"It would be . . . intolerable to sit in pure academic seclusion writing
long-term stuff: indeed I’ve never believed that, even in peace, anything
useful can be written on politics by anyone wholly isolated from current
realities . . . . Hence I need something which gives me (i) the necessary
contact with day-to-day affairs (ii) the sense that I am making some sort of
contribution to the war – or at any rate to the peace (iii) a platform,
other than the long-range one of book-writing, for getting some of my ideas
across. The Times at [the] present moment comes nearer than anything else
I’ve discovered to fulfilling these conditions."
This is a revealing cri de coeur. To “get across” his ideas about politics he
needs a “platform” and, equally indispensable, contact with current
“realities”. Since the ideas were seen by many as emphatically “left-wing”
and Carr’s as a distinctive and indeed idiosyncratic voice, the conclusion
that there was no more appropriate platform for this activity than the
impersonal organ of the political Establishment indicates something of the
paradoxical quality I mentioned earlier. Yet, viewed under another
description, there was nothing in the least puzzling about Carr finding such
a berth in Printing House Square: after all, he wrote in the approved
mandarin style; he was a Foreign Office insider; he tended to equate public
life with politics and politics with government policy, especially foreign
policy; he had little truck with “ideology” and always used “sound”,
“practical” and, above all, “realistic” as strongly positive terms – as one
goes on, Carr comes to seem almost the perfect recruit for the peculiar
institution that was The Times in the first half of the twentieth century.
But while his formation may have corresponded to that of a familiar social type,
his views did not, especially his views about Soviet Russia. The war had
opened Carr’s eyes to the strength of Russia and hence to the great
achievements in modernization that had been made under the Soviets.
Moreover, he believed that the Russian model had wider significance:
laissez-faire capitalism had failed, the modern era was to be the era of the
planned economy. Such views were hardly unknown in Britain during the war,
of course, but Carr exploited the prominent cultural position of The Times’s
leader columns to express them in vigorous terms. A notable early example
was his long leading-article on “The two scourges” published on December 5,
1940. The scourges in question were war and unemployment: the first was
henceforth to be avoided by a new international order based on a realistic
acknowledgement of the interests of the dominant powers, the second by
adapting to the peacetime economy many of the measures of central planning
and control that were willingly accepted in the circumstances of war. The
air of hard-headed briskness, and lack of “sentimental” consideration for
small nations and civil liberties alike, were characteristic of Carr’s
political writing.
In the course of the war, his leaders became something of a cause célèbre. It
is hard to know what Tom Jones, leading Whitehall fixer of the period, meant
when, in his telegram to the Principal at Aberystwyth justifying Carr’s
continuing secondment, he declared: “Professor Carr on The Times is worth
several generals in the field”, but this was scarcely a common view in
official circles. In 1942 the Foreign Office even went so far as to minute
the opinion that “H.M.G. are definitely opposed to the policy advocated by
Professor Carr in The Times”. Whitehall was not the only source of such
complaints. At one point Carr was even denounced in the House of Lords (by
Viscount Elibank): “Professor Carr is indeed an active danger to this
country and its future in the position which he holds, and if we were so
foolish as to be guided by his views, we should certainly lose the peace and
all our sacrifices would be in vain”. But Carr also took a lot of stick from
what might be regarded as the opposite flank: Orwell sneered that “all the
appeasers, e.g. Professor E. H. Carr, have switched their allegiance from
Hitler to Stalin”. It is hard to know whether to be more struck by Carr’s
expressing such provokingly heterodox views from such an unimpeachably
Establishment platform, or by the evident importance that all parties
attributed to the peculiar literary genre of the leading article.
Despite the repeated charges of his critics, Carr was not in fact
ideologically pro-Soviet, at least not in the way that many on the Left in
Britain were at the time; he was, instead, in favour of recognizing the
geopolitical interests of Russia and acknowledging the determining part that
the Russian state would necessarily play in the post-war world. But by the
same token, he tended to underestimate the role of ideology in determining
Soviet policy, just as he had in the case of Nazi Germany in the late 1930s.
His devotion to realpolitik thus turned out to be in this respect
unrealistic, a failure accurately to register the actual moving forces in
world affairs. Nor is it obvious that his views were in any conventional
sense those of “the Left”. He was impatient with the strain of
anti-industrial nostalgia that constituted a defining feature of British
socialism; he evinced little sympathy for oppressed minorities of any kind;
he was indifferent to the claims of small nations or other ethnic groups.
It was in the autumn of 1944, with the Red Army, victorious the previous year
in the decisive Battle of Stalingrad, approaching the outskirts of Warsaw,
that Carr formed the idea of writing a large-scale history of the momentous
social and economic experiment that lay behind these military successes. In
the event, the scale of the enterprise outgrew even his ambitious plans: the
first volume, part one of The Bolshevik Revolution 1917–1923, appeared in
1950; the last instalment, Volume Three of Foundations of a Planned Economy,
1926–1929, appeared in 1977, when its author was eighty-five. Thirty-three
years; fourteen volumes (two of them partially co-authored); 6,553 pages:
Carr was fortunate to have been such a striking instantiation of one of his
own pet themes, the increased longevity which came with the industrial
progress of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Initially, however, the decision to embark on his History of Soviet Russia
complicated his career prospects rather than improving them. Carr left his
position at The Times in 1946, though he continued to write for it for some
years thereafter, and he resigned his Aberystwyth Chair for personal reasons
in 1947. He twice failed to be elected to Oxford’s Montague Burton Chair of
International Relations in the 1940s; he was vetoed for a Chair in Russian
Studies at the School of East European and Slavonic Studies in London, for
being too “pro-Soviet”; and he was in effect blackballed for a Senior
Research Fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge, on account of his “support
of the Stalin regime”. But as Haslam fairly records: “For every individual
trying to hold him back, Carr invariably found support elsewhere”. A
short-term teaching post at Balliol College, Oxford, was followed in 1955 by
election to a Senior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, a
comfortable berth that allowed him to devote his energies over the next two
decades or more to the completion of his magnum opus.
There has been no shortage of scholarly discussion of the strengths and
weaknesses of Carr’s History of Soviet Russia; I have nothing of value to
contribute to that debate. But I would observe, as others have noted in more
detail, that not only is the whole conception of the work expressive of
Carr’s general intellectual sensibilities – for example, in the early
volumes he typically saw Lenin more as a state-builder than as a
revolutionary – but also that a characteristic, if subdued, polemic
underwrote his more notorious judgements. Setting his face against
conventional opinion in the West, he maintained that collectivization had
been a success, at least in terms of increasing production and feeding the
population; his recognition of the human costs of this process seemed to
some of his critics little better than perfunctory. This may have been one
of those places where his habitual counter-suggestibility was particularly
unhelpful; he suspected that the concern among Western intellectuals for the
fate of the peasant was simply part of a wider nostalgia for a simpler rural
past. “The peasant is the spoilt child of Western historians.” However large
the grain of truth in that provocative assertion, it seemed to most
observers to be outweighed a hundred times over by the blood-soaked fact
that the peasant was certainly not the spoilt child of Stalinist commissars.
Carr’s absorption in his History during the thirty years after he left The
Times helps to account for his diminished visibility in British intellectual
life during these decades. But even during this period he continued to
engage in various controversies. The best-known of these concerned, first,
the justification of Soviet policy, and, second, the character and purpose
of historiography. But underlying and surrounding these two prominent
topics, there was a recurrent motif to the engagements of Carr’s later
decades that has not, I believe, been properly recognized: over and over
again, he took issue with what he saw as the conservatism and pessimism of
intellectuals in the West, especially in Britain. In doing so, he revealed a
certain unclarity or tension in his conception of intellectuals and, more
significantly, a betraying unsteadiness about where he placed himself within
this vexed category.
The roots of this difficulty can be traced back at least as far as The Twenty
Years’ Crisis. In the contrast elaborated in its opening pages between the
“intellectuals” and the “bureaucrats”, the former are held to be inherently
utopian, marked by their “failure to understand existing reality”. The
latter, by contrast, are characterized by their “empirical” approach to
political problems, and so seem to earn the author’s endorsement from the
very outset of the analysis. But he does also note that “the bureaucrat . .
. is bound up with the existing order, the maintenance of tradition, and the
acceptance of precedent as the ‘safe’ criterion of action”. He also goes on
to draw the obvious contrast in terms of political affiliation: “The
intellectual, the man of theory, will gravitate towards the Left just as
naturally as the bureaucrat, the man of practice, will gravitate towards the
Right”. As with most writers who set up a pair of binary ideal types, Carr,
by implication, transcends his own categories, though in general his
evaluative language suggests considerably greater respect for the bureaucrat
than for the intellectual (and also appears to give the former the more
impressive pedigree: “It is worth remarking that both Machiavelli and Bacon
were bureaucrats”). But in at least two ways, the terms of this contrast
created pitfalls for Carr’s subsequent identity: after all, he was
outspokenly antagonistic to those he regarded as defending “the existing
order” and he saw himself as occupying a position on “the Left”, albeit of
an idiosyncratic kind. Yet Carr, the apostle of realism, cannot have been
willing to place himself among those he was here calling “the
intellectuals”.
Similar difficulties of self-inclusion crop up in What Is History? (1961), the
book that grew out of his Trevelyan Lectures, especially in its last
chapter. Here (it is an aspect of the book that is often overlooked) Carr
allowed himself a purely local reference. He upbraided the Cambridge History
Faculty for the narrowness and Anglocentrism of its teaching. But he made
clear that he thought the intellectual parochialism he was pointing to was
in fact “typical of most other British universities and of British
intellectuals in general in the middle years of the twentieth century”;
extending the charge still further, he added: “it sometimes looks as if we,
by our inability or unwillingness to understand, were isolating ourselves
from what is really going on in the world”. The use of the first person
plural seemed initially to point to a national community and Carr’s
membership of it, and yet, as the argument developed, it became apparent
that he saw himself as speaking from an offshore vantage point, at least in
intellectual terms. “What is really going on in the world”: this was Carr’s
frequently played trump. He cast himself as the bringer of news to his
audience in Cambridge’s Mill Lane lecture rooms, news from outside a
syllabus still largely confined to European and, above all, British history.
More broadly, he appeared to be exempting himself from the failings ascribed
to “British intellectuals in general”. On Carr’s showing, intellectuals seem
even more prone to herd-behaviour than do other groups in the population.
His correspondence suggests that a desire to challenge the liberal
understanding of history made fashionable in the 1950s by Karl Popper,
Isaiah Berlin and others guided Carr’s choice of subject for his Trevelyan
letures. But in his concluding lecture, he broadened the assault to include
other “voices of the 1950s” who contributed to what he saw as a prevailing
conservatism, such as Michael Oakeshott, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Lewis Namier.
Namier was in some ways the odd one out in this list, not just because of
Carr’s considerable admiration for him, but also because of an intellectual
or temperamental affinity between the two men, and this highlights from
another angle Carr’s ambivalence about his own position. He regarded Namier
as “the greatest British historian to emerge on the academic scene since the
First World War”. Namier understood power: for Carr, this was the highest
accolade. And Namier, like Carr, was hostile to those he categorized as
“moralists” rather than “historians”, those who rushed to pass judgement
(judgement was of course not exactly absent from the writings of either of
them). By choice, Namier returned to a period before ideas and revolutions
had attempted to remake the world: he returned to the stable society of the
governing classes in eighteenth-century England. In so far as Namier did
write about revolution, Carr noted, he chose not one of the great turning
points of European history, but the failed revolution of 1848. In Namier’s
hands, what this demonstrated was that “the intrusion of ideas into the
serious business of politics is futile and dangerous; Namier rubbed in the
moral by calling that humiliating failure ‘the revolution of the
intellectuals’”. Carr may seem a little too ready to endorse the sneer in
Namier’s label here, as though it were self-evident that “intellectuals”
would make a mess of “the serious business of politics”.
