Description
E.H. Carr identifies Hegel as one of the most significant Realist theorists of modernity. The paper investigates this claim and, in particular, how Carr’s reading of Hegel informed the development of his ethical positions in The Twenty Years’ Crisis, Conditions of Peace and elsewhere. The paper has two primary axes of interpretation: first, I examine the critiques of law and formalistic ethics offered by Hegel and Carr in Natural Law and The Twenty Years’ Crisis respectively. I argue that in place of universalist formulae and imperatives, Hegel and Carr offer more adaptively organic ethics based in judgment. The second element of the paper revolves around the question of how to think about ethics in this fluid manner. I argue that the Hegel-Carr dialectical mode of theorising the relationship between politics and ethics offers a powerful means of navigating the space between what is morally desirable and politically necessary that is more productive than the Kantian insistence that politics must bend its knee before morality.
