The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939 Quotes

“Immature thought is predominately purposive and utopian. Thought which rejects purpose altogether is the thought of old age. Mature thought combines purpose with observation and analysis.”
― Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations

“The trade unionist tends to regard the intellectual as a utopian theorist lacking experience in the practical problems of the movement. The intellectual condemns the trade union leader as a bureaucrat. The recurrent conflicts between factions within the Bolshevik party in Soviet Russia were in part, at any rate, explicable as conflicts between the "party intellectuals", represented by Bukharin, Kamanev, Radek and Trotsky, and the "party machine" represented by Lenin, Sverdlov and Stalin.”
― Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations

“Expanding prosperity contributed to the popularity of the doctrine of the harmony of interests in three different ways. It attenuated competition for markets among producers, since fresh markets were constantly becoming available; it postponed the class issue, with its insistence on the primary importance of equitable distribution, by extending to members of the less prosperous classes some share in the general prosperity; and by creating a sense of confidence in present and future well-being, it encouraged men to believe that the world was ordered on so rational a plan as the natural harmony of interests. It was the continual widening of the field of demand which, for half a century, made capitalism operate as if it were a liberal utopia.”
― Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations

“Biologically and economically, the doctrine of the harmony of interests was only tenable if you left out of account the interest of the weak who must be driven to the wall, or called in the next world to redress the balance of the present.”
― Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations

“Like the alchemists, they were content to advocate highly imaginative solutions whose relation to existing facts was one of flat negation.”
― Edward Hallett Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations