Reason and romance: The place of revolution in the works of E.H. Carr

Abstract

There could be no concept more central to the extended oeuvre of Carr than that of revolution. In a half-century of intellectual output Carr produced works of three broad kinds: in the early 1930s a set of four biographical studies - Dostoevsky, Karl Marx, Michael Bakunin and the Romantic Exiles - in the years after the Second World War a 14-volume study of the outcome of the Bolshevik Revolution spanning the years 1917 to 1932, accompanied by essays on the same theme, and, in the intervening decade a set of broad studies, historic and analytic, of international relations, among them The Twenty Years’ Crisis, International Relations Between the Wars, Nationalism and After and The Soviet Impact on the Western World. His most famous work What is History?, though published in 1961, can be taken as part of the second period.