This article offers a new approach to the opposition of utopianism and realism in interwar International Relations. It first analyses how E. H. Carr drew on Karl Mannheim to develop that opposition in his 1939 classic, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, and how Alfred Zimmern, one of Carr’s predecessors in the Woodrow Wilson Chair in International Politics at Aberystwyth, responded to Carr and his Mannheimian model in a review in the Spectator as well as in private correspondence with Norman Angell and others. It then offers a close reading of Carr’s allusions to Zimmern in his discussions of power, morality, and international law, and of the passages from Zimmern’s works that Carr was quoting. Analysis of how Carr and Zimmern read each other’s works and of some of Zimmern’s other writings suggests that they were closer in thought than Carr was willing to allow and that it was Carr’s apparent relativism to which Zimmern took objection. This article shows that contemporary readers, including Christian Realists such as J. H. Oldham and William Paton, were alive to these similarities and relates Carr’s misreading of Zimmern to their different attitudes to appeasement and their different disciplinary notions of International Relations.

Disciplinary debates within IPE often leave as an open question how contemporary scholars may build on and incorporate insights from its rich intellectual history. In this article I examine the work of three scholars who are rarely grouped together, but who should be recognised today as engaged in an IPE-inflected debate: Karl Polanyi, E. H. Carr, and David Mitrany. They advanced distinct IPE-centred ways of framing the central problems of the post-1945 world, which are remarkable for how they prefigure important themes in modern IPE scholarship. By assembling and considering their work collectively, I make two arguments: (1) we should recognise their contributions as a precursor to modern IPE; and (2) their work, with certain caveats, provides valuable intellectual resources for contemporary scholars. Their combined work should be considered as part of the common heritage of IPE.

In this article I argue that the claims made about the efficacy of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) echo the pejorative conceptions of “utopianism” as advanced by E. H. Carr and Ken Booth in two ways: through the determination of RtoP supporters to claim “progress” in spite of countervailing empirical evidence; and through the exaggerated importance that supporters ascribe to institutionalization, which mistakenly conflates state support with a change in state behavior and interests. I argue that RtoP's impact on the behavior of states has been and will continue to be limited. Moreover, while RtoP has garnered widespread support among states, this is due to it having been rendered largely impotent through a process of norm cooptation. While both Carr and Booth criticized a particular form of utopianism, they both also defended the articulation of normative prescriptions that are not immediately feasible. To this end, I conclude by suggesting a potential reform of the existing international legal order that meets Carr's preference for normative thinking that is “utopian in the right sense.”

E. H. Carr was one of Europe’s pre-eminent thinkers in the field of international affairs. Yet his contribution to International Relations theory is continually questioned. Realists depict Carr as a quintessential realist; revisionists draw from his wider corpus to qualify his contribution. Although not inaccurate, the revisionist literature is incomplete as it neglects a number of Carr’s diplomatic histories. Refocusing on these, especially the manner in which traces of Ranke’s ‘the primacy of foreign affairs’ tradition is evident, this article points to a more conservative and less critical Carr. Utilising an interpretivist framework, this shift in traditions of thought is explained by the dilemmas Carr faced. Although works of history rather than theory, the article contends that Carr’s diplomatic histories remain relevant, particularly with regard to the embedded criticism of realpolitik they contain. This realisation is made evident through a reading of Carr in parallel with the concept of tragedy.