Carr, Mannheim, and a Post-positivist Science of International Relations
| Author | Charles Jones |
| Published date | 01 June 1997 |
| Date | 01 June 1997 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.00078 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Carr, Mannheim, and a Post-positivist
Science of International Relations
CHARLES JONES
University of Warwick
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 ®nds a coherence in Carr's work deriving sub-
stantially 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.
In his preface to the ®rst edition of The Twenty Years' Crisis, E. H. Carr issued a
blanket acknowledgment of the published work of others before naming two
books: Ideology and Utopia by Karl Mannheim and Moral Man and Immoral
Society by Reinhold Niebuhr. These, as he put it, `though not speci®cally
concerned with international relations, seem to me to have illuminated some
of the fundamental problems of politics'.1 The central purpose of this paper is
to examine Carr's debt to Mannheim. An obvious reason for doing so is that it
may help establish just what Carr believed `the fundamental problems of
politics' to be. So it does; and a major conclusion is that its rootedness in
Mannheim's ideas enables one more easily to detect a coherence of method and
policy recommendation and to delineate the relationship between domestic and
international issues in Carr's work.
It would be wrong to emphasize what might be judged a marginal comment
without a little more justi®cation. Mannheim deserves consideration by students
of international relations chie¯y because he provided Carr with the dialectical
structure of The Twenty Years' Crisis and a distinctively post-positivist social
scienti®c methodology that would mark him o from the dominant positivism
of the Anglo-Saxon world of his day. Far from being a methodologically
unsophisticated historian, a traditionalist displaced by post-war behaviourism
as it colonized international relations, Carr was a social scientist in a tradition
that had already proclaimed the redundancy of behaviourism.2 But in the eyes
of those of his critics who realized this, the connection with Mannheim proved
1 E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis (London, Macmillan, 1939), p. x.
2 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: an Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (London,
Kegan Paul, 1936), pp. 39±42.
# Political Studies Association 1997. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
CHARLES JONES
233
to be for Carr the methodological equivalent of his wartime policy towards the
Soviet Union. Each was conceived of as a Centrist stance, capable of command-
ing the assent of substantial sections of the British policy-making community
and administrative eÂlites. Each was transformed by the onset of the Cold
War into an apparent commitment to the Left, rendering Carr vulnerable and
depriving him of such in¯uence as he had once possessed. The debt to
Mannheim therefore helps explain Carr's ultimate failure and accounts for the
strange readings of his work that prevailed until quite recently.3
Mannheim and the Sociology of Knowledge
Carr's reading of Ideology and Utopia merits close attention.4 After a spell as
professor at Heidelberg, Mannheim had moved to the new Institut fuÈr
Socialforschung as one of two professors in what was soon to become known
as the Frankfurt School. Its director Paul Horkheimer, and other ®gures such as
Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, were to develop, in critical theory,
a distinctive approach within the Marxist tradition. Mannheim himself was no
Marxist, but his sociology of knowledge was suciently sophisticated to
be regarded as a threat by Marxist contemporaries and to draw their ®re. Hork-
heimer attacked Ideology and Utopia within a year of publication. Marcuse,
sympathetic at ®rst, soon became more critical. Adorno stoked the ®re with a
1953 critique of Man and Society in the Age of Reconstruction. In the meantime,
Karl Popper, who had set out in his early years within the same broad German-
speaking radical milieu as Mannheim, Hilferding, and their Marxist critics, had
diverged sharply from this circle, so that the intellectual Cold War of the later
1950s and 1960s found Mannheim caught between the two: condemned as arch-
historicist by Popper; dismissed as irretrievably bourgeois by the Marxists.
All this lay ahead when Carr ®rst came across Mannheim, probably through
the English translation of Ideology and Utopia, published in 1936. Acceptance of
the sociology of knowledge, as of Marxism, has some of the characteristics of
religious experience, and Carr displays the full enthusiasm of an acolyte in
The Twenty Years' Crisis. Characteristically, however, Carr bent Mannheim to
his own will, twisting the structure of his argument in unexpected ways.
The case that Mannheim puts forward is neither simple nor elegantly
expressed, but its main outline is clear enough. The ®rst step is to expose the
incoherence of naive empiricism. Is it possible that all knowledge could be
derived by an individual from experience of the world through the senses? ± No,
replies Mannheim, because the stream of raw sense data would not constitute
meaningful knowledge until it was organized.
3 A brilliant anticipation of the more recent re-interpretation of Carr is to be found in G. Evans,
`E. H. Carr and international relations', British Journal of International Studies, 1 (1975), 77±97.
W. T. R. Fox, `E. H. Carr and political realism: vision and revision', Review of International Studies,
11 (1985), 1±16, is excellent, as is Paul Howe's `The utopian realism of E. H. Carr', Review of
International Studies, 20 (1994), 277±97, which very successfully extends the contemporary reading
of Carr beyond The Twenty Years' Crisis and advances the claim that Carr's thought is coherent,
but says little about its sources. Also interesting is J. Ann Tickner, `Revisioning Security' in
K. Booth and S. Smith (eds), International Relations Theory Today (Cambridge, Polity, 1995),
pp. 175±97.
4 So, less obviously, does Karl Popper's treatment of Man and Society. Karl Mannheim, Ideology
and Utopia; Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction: Studies in Modern
Social Structure (London, Kegan Paul, 1940).
# Political Studies Association, 1997
234
Carr, Mannheim and a Post-Positivist Science
Part of the process of rational organization of knowledge might be universal.
Kant's purpose in the ®rst critique had been to delineate this sphere, though
later philosophers were to challenge the universality even of mathematics and
formal logic.5 Yet even if a Kantean compromise between empiricism and
idealism were conceded, it could still be argued that many of the concepts
employed in practical reason ± that is, reasoning about moral and political
aairs ± grew out of the distinctive experience and activities of each social
group and were embodied in its practices and language. Such cultural artifacts
were likely to vary over time, across dierent language groups, between national
societies, and even between classes. Indeed, the categories used to describe
intentional action are doubly cultural, depending on custom and consent for
their reproduction both in discourse and in political practice, and therefore
demanding that the social scientist adopt a hermeneutic methodology.
It would be anachronistic to attribute every step in this greatly truncated
argument to Mannheim. However, its methodological and political implications
are at least broadly consistent with his work. Indeed, the methodological
implication for sociological inquiry, and for a science of international relations
of the kind that Carr sought to found, was to be nicely summed up in Man and
Society. Mannheim claimed that an empirical science of society which avoided
empiricism was possible provided his view of the relationship between fact and
theory was accepted. One might start from either, `but whatever procedure [was
chosen], facts and structure are continuously related to each other and facts only
become more than data if their function in the whole mechanism is adequately
realized, for it is the total structure of society alone which reveals the real
function and meaning of the parts'.6
The argument appears to be that fact and theory, like participation and
understanding, are mutually constitutive. So for Mannheim, the individual had
meaning only through membership of society. `We belong to a group' he
claimed, `not only because we are born into it, not merely because we profess to
belong to it, nor ®nally because we give it our loyalty and allegiance, but
primarily because we see the world and certain things in the world the way it
does . . . In every concept, in every concrete meaning, there is contained a
crystallization of the experiences of a certain group.'7
If all this were as Mannheim and his followers supposed, how...
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