E. H. Carr and Alfred Zimmern: utopia, reality, and the twenty years’ crisis

Journal article

This article offers a new approach to the opposition of utopianism and realism in interwar International Relations. It first analyses how E. H. Carr drew on Karl Mannheim to develop that opposition in his 1939 classic, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, and how Alfred Zimmern, one of Carr’s predecessors in the Woodrow Wilson Chair in International Politics at Aberystwyth, responded to Carr and his Mannheimian model in a review in the Spectator as well as in private correspondence with Norman Angell and others. It then offers a close reading of Carr’s allusions to Zimmern in his discussions of power, morality, and international law, and of the passages from Zimmern’s works that Carr was quoting. Analysis of how Carr and Zimmern read each other’s works and of some of Zimmern’s other writings suggests that they were closer in thought than Carr was willing to allow and that it was Carr’s apparent relativism to which Zimmern took objection. This article shows that contemporary readers, including Christian Realists such as J. H. Oldham and William Paton, were alive to these similarities and relates Carr’s misreading of Zimmern to their different attitudes to appeasement and their different disciplinary notions of International Relations.

Authors: Rood, T

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Journal: International Theory
• Volume: 18
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 45-74
• Publication date: 2025-09-18
• Acceptance date: 2025-07-10
• DOI: 10.1017/s1752971925100109
• EISSN: 1752-9727
• ISSN: 1752-9719
• Language: English
• Keywords: E. H. Carr; Alfred Zimmern; utopianism realism in international relations; Christian realism