November 2015 The American Conservative
by Benjamin Schwarz
No book expounding a realist view of international politics has been more influential and controversial than E.H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939: A Study in International Relations. Ever since its publication, barely two months after the start of the Second World War, this inventive, bracing work has been subject not merely to regular misinterpretation of its constituent arguments but to consistent misapprehension of its essential propositions. This is at least as much owing to the author’s faults as to those of his admittedly many unsympathetic and narrow-minded critics. Undeniably, no writer in what Carr dismissed as the intellectually flimsy field of international relations has equaled the equipoise of his sentences, the detached hauteur of his style, the nonchalance of his historical erudition, the icy clarity of his forensic critiques. (The classicist M.I. Finley said that Carr’s was “the most controlled…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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