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 20th
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
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...
