the practical machinery for making each successive chance of war abortive … Seize every pretext, however small, for arbitration methods, and multiply the precedents; foster rival excitements and invent new outlets for heroic energy; and from one generation to another, the chances are that irritations will grow less acute and states of strain less dangerous among nations (James Reference James1982b, 123).
The gradual displacement of a militarist ethic by a ‘stable system of morals of civic honour’, based upon the achievement of ‘constructive interests’ can serve as an alternative to the war function as a source of meaning and social cohesion. As to the prospects of success for this transformation of international ethics, James maintains that it is ‘an infinitely remote utopia just now’, but also argues that its success is merely a question of time and effective opinion forming, a process in which James, like Carr, allows an important role for propaganda.
E.H. Carr – escaping the father of all things
Carr’s claim that there is ‘so much justification’ for the Heraclitean aphorism, ‘war is the father of all things’ demonstrates that, like James, he affords to war a central role in international society. The parallels with James are further evidenced by Carr’s arguments about the powerful social cohesion and impetus that war provides to international society. For Carr, war is ‘at the present time the most purposeful of our social institutions’ in order to eliminate war, and to provide a workable alternative, it is necessary to understand ‘the essential social function which it performs’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 113). War exhibits a distinct evolution from wars of plunder to the total wars of the twentieth century. Throughout its evolution wars have had the economic effect of providing and distributing wealth, through direct and indirect means, across the populations of states. War is also ‘the most powerful known instrument of social solidarity’ as it provides ‘meaning and purpose widely felt to be lacking in modern life’. Any alternative to war, therefore, must provide the same elements to the same degree (Carr Reference Carr1942, 113–15). Like James, Carr argues, ‘[w]e cannot escape from war until we have found some other moral purpose powerful enough to generate self-sacrifice on the scale requisite to enable civilisation to survive’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 116). If James proposed a state pacifically organized, Carr went one step further and proposed an international system designed with pacific organization at its core. Constructing a new Europe would ‘give Europeans a moral purpose that they had been lacking during the years of the Great Depression and which they had re-found in a perverted way, during wartime’ (Gilbert Reference Gilbert2009, 40).
Like James, Carr recognizes the importance of the psychological and moral aspects of war, but takes pain to put them in an economic context:
The immediate impulses which lead to war and other social disorders may, as has often been said, be psychological and moral; envy, fear, injured pride, thwarted ambition. But there is ample evidence to show that these impulses flourish in a soil of economic maladjustment … the building of a new economic order is the most urgent task which confronts us after the war (Carr Reference Carr1942, 119–20).
Conditions of Peace is predicated upon the impossibility of a return to the status quo ante of 1939. Carr is concerned with nothing less than engaging with ‘the meta-game of world politics, that is, to engage in actively changing the constitutive rules of the game’. As such, Conditions of Peace represents an early pragmatist attempt to theorize ‘beyond Westphalia’ (Albert and Kopp-Malek Reference Albert and Kopp-Malek2002, 453). Both Carr and James see the future of international ethics as being a process of evolution. James’ evolution is a steady process whereby the sandbanks of reason gradually grow, ‘bit by bit it will get dyked and breakwatered’ (James Reference James1982b, 121). In contrast, Carr’s evolution is more along the punctuated equilibrium model, with periodic crises, in particular revolutions and wars, having transformational effects. In this light, WW2 was merely the unwitting culmination of a revolt against nineteenth-century liberal democracy that begins with Marx and continues through Lenin and on to the totalitarian regimes of Nazism, Fascism and Stalinism. The moral crisis of the age for Carr, was ‘the breakdown of the system of ethics which lay at the root of liberal democracy, of national self-determination, and of laissez-faire economics’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 102). The challenge of the revolution in ethical life could, according to Carr ‘only be met by re-defining and reinterpreting democracy in a new and revolutionary sense. The present crisis of democracy is the need for this re-definition’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 12). Carr is a progressive theorist because he embraces the opportunity that crisis provides to ‘formulate new questions that could not even be asked previously’, and recognizes that ‘in times of revolutionary change the bounds of sense are being redrawn’ (Kratochwil Reference Kratochwil2009, 22). Carr was, as Scheuerman (Reference Scheuerman2011, 58) recognizes, responding to a situation in which, ‘the classical market could no longer function properly, and the needs of neither workers nor consumers were properly served’. In this context of a failed classical liberal capitalism, Carr sees a centrally planned Europe-wide system as providing an effective alternative to economic nationalism, protectionism and other counter-productive measures that had demonstrated their disastrous weaknesses in the post-1929 era.
Carr and James then project a future in which the war society is ultimately replaced by a ‘socialistic equilibrium’. Carr takes this idea rather further than James’ somewhat vague concepts of national service inculcating values of hard work and solidarity and elite led initiatives to prevent war. Curiously, Carr expresses this in religious terms most commonly as ‘a new faith’ or ‘creed’ to replace the previous ideology of Benthamite liberal utilitarianism. Of the eight aspects of the agenda for ethical reform that Carr identifies as tenets of the new faith, six relate primarily to domestic politics. The main thrust of Carr’s position is the economic emancipation of the working classes, with society being reoriented in order to serve the interests of the ‘small man’ disenfranchised by organized capital but also by the power of organized labour. Employment, equality and a communitarian obligation to preserve social cohesion typify Carr’s domestic ethical agenda. The seventh and eighth aspects of the new faith relate more directly to the international arena. The seventh aspect stresses the revolutionary effect of the war on the very fabric of international society. The sanctity of territorial jurisdiction and national distinctions had been eroded by the war, which also introduced ‘new forms of cooperation between those engaged together in it’ – new forms that in turn, according to Carr, ‘laid foundations on which the new faith can build’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 123). The eighth aspect of the new faith is a reconsideration of the relationship between authority and liberty, with Carr arguing the necessity to ‘reinterpret the concepts of liberty and authority in the social and economic sphere’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 123). Implementing the new faith will in effect change the fabric of international society and the nature of ethical possibility, replacing the patchwork of states with ‘a pluralistic political order in which individuals would determine themselves into different groups for different purposes. In such an order the meaning of territorial boundaries would be transformed’ (Wilson Reference Wilson1996, 44). Carr’s project promotes the pluralization of loyalty and transcending of parochial identifications, anticipating by 60 years Festenstein’s argument regarding pragmatism’s capacity to go beyond exclusive identification with the nation-state (Festenstein Reference Festenstein2002, 565).
The cathedral of the new faith: integration and ‘the New Europe’
One of the major consequences of WW2 is that it demonstrated ‘the final proof of the bankruptcy of the political, economic and moral system which did duty in the prosperous days of the nineteenth century’. The war also had the effect in the English speaking world of reviving, ‘the national will, increased the sense of cohesion and mutual obligation, bred a salutary realisation of the gravity of the crisis, and at the same time created the hope and the opportunity of a new ordering of human affairs’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 124). In short, WW2 created a tabula rasa, which, despite there being no guarantee that this common solidarity would outlast the needs of wartime, at least created the possibility of an ethical transformation of political life (Linklater Reference Linklater1997, 321). Carr’s commitment to an ethics led resolution of the post-war future is telling: ‘The crisis cannot be explained – and much less solved – in constitutional, or even in economic, terms. The fundamental issue is moral’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 125).
The tabula rasa approach allowed Carr to deploy the full extent of his ethical theory in Conditions of Peace without being troubled as he was in The Twenty Years’ Crisis with preserving as much as possible the pre-existing power of the satisfied states. From a perspective rooted in British foreign policy, Carr argues that Britain after the war would not be able to adopt a policy of isolation, or of allying exclusively with the English speaking powers, for example, the United States, simply because the very fabric of international society and the logic that accounted for the running of that society, the balance of power, had ‘hopelessly broken down’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 190). Pragmatically, Britain had no choice but to take a leading role in the reconstruction, rehabilitation, and investment of resources in post-war Europe. The conservative recourse to the old politics of Britain holding the balance of power against the strongest power in Europe had been demonstrably invalidated by the rise to pre-eminence of Germany – neither an alliance with the French nor any combination of lesser powers could serve to counter German power, with the result being that ‘Great Britain must courageously face the fact that the policy of the balance of power was irretrievably bankrupt’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 199).
The problem of the new international society remained that of the old – what to do with Germany? Carr argues that there are only two real options. The first option is that the victors in the war massacre 50,000,000 Germans, an option ‘that even the strongest advocates of the policy of weakening Germany shrink from’ despite it being ‘the only method which would make their policy really effective’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 218). The other option would be to resolve the German dilemma ‘not by destroying Germany or by diminishing her, but by making her a partner in a larger unit in which Great Britain will also have her place. Germany’s belated nationalism can be overcome only by making internationalism worth her while’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 224–25).
The format of such an internationalism according to Carr, meant that ‘[s]ome kind of European economic unit, whatever its precise scope and dimensions, has become imperative’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 233). The nature of this unit is important to grasp. Carr is not concerned with the erection of legal edifices and structures of international society – this he argues was the error of the 1919 peace settlement, which mistook its de jure rules for a de facto peace system (Wilson Reference Wilson1996, 57). Carr promotes instead a process of gradual reconstruction and rehabilitation: ‘After the present war it will be wise to recognise that peace-making is not an event, but a continuous process which must be pursued in many places, under varying conditions, by many different methods over a prolonged period of time’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 240). The pragmatism of Carr’s project is evident from his belief that this ‘reconstruction must necessarily be slow and gradual. Its course should be guided by practical needs rather than by preconceived theories; and this course should in turn dictate the lines of a political settlement’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 241). It is the process of rehabilitation that should lead to the construction of a new form and logic of international relations, not the form that should lead to the processes. This would be, according to Carr, an evolution from the cooperation of the victorious allies in wartime to their continued cooperation in peacetime:
The economic problems of peace will be substantially different from those of war, and different types of organisation will no doubt be required. But these must be allowed to emerge from existing organisations – just as the conditions of peace must be allowed to emerge from the conditions of war – not by an abrupt switch-over, but by a process of gradual evolution. This evolution will be the task of the reconstruction period, in which we may distinguish three different phases, logically interdependent and certainly to some extent overlapping in time: the phase of relief, the phase of reconstruction and rebuilding, and the phase of economic planning for the future (Carr Reference Carr1942, 246–47).
The European unit that emerges from the process of reconstruction and rehabilitation should follow the Jamesian model of public works designed ‘not merely to remedy unemployment but to promote practical international cooperation as a psychological substitute for war’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 252).
The nucleus of the new faith: the European Planning Authority
As the process of rehabilitation, reconstruction, and reinterpretation of European international society proceeds it will require a central authority, the ‘European Planning Authority’ to deal with issues arising from the day to day problems of reconstruction and this authority ‘should be encouraged to develop into the ultimate authority responsible for vital decisions on “European” economic policies’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 253–54). This agency should take the lead on arranging satisfactory Europe wide solutions to problems exacerbated by the profusion of nation-states in the period 1919–1939 – production and marketing, international trade and international finance. Carr’s raising of obligation to community over individual right reaches its logical conclusion in his argument that the project of international reconstruction and public works ‘will depend on the limits of our readiness to recognise an obligation to people of other countries as well as of our own’. If this sense of obligation is not present, ‘then no financial ingenuity will make any international society work’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 263). The extent to which Carr’s project is devoted to the achievement of a ‘socialistic equilibrium’ is clear from his opposition to laissez-faire economics and free competition, ‘which tend to make the strong stronger and eliminate the weak’. As an alternative, Carr offers a system based on ‘the primary aim … and the sole method of averting future conflicts – the increasing equalisation of standards of living, and a wider distribution of the processes of production, between the more privileged and less privileged countries’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 261). The idea of obligation finds its ultimate expression in the financial self-sacrifice of the economically powerful. In a passage of contemporary relevance to the debt crisis in the EU, Carr claims that, ‘it seems probable that those who occupy the most privileged position within any financial system will be obliged from time to time to make deliberate sacrifices in order to make the system work; and these liabilities, like money spent on relief, must be regarded either as the discharge of a moral obligation or an insurance premium for the maintenance of civilisation’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 264).
Only after the ‘provisional’ bodies that develop organically through the period of transition from war to reconstruction have in effect transformed the logic of international society from one based on conflicting parties within a balance of power to one in which parties cooperate amicably within a pragmatic framework should thought be given to developing a new formal political and economic order (Carr Reference Carr1942, 270–71). 1919 serves as a warning because the attempt to create an order in imitation of the legal apparatus of the state was ‘a policy of self-contradiction and self-frustration’, that merely accelerated the centrifugal forces that ultimately ripped Europe apart. ‘The best hope’, according to Carr, ‘lies in the reversal of this process. Instead of basing our settlement on a recognition of the unrestricted right of national self-determination, and then seeking to build up an international system out of independent national units, we must begin by creating the framework of an international order and then, as a necessary corollary, encourage national independence to develop and maintain itself within the limitations of that framework … Our task must be to plan from the first in terms of the wider framework’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 272). This framework, and the processes that give rise to it, should be pragmatic in nature, ‘determined not theoretically according to some a priori conception of league, alliance or federation, but empirically as the outcome and expression of a practical working arrangement’ (Carr Reference Carr1942, 273). The stewardship of this process and framework is vital and should be informed by both the willingness to use coercive power when and where necessary to force recalcitrant parties into line in the interests of the whole, but also, and more vitally, those who have the power should exercise this power according to the moral obligations which alone make their dominance tolerable.
Adding a pragmatist dimension to the recovery of Realist ethics
Having worked through the nature and development of pragmatic Realist ethics in The Twenty Years’ Crisis and Conditions of Peace, the aim of the final section of this article is to explore how this reinterpretation of E.H. Carr’s political–ethical approach advances contemporary IR theory by means of a critical contrast with the two most prominent attempts to devise a Realist ethics of IR – Richard Ned Lebow’s ‘tragic vision’ and Michael C. Williams ‘wilful’ Realism. The fundamental difference between the tragic or wilful ethics of classical Realism, and in particular Morgenthau, as explored by Lebow and Williams, and the pragmatic ethics of Carr relates to the question of change. As Lebow argues, ‘classical’ Realism is predicated on hybrid orders (2003, 33) of old and new, with the Realist seeking to preserve as much as possible of the old regime within the context of the new. Carr’s first, and arguably least successful phase, in which he advocated peaceful change through appeasement of Nazi Germany, could be understood in these terms. It is Carr’s second, more radical phase, in which he advocates the total revolutionization of both European space and politics, which represents a decisive shift away from the politics and ethics of preservation and towards an ethic of growth and transformation, while still rooted in the power dynamics of the envisaged post-war world. These contrasting ethical goals – limited change versus total transformation – are symptomatic of two very different ethical positions. Lebow correctly identifies Morgenthau as a thinker imbued with the ‘tragic sense’ of life (2003, 49), a sensibility that allowed him to tap into the deep philosophical wells of Western thought extending back to the era of Thucydides. The primary orientation of the tragic sensibility is to seek wisdom by means of looking backwards, seeking illumination from history and the insights of past philosophical giants. Lebow, who draws compelling parallels between Thucydides, Clausewitz, and Morgenthau’s attempts to engage with the problems created by the modernizations of their respective eras, presents their efforts as cyclically akin.Footnote 16 In contrast to the shared tragic sense of Morgenthau, Clausewitz, and Thucydides, Carr presents a pragmatist vision predicated not on tragedy, but reformation.Footnote 17 Crisis is not simply tragedy for Carr, but rather also an opportunity – war is the father of all things, including alternatives to war itself. Although opposed to teleological readings, his philosophy of history is future oriented and progressive – his motto being that although history might be devoid of a rational design, ‘yet it moves’. This opens entirely different ethical vistas to those of the tragic Realists, whose efforts may be seen in terms of damage limitation as opposed to systemic amelioration.
At base, the difference between tragic Realist and pragmatic Realist approaches is anthropological. Morgenthau bases his theory on human lack – human beings are defined by what they cannot do, that is, bridge the gap between their political natures and ethical ideals. By contrast, for Carr, ethics is predicated on human capabilities. For Morgenthau, Tragic Man, the antithesis of Scientific Man, is a hero who confronts his own nature, and that of humanity in general, by acknowledging the ubiquity of evil and the moral requirement to choose the lesser evil.Footnote 18 In pragmatic Realist ethics, the tragic is largely absent. To choose an ethical reference point for Carr one would not look to a tragic hero such as Pericles or Oedipus, but rather the figure of Odysseus – the problem solving, instrumental pragmatist. Where Morgenthau thinks in terms of the paradox of human existence in terms of the tragic gap between what he is and what he ought to be, Carr asks how can the conditions be created in which this gap may be narrowed via a synthesis of is and ought, albeit only so far as the prevailing context allows. Ultimately, this leads in two very different directions: a hope ‘that state sovereignty would be superseded by some kind of supranational authority, ultimately on a global basis’ (Lebow 2003, 245) which remained vague (‘He never elaborated any institutional framework or seriously addressed the problem of transformation’ Lebow 2003, 245) and a much more detailed attempt by Carr to advocate a new kind of politics and ethics based on institutional and systemic reform.
The manifest division in Realism between the tragic and the pragmatic visions leads to very different ethical orientations. The profound meditation on the nature of the self that lies at the heart of Morgenthau’s ethics leads to an ethos of self-restraint (Lebow 2003, 284), in which the curbing of the animus dominandi and the identification of moderation and prudence are identified as the cardinal political–ethical virtues: only when international society proceeds on such grounds is the approximation of justice possible. In contrast, Carr’s ethics are Other focused and more relational in nature. In both phases of his career, Carr’s ethics are predicated above all on self-sacrifice in the interest of the wider community, whose preservation or transformation is in the ultimate interests of the sacrificing agent. The tragic vision enables reflection on the nature of relationships, while the pragmatic vision is based on the transformation of relationships, whether it is the relationship between the status quo powers and Germany in the 1930s, or that facing the powers of Europe and the rest of the world after the tabula rasa created by WW2. Where Morgenthau was concerned with knowing the limits of relationships, Carr advocated the redefinition of the limits themselves.
Limits and immanence: wilful Realism and pragmatic Realism
The issue of limits also separates Carr’s pragmatist version of Realism from the ‘wilful’ Realism espoused by Michael C. Williams (2005). For Williams, Realism’s most powerful insights, epistemological and ontological, are connected to the limits of human knowledge and political organization. Epistemologically, ‘wilful’ Realism professes a ‘strong advocacy of the need for a politics both informed and suitably chastened by an understanding of the limits of knowledge’ (Williams 2005, 6). These limits are attributable to ‘the essential opacity of both the self and the world’, with the basis of a Weberian ethic of responsibility found in the recognition of the need ‘to be limited by one’s responsibility to the sense of limits’ (Williams 2005, 176). From this point, Williams goes on to develop a politics of limits that ‘recognises the destructive and productive dimensions of politics, and that maximises its positive possibilities while minimising its destructive potential’ (2005, 7).
Williams’ key move is to stress that as a result of its opacity, politics is an activity without any objective foundation, rather it should be reconceptualized as the product of will, with Hobbes, Rousseau, and Morgenthau identified as exemplars of wilful Realism because of their ‘unflinching attempts to construct a viable, principled understanding of modern politics, and to use this understanding to avoid its perils and achieve its promise’ (Williams 2005, 7). The perils to be avoided, at least in the era of Morgenthau, lie in the shape of a decadent liberalism that insists on rationalist foundations for politics and that does not understand the political as an activity of will, and at the opposite end of the spectrum, the mythological nationalism of Carl Schmitt (2005, 185). It is important to recognize, however, that Williams’ (2005, 10) reading of Morgenthau and wilful Realism more generally is not one that is opposed to liberalism. Williams stresses that Realism is itself a form of liberalism distinct from the decadent rationalist liberalism attacked by Morgenthau in Scientific Man Versus Power Politics. According to Williams (2005, 190), Morgenthau ‘seeks to foster a wilfully liberal commitment to discipline, opacity, and plurality’. The separation and balancing of powers and interests typical of a liberal order is not a mechanistic outgrowth of objectively valid, mechanistic laws for Morgenthau, they must be understood instead as the products of a ‘principled strategy’ instead (Williams 2005, 123). For Williams, recognizing that the benefits of liberal society are due to will and power ‘must be taken seriously and worked with if one is to create a viable liberal order’ (Williams 2005, 130). The intention is ‘not to destroy the liberal political order as a whole, but to construct mechanisms for its defence (Williams 2005, 187). In a manner similar to that of Lebow, for Williams, the ethical actor (or perhaps more accurately, paragon) responsible for maintaining this newly reconfigured liberal order is ‘the heroically responsible individual’ who despite his/her disenchantment due to the exposure of the foundationless nature of liberalism, nonetheless ‘overcomes the desire for such foundations, who creates political order as an act of will, and yet who does so within the limits prescribed by an ethic of responsibility’ (Williams 2005, 195). Williams presents ‘wilful Realism’ then as a means to reinscribe liberal politics in a post-rational, post-structural age.
In sharp contrast to Williams’ (2005, 144) restatement of liberalism through Realism, Carr offers a much more radical vision of post-liberal politics and ethics. The onus here is not on being as faithful as possible to the Enlightenment project, but rather on decisively and definitively moving away from it. Carr (Reference Carr1980, 182) applauded Mannheim’s tearing of ‘the gaudy and long tattered garments of the Enlightenment’. Carr’s orientation is not towards the past but rather the future. Liberalism for Carr is nothing more than ideology, a justification and rationalization of the power exercised and institutionalized by the great states and the classes that control them in their own interests. World and domestic order are not best served by the heroic individual investing his will in order to preserve on new epistemic grounds the liberal ontology, instead Carr offers a vision rooted in the pragmatic solution to the problems of sovereignty, war, economic coordination, and reconstruction. Carr’s pragmatism allows him the opportunity to create a more radical alternative than that offered under the rubric of wilful Realism. As a pragmatist Realist, Carr – particularly in Conditions of Peace – is concerned with identifying the processual logic of transformation –asking what is becoming, as opposed to asking how might we preserve what is or what has been. In this sense, the pragmatic Realist’s task is not defined by limits but by going beyond limits. The preservation of liberalism in this scenario is irrelevant to the major concern, which is to create a politics both internationally and domestically according to the immanent logic of political evolution, an evolution for Carr that pointed away from liberalism’s primary concerns. In Carr’s pragmatic scenario the question of foundations does not arise – the key concern is with the processes of transformation in accordance with the principle ‘what works?’ which is an entirely different point of origin for a political ethics than ‘what ought I do according to liberal principles (whether I consider them to be foundational or not)?’
Conclusion
Neither Realist approach to ethics is perfect. As Richard Ned Lebow (2003, 230) writes of Carr: ‘Most of us would probably agree that appeasement, as practised by the Western democracies in the 1930s, rewarded Hitler’s appetite for aggression and helped to provoke a long and costly war’. For Scheuerman and others Carr was also too accommodating of Stalin’s excesses, succumbing ‘to the irresponsible political illusion that Soviet Russia, despite its ugly warts, was a fundamentally positive force for historical change’– yet as Scheuerman (Reference Scheuerman2011, 176–77) also professes: ‘it [is] possible to salvage some elements of Carr’s version of progressive Realism without having to reproduce his poor political judgments about the USSR or, for that matter, German appeasement, which he supported in the 1930s’. In the reading presented in this article, what can be salvaged is Carr’s ability to enable us to understand the ‘socio-intellectual space’ (Wilson, Reference Wilson2009) but also Carr’s commitment to develop a pragmatic ethics in the international sphere.
Similarly, although later in life Morgenthau embraced the idea of change, he was at a loss as to the processes by which this change might be achieved, beyond vague gestures towards functionalism, as Lebow recognizes: ‘[n]one of our classical realists said very much about the process by which social orders should be renegotiated. For this we must turn to their contemporaries’, especially, as argued here, to Carr. It is ironic that Morgenthau, who had dismissed Carr’s efforts in the 1940s, with important consequences for how Carr has been read in the discipline, late in his career endorsed positions very similar to Carr (Scheuerman, Reference Scheuerman2011, 81).
Ultimately, the advantage of rediscovering Realist ethics, both tragic and pragmatic, lies in recognizing that they address ethics in very different, but complementary ways. Morgenthau’s concerns play out on a level distinct from the plateau on which Carr operated. Morgenthau’s focus on understanding the human being as a political and ethical agent, led to a deeper and more philosophically compelling analysis than that of Carr, but this approach is not designed to deal with the intricacies of a political system in a state of flux. It is during times of radical disjuncture, when norms, institutions, and processes are at their most contingent and conditional that the tragic vision becomes obscured. At times of crisis, with its focus on the good rather than the just, Carr’s experimental pragmatism may provide a more fruitful source than its detractors, like Morgenthau, have been willing to admit. By the same token, in order to ensure that it retains a level of insight that may help to avoid errors like those of Carr in relation to the Nazis, pragmatic Realism has to take cognisance of the strengths of tragic Realism. Viewing these competing ethical perspectives in this manner fosters the kind of heterogeneity that in Lebow’s (2003, 371) formulation ‘makes choices available … encourages, if not compels, individuals to evaluate their beliefs, values and practices in light of available alternatives’.
The key then is to read tragic and pragmatic Realism as complementary and not oppositional perspectives. There is no requirement to make an either/or choice between tragic and pragmatic Realism and thereby repeat Morgenthau’s closure of the possibilities presented by Carr’s attempts to deal with the ‘the moral instability of late-modern life’ (Nishimura Reference Nishimura2011b, 448).Footnote 19 As Realism emerges from the shadow of Neorealism to reclaim its status as a normative theory of IR it should embrace opportunities for dialogue within the camp of Realism, as well as seeking to engage other theoretical approaches (as exemplified in Scheuerman Reference Scheuerman2011) and thereby add depth and nuance to its understandings of the relationship between politics and ethics. Such internal dialogue has the advantage of opening up new debates and avenues of inquiry that will otherwise remain unexplored to the impoverishment not only of Realism, but of IR’s ethical discourse as a whole.
Acknowledgements
The author thank the anonymous reviewers who commented on the initial submission of this article. The author also wishes to thank the panel, discussant, and audience who discussed an earlier version of this article delivered at the British International Studies Association in Edinburgh, 2012. The author thanks Bob Lacey for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this article and for many discussions relating to pragmatism over the years. The author would also like to acknowledge the generous financial assistance of the AHRC {www.ahrc.ac.uk}, which has supported the wider project on Realist ethics of which this article is a part.
