The career of E. H. Carr (1892–1982) provides a singular, and often baffling, illustration of the tensions and paradoxes involved in being one of twentieth-century Britain’s leading intellectuals. Through his little book What Is History?, he probably did as much as any other single figure to shape reflective assumptions in the second half of the century about the nature of historical knowledge, especially among sixth-formers and university students, yet he had not been educated as a historian, nor did he ever hold an appointment as a teacher of the subject. He was the principal British founder of what was to become the dominant “realist” school in the study of international relations, yet in the latter part of his long and productive life he disparaged the discipline and kept his distance from it. Throughout the Cold War, he courted intellectual and political isolation by championing the achievements of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union, yet he was largely untouched by Marxist theory.

There are comparable paradoxes in the manner in which Carr occupied his various roles. Some of his most-noticed writing took the form of leading articles for the acknowledged voice of Establishment opinion in the middle of the century, The Times, of which he was Assistant Editor from 1941 to 1946; yet his contributions were regularly denounced by ruling politicians and administrators alike, who saw them as dangerously subversive of national policy. In the 1960s and 1970s he was hailed as something of a lost leader of the intellectual Left, yet he was dismissive of the “abstract analysis of Marxist texts” he saw characterizing the New Left Review of the period, preferring to publish his own views in the far more mainstream Times Literary Supplement.

Carr was a forceful writer with both a talent and a taste for polemic, yet much of his most influential writing was published anonymously (albeit his authorship was often widely known or suspected). There was also a paradoxical quality to many of his characteristic views and intellectual sensibilities. He vigorously spoke up for progress, against all forms of conservatism and nostalgia, yet he was in no way a liberal. His major work, the fourteen-volume History of Soviet Russia, was devoted to one of the greatest upheavals in modern history, the deliberate remaking of a whole society in accordance with an elaborate ideology, yet his own inclinations as a historian were to concentrate on the legal and administrative procedures of governments and to play down the role of ideas. He was scathing about the provincialism of British intellectuals, yet Edmund Wilson was not alone in finding his writings marred by a “never intermitting British chill”. He deliberately courted controversy, yet he shunned publicity and was by habit and temperament something of a recluse. And finally, he was someone who, shortly after his death, had the rare distinction of being violently denounced in both of the two leading organs of British intellectual and literary opinion, the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books, yet thereafter his name seemed to slip from view with dramatic suddenness. He rarely appears in surveys of leading twentieth-century British intellectuals, or even of that century’s outstanding historians, though he might seem to have better credentials for these titles than several of those to whom they are more readily applied.

Sheer contingency played a larger part in determining the contours of Carr’s career than is true for many writers, but if any consistent or unifying theme is to be located among these tensions and paradoxes, then it must be found, at least from that point in the late 1930s when he can be said to have discovered his own voice, in his unwavering commitment to what he understood as “realism”. And in the case of this deeply contentious man, such an understanding found habitual expression in criticizing and dismissing those he deemed guilty of various kinds of “illusion”. In the 1930s, he principally took issue with those liberal idealists who had deluded themselves that the Treaty of Versailles should be based on the twin foundations of German guilt and the rights of small nations, rather than on efforts to assure the long-term security of Europe through a recognition of the realities of the large power blocs. Thereafter, he evinced a similar exasperation with those who could not see that laissez-faire capitalism had failed and needed to be superseded by planned economies. In the 1950s and 1960s, he could barely contain his disdain for those who refused to accept the reality that Britain was no longer a major power and Europe no longer the centre of world history. And in his dealings with a variety of opponents, he complained of their failure to see that, although technological and economic advances may have dealt roughly with some of the cherished idols of the nostalgic and comfortably-off intellectuals of the West, the welfare of the mass of mankind had benefited immeasurably, and that that was what mattered in drawing up the balance-sheet of progress.

In every sphere, Carr insisted that the realities of power be acknowledged (or indeed, according to his critics, celebrated). This may seem simply the essential entrance qualification for anyone setting up as a commentator on world affairs, but the central question about Carr’s career has to be whether this unwavering commitment, always accompanied by an eagerness to expose the irresponsible illusions of ideologues and idealists alike, did not in the end become a limitation. A degree of insensitivity to the play of ideas may be characteristic of officials of any stripe, just as a rather-too-pleased-with-itself hard-headedness may be typical of political historians: Carr had a share of both of these identities, and this inheritance, when combined with an almost solipsistic absorption in his own projects, expressed itself in a perspective of considerable power and penetration, but one that, in the ultimate paradox, may not have been best suited to taking the measure of the ideas-driven century he lived in and wrote about.

The contingencies that helped shape Carr’s career were representative of the ways in which aspects of the older role of the man of letters survived, even as that role mutated into more specialized and even professionalized identities. Seen in these terms, the inaugurating moment came in December 1928, when Carr was already thirty-six years old. Up to that point, his life had followed a pattern familiar among the cleverer sons of the educated and professional classes at the turn of the century. A First in Classics at Cambridge had been followed by a temporary wartime appointment attached to the Foreign Office, including a spell at the Versailles peace conference in 1919. In the early 1920s, Carr allowed himself to drift into what looked as though it was going to be a permanent career in the diplomatic service. (Jonathan Haslam’s excellent biography, The Vices of Integrity, 1999, provides the fullest account of Carr’s career.) His longest posting was at Riga, between 1925 and 1929, but he was bored by embassy life, and having learned Russian he formed the desire to write about Russian literature. It was while on leave in London, in December 1928, that he met V. S. Pritchett, then just beginning a regular reviewing stint on the Spectator, and this gave him the opening he craved: the first of Carr’s reviews for that paper appeared in March 1929. Initially, Carr struggled to get any recognition for his longer literary efforts: his biography of Dostoevsky was turned down by various publishers before being accepted by Unwin in 1931. His first real success came with the appearance in 1933 of The Romantic Exiles, a group portrait of Herzen, Bakunin and the generation of the 1840s. Thereafter, Carr was to be found writing fairly frequent articles and reviews in publications such as the Fortnightly Review and the Spectator. Given the delicacies involved in commenting upon contemporary international affairs while still working for the Foreign Office, he published several of these pieces under the nom de plume “John Hallett”, a portent of a career in literary journalism that was to be, to an extent unusual by this date, often carried on under the cover of anonymity or pseudonymity.

This was particularly the case with his contributions to the TLS (which extended the practice of anonymous reviewing until 1974). It is only with the recent compilation of the TLS contributors’ index, covering the period from its foundation in 1902 till 1974, that the quite remarkable scale of Carr’s writing for the paper has become fully apparent. When his friend Stanley Morison became Editor in 1945, Carr enjoyed favoured status among contributors and reviewed most of the leading books on Russia and international affairs more generally. He maintained this position under Morison’s successor, Alan Pryce-Jones, Editor until 1959. In the half-century following his first review, in 1930, Carr contributed several hundred reviews and articles, mostly on international affairs and Russian history; when his letters to the Editor and other lesser items are added in, he turns out to have made more than 900 contributions in total.

All the while he was trying to build up his literary career in the early 1930s, Carr continued his rather undemanding role at the Foreign Office in London, but in 1936 he successfully applied for the Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics at Aberystwyth. The Wilson professorship was not a conventional academic chair: it had been established in 1918 with the express purpose of furthering the study of international relations so as to “promote peace between nations”, and it was expected that the holder would travel a good deal and keep abreast of current political developments. This liberty suited Carr, who thus assumed an academic identity for the first time at the age of forty-four.

In the mid- and late-1930s, Carr was most prominent as an advocate of appeasement. He believed that the 1919 settlement had been needlessly punitive towards Germany, and that it was in the interests of the balance of power in Europe that Germany be encouraged to reassert its national claims. At a time when there were few professors whose brief was to concern themselves with current politics at all, the holder of the Wilson chair commanded more attention than might be the case today. During his tenure, Carr wrote several books on international affairs, the best-known being The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939, first published in 1939, a “realist” account of the conduct of international relations and an indictment of the misguided liberal idealism that resulted in an ineffectual League of Nations. In its opening pages, Carr elaborated an extended contrast between the perspectives of two ideal types, that of “the bureaucrat” and that of “the intellectual”, emphasizing the delusions of the latter. (Once again, a writer who would, on most measures, soon come to figure among Britain’s leading intellectuals sharply distanced himself from membership of the category.) Blame for the catastrophe of 1914 and for the disasters that followed in the interwar years was placed at the door of the idealistic liberal. Liberals (“liberals”, “utopians” and “intellectuals” were near synonyms for Carr at this point) simply did not understand the nature of power: this was to become his abiding message.

The approach of war in 1939 discredited the case for appeasement, but it also provided Carr with a new role. He had written occasional pieces for The Times since 1937 and had got to know the Deputy Editor, R. M. Barrington-Ward, who had a high opinion of his talents, and who was to replace Geoffrey Dawson as Editor in 1941. In the course of 1940, Carr began writing leaders for the paper, officially becoming Assistant Editor in 1941. He immediately began to campaign for what he saw as the two faces of a successful policy of reconstruction to follow the war: a recognition of the reality of Soviet power in Europe and a recognition of the need for collectivist planning at home.

The role of a leader-writer on The Times was, at least up until the transformation of that paper in the 1960s, a curious one, and this was at the root of one of the more paradoxical features of Carr’s career. The Times was still seen, especially abroad, as a semi-official organ, close to the government of the day, uniquely well-informed, concerned not to take a “sectarian” or idiosyncratic political line. Leading articles were, of course, always anonymous, and so, although they provided an exceptionally influential channel for the expression of ideas, particularly where impact on the world’s political and administrative elites was concerned, they were doubly impersonal: they were not the opinions of a named individual and they were not the expression of a partisan or campaigning newspaper (as leaders might be in a paper such as, for example, the Manchester Guardian). But in Carr’s case, his authorship of certain leading articles became widely known, especially because they tended, even after having been toned down first by Geoffrey Dawson and then by Robin Barrington-Ward, to be more critical of government policy than the paper usually allowed itself to be. Carr’s name thus acquired considerable currency in official and political circles without his ever once appearing as the author of the pieces which attracted this attention.

Throughout his period as Assistant Editor at The Times, Carr continued to hold his chair. As he explained himself to Ifor Evans, the Principal at Aberystwyth, he intended to return to his post after the end of the war, but he could not bear to be sidelined in merely academic activity during it.

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