This thesis re-evaluates E. H. Carr's approaches to the issues of international relations, presenting his critique of the hegemonic status of Western liberalism as the guiding thread informing his thought. In the discipline of IR, his concern to displace nineteenth-century liberal internationalism has been regarded simply as part of a realist attack on the 'Utopianism' of the inter-war period, associated with his long established reputation as a Realist who denounced the under-estimation of the role of power in international politics. However, this picture of Carr is to a significant extent misleading, and there is a need for the nature of his thought to be understood in a wider historical and intellectual context. Taking a historical and context-sensitive approach, this thesis explores his unmasking of the claim that liberal principles, regarded as absolute and universal by those who had been strongly influenced by the liberal tradition, were not genuine principles at all; they were the ideological reflection of a particular interest at a particular time, essentially that of the 'haves', who wished to maintain the status quo. To expose and then transcend this logic, Can, in tackling the individual political issues and advancing the prescriptions for resolving them, introduced a realist-relativist approach to expose the ever-changing reality of international relations and defended a progressive attitude towards the transformation of world politics. The thesis illuminates how they developed through a dialectical process guided by his central question of how the Western liberal tradition should be superseded in a historically progressive way, seeking to navigate our way out of some of the sterile conceptual blind alleys that dominated IR theory until fairly recently and also contribute to understanding the contemporary world in a more subtle and historically sensitive way.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:633487 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Yamanaka, Hitomi |
| Publisher | Keele University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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