Description
This paper has two aims: first, to establish the nature of the relationship between Machiavelli and E.H. Carr; secondly, to assess Morgenthau’s claim that the Machiavellian perspective as employed by Carr leaves a theorist ‘philosophically ill-equipped’ to think ethically about IR. The article explores the parallels and affinities in Carr and Machiavelli's work and argues that Carr was perhaps more Machiavellian than he realised or was willing to admit, and that as such, he may – contra Morgenthau - be better philosophically well-equipped to deal with the question of the relationship between politics and ethics than critics have recognised – a ‘dangerous’ Machiavelli, but not a ‘disastrous’ one. Reading these authors in parallel allows us to gain a more developed sense of how both both deal with the vexed relationship of ethics to politics. While Machiavelli does not concentrate primarily on IR, what he does say suggests that he thinks international politics are inherently unstable and therefore without any chance of improvement politically or ethically. His true importance lies in demonstrating the possibility of a political ethics and the articulation of such an ethic applied to domestic politics, which, with some adjustments, could be made to serve as the basis for a realist international ethics. Carr's close adherence to Machiavelli's formula suggests that this was also his template – but was he successful in applying it to IR? By examining the two thinkers in parallel, and differentiating them when necessary, the nature of Realist ethics in political theory and IR becomes clearer and one gains a greater insight into this mode of thought about ethics. For both thinkers the universal problems of ethics are best understood in terms of judgement that allies moral requirement with political necessity.
