Carr, Mannheim, and a Post–positivist Science of International Relations

Recent work on Carr has looked beyond The Twenty Years' Crisis to the seeming anomaly of a political realist advocating regional integration in Western Europe, a welfare state at home, and a free hand for the USSR in Eastern Europe. Some have seen this anomaly, and Carr's successive appeasements of Germany and the USSR, as mere opportunism, but this paper finds a coherence in Carr's work deriving substantially from Mannheim. It was from Mannheim that Carr took not only the structure of The Twenty Years' Crisis, but also his characteristic post‐positivist and interdisciplinary methodology, his belief in the policy role of the intellectual, his strong sense of the connectedness of foreign and domestic policy, his insistence on forms of international society that heavily discounted the sovereignty of small nations, and the besetting weaknesses of inadequately acknowledged historicism and elitism.