The Twenty Years' Crisis 1919-1939 PDF

# The Twenty Years' Crisis 1919-1939 An Introduction to the Study of International Relations E. H. Carr Reissued with a New Introduction and additional material by Michael Cox Professor of International Politics University of Wales Aberystwyth ## 6 The Science of International Politics * the gr...

# The Twenty Years' Crisis 1919-1939 An Introduction to the Study of International Relations E. H. Carr Reissued with a New Introduction and additional material by Michael Cox Professor of International Politics University of Wales Aberystwyth ## 6 The Science of International Politics * the ground, not that it was false, but that it was inopportune; and this criticism, whether justified or not, would be intelligible, whereas the same criticism of a book about the causes of cancer would be meaningless. Every political judgement helps to modify the facts on which it is passed. * Political thought is itself a form of political action. Political science is the science not only of what is, but of what ought to be. ## The role of utopianism * If therefore purpose precedes and conditions thought, it is not surprising to find that, when the human mind begins to exercise itself in some fresh field, an initial stage occurs in which the element of wish or purpose is overwhelmingly strong, and the inclination to analyse facts and means weak or non-existent. * Hobhouse notes as a characteristic of 'the most primitive peoples' that 'the evidence of the truth of an idea is not yet separate from the quality which renders it pleasant'. The same would appear to be conspicuously true of the primitive, or 'utopian', stage of the political sciences. During this stage, the investigators will pay little attention to existing 'facts' or to the analysis of cause and effect, but will devote themselves wholeheartedly to the elaboration of visionary projects for the attainment of the ends which they have in view - projects whose simplicity and perfection give them an easy and universal appeal. It is only when these projects break down, and wish or purpose is shown to be incapable by itself of achieving the desired end, that the investigators will reluctantly call in the aid of analysis, and the study, emerging from its infantile and utopian period, will establish its claim to be regarded as a science. * 'Sociology', remarks Professor Ginsberg, 'may be said to have arisen by way of reaction against sweeping generalizations unsupported by detailed inductive enquiry.' * It may not be fanciful to find an illustration of this rule even in the domain of physical science. During the Middle Ages, gold was a recognized medium of exchange. But economic relations were not sufficiently developed to require more than a limited amount of such a medium. When the new economic conditions of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries introduced a widespread system of money transactions, and the supply of gold was found to be inadequate for the purpose, the wise men of the day began to experiment in the possibility of transmuting commoner metals into gold. The thought of the alchemist was purely purposive. He did not stop to enquire whether the properties of lead were such as to make it transmutable into gold. He assumed that the end was absolute (i.e. that gold must be produced), and that means and material must somehow be adapted to it. It was only when this visionary project ended in failure that the investigators were prompted to apply their thought to an examination of 'facts', i.e. the nature of matter; and though the initial utopian purpose of making gold out of lead is probably as far as ever from fulfilment, modern physical science has been evolved out of this primitive aspiration. ## The Beginnings of a Science * Other illustrations may be taken from fields more closely akin to our present subject. * It was in the fifth and fourth centuries BC that the first serious recorded attempts were made to create a science of politics. These attempts were made independently in China and in Greece. * But neither Confucius nor Plato, though they were of course profoundly influenced by the political institutions under which they lived, really tried to analyse the nature of those institutions or to seek the underlying causes of the evils which they deplored. Like the alchemists, they were content to advocate highly imaginative solutions whose relation to existing facts was one of flat negation. * The new political order which they propounded was as different from anything they saw around them as gold from lead. It was the product not of analysis, but of aspiration. * In the eighteenth century, trade in Western Europe had become so important as to render irksome the innumerable restrictions placed on it by governmental authority and justified by mercantilist theory. The protest against these restrictions took the form of a wishful vision of universal free trade; and out of this vision the physiocrats in France, and Adam Smith in Great Britain, created a science of political economy. The new science was based primarily on a negation of existing reality and on certain artificial and unverified generalizations about the behaviour of a hypothetical economic man. In practice, it achieved some highly useful and important results. But economic theory long retained its utopian character; and even to-day some 'classical economists' insist on regarding universal free trade – an imaginary condition which has never existed – as the normal postulate of economic science, and all reality as a deviation from this utopian prototype. * In the opening years of the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution created a new social problem to engage human thought in Western Europe. The pioneers who first set out to tackle this problem were the men on whom posterity has bestowed the name of 'utopian socialists': Saint-Simon and Fourier in France, Robert Owen in England. These men did not attempt to analyse the nature of class-interests or class-consciousness or of the class-conflict to which they gave rise. They simply made unverified assumptions about human behaviour and, on the strength of these, drew up visionary schemes of ideal communities in which men of all classes would live together in amity, sharing the fruits of their labours in proportion to their needs. For all of them, as Engels remarked, 'socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and needs only be discovered in order to conquer all the world in virtue of its own power'. * The utopian socialists did valuable work in making men conscious of the problem and of the need of tackling it. But the solution propounded by them had no logical connexion with the conditions which created the problem. * Once more, it was the product not of analysis, but of aspiration. Schemes elaborated in this spirit would not, of course, work. Just as nobody has ever been able to make gold in a laboratory, so nobody has ever been able to live in Plato's republic or in a world of universal free trade or in Fourier's phalansteries. But it is, nevertheless, perfectly right to venerate Confucius and Plato as the founders of political science, Adam Smith as the founder of political economy, and Fourier and Owen as the founders of socialism. * The initial stage of aspiration towards an end is an essential foundation of human thinking. The wish is father to the thought. Teleology precedes analysis. ## 8 The Science of International Politics * The teleological aspect of the science of international politics has been conspicuous from the outset. * It took its rise from a great and disastrous war; and the overwhelming purpose which dominated and inspired the pioneers of the new science was to obviate a recurrence of this disease of the international body politic. * The passionate desire to prevent war determined the whole initial course and direction of the study. Like other infant sciences, the science of international politics has been markedly and frankly utopian. * It has been in the initial stage in which wishing prevails over thinking, generalization over observation, and in which little attempt is made at a critical analysis of existing facts or available means. * In this stage, attention is concentrated almost exclusively on the end to be achieved. The end has seemed so important that analytical criticism of the means proposed has too often been branded as destructive and unhelpful. * When President Wilson, on his way to the Peace Conference, was asked by some of his advisers whether he thought his plan of a League of Nations would work, he replied briefly: 'If it won't work, it must be made to work.' * The advocate of a scheme for an international police force or for 'collective security', or of some other project for an international order, generally replied to the critic not by an argument designed to show how and why he thought his plan will work, but either by a statement that it must be made to work because the consequences of its failure to work would be so disastrous, or by a demand for some alternative nostrum. * This must be the spirit in which the alchemist or the utopian socialist would have answered the sceptic who questioned whether lead could be turned into gold or men made to live in model communities. * Thought has been at a discount. Much that was said and written about international politics between 1919 and 1939 merited the stricture applied in another context by the economist Marshall, who compares 'the nervous irresponsibility which conceives hasty utopian schemes' to the 'bold facility of the weak player who will speedily solve the most difficult chess problem by taking on himself to move the black men as well as the white'. * In extenuation of this intellectual failure, it may be said that, during the earlier of these years, the black pieces in international politics were in the hands of such weak players that the real difficulties of the game were scarcely manifest even to the keenest intelligence. * The course of events after 1931 clearly revealed the inadequacy of pure aspiration as the basis for a science of international politics, and made it possible for the first time to embark on serious critical and analytical thought about international problems. ## The impact of realism * No science deserves the name until it has acquired sufficient humility not to consider itself omnipotent, and to distinguish the analysis of what is from aspiration about what should be. * Because in the political sciences this distinction can never be absolute, some people prefer to withhold from them the right to the title of science. * In both physical and political sciences, the point is soon reached where the initial stage of wishing must be succeeded by a stage of hard and ruthless analysis. * The difference is that political sciences can never wholly emancipate themselves from utopian-ism, and that the political scientist is apt to linger for a longer initial period than the physical scientist in the utopian stage of development. This is perfectly natural. For while the transmutation of lead into gold would be no nearer if everyone in the world passionately desired it, it is undeniable that if everyone really desired a 'world-state' or 'collective security' (and meant the same thing by those terms), it would be easily attained; and the student of international politics may be forgiven if he begins by supposing that his task is to make everyone desire it. * It takes him some time to understand that no progress is likely to be made along this path, and that no political utopia will achieve even the most limited success unless it grows out of political reality. * Having made the discovery, he will embark on that hard ruthless analysis of reality which is the hallmark of science; and one of the facts whose causes he will have to analyse is the fact that few people do desire a 'world-state' or 'collective security', and that those who think they desire it mean different and incompatible things by it. He will have reached a stage when purpose by itself is seen to be barren, and when analysis of reality has forced itself upon him as an essential ingredient of his study. * The impact of thinking upon wishing which, in the development of a science, follows the breakdown of its first visionary projects, and marks