Memorable Texts

Rereading a book after a gap of 50 years can be a grave disappointment – that was certainly the case for me recently when I was able to download Stan Andreski’s Social Sciences as Sorcery which I had read in the 1970s. What I had remembered as a series of caustic witticisms turned out to be rather belaboured and cheap digs..  

Thanks to researchgate, I am currently rereading with a great deal of pleasure a book which made a huge impact on me in the early 60s - during my Politics and Economics course at the University of Glasgow. The Twenty Years’ Crisis is the first classic of what was to become the prestigious discipline of International Relations. 

It opens with the fascinating story of how any field of study generally starts with a utopian stage - which focuses on the ideal or how things should be, eg the study of gold for example started with alchemy. Only after major disappointments and no little strife do people move on to adopt a more scientific approach. Thus the high hopes with which the 20^th Century started were dashed by the horror of the First World War – paving the way for the efforts in the 20s and 30s to “end all war”. “The Twenty Years’ Crisis” was written not just to challenge such naivety – but to explain it. It was at the printers on the very day in 1939 that the Second World War was declared…

What was it about Carr’s writing – almost 60 years ago – that gave his words such impact then and now? At the time I know I was also reading Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) which also left a lasting impact. It must have been the bluntness with which the doctrine of Realism was spelled out in the two books – against the chimera of utopianism which had been so well taken apart by Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies (1944) 

Another important – if less memorable - book in the course was “Ideology and Utopia” (1954) by Karl Mannheim, an early text on the sociology of knowledge…. 

The texts in the Economics part of the programme offered no such exciting reading - with one noticeable exception – Schumpeter’s powerful Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942)

All in all, it’s perhaps not surprising that I emerged from my studies as a reformist convinced of the benefits of Fabianism….Ironic that my LSE tutor on the political sociology MSc programme I briefly enrolled in should turn out to be Ralph Miliband of Parliamentary Socialism fame (1961) - but even more ironic that his two sons should in the 2000s rise to such heights in the party he despised.

And if you think these titles were dated even for the 1960s, that was all that universities could offer in those days – even if JK Galbraith used the term “The Affluent Society” for his famous 1958 book. SM Wolin’s Politics and Vision – continuity and innovation in western political thought was quite exceptional as a 1960 textbook which was given pride of place in our reading list…

What is History? is based on lectures Carr gave in 1960 and contains a sentence which has stayed with me for half a century….   

facts are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what we catch will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean we choose to fish in and what tackle we chooses to use - these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish we want to catch. By and large, we will get the kind of facts we want

I mused recently about what it was that accounted for the originality of good writing – suggesting that straddling of boundaries (whether national or intellectual) does help give an extra dimension to one’s understanding. Carr was a Brit through and through but straddled the worlds of the civil service (Foreign Office); journalism (Deputy Editor of The Times no less) and academia. It’s increasingly rare to find such career combinations these days – which is very much our loss!!

update; https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2019/05/eh-carr-what-is-history-truth-subjectivity-facts

The crayon drawing which adorns this text is by Grigor Naidenov - one of my favourite Bulgarian artists of the first half of the 20th century, well known for his aquarelle cafe scenes...