Abstract
Along the long road that led from the Truman Doctrine in 1947 to the final collapse of Soviet power over 40 years later there were an almost infinite number of intellectual battles and skirmishes surrounding the Cold War. Some of these took place in public, but many tended to be fought out in the pages of academic journals, magazines and books that were read by few but thought at the time to be deeply significant. Given the turbulent times, most of these encounters tended to be highly polemical, several became the subject of litigation, though some — like the great 1960s debate about the origins of the Cold War — helped redefine the way historians thought about the world around them. In the end, however, nearly all of these discussions returned to the same set of questions: about who started the conflict, which of the two sides (if any) held the moral high ground, on whose side should one stand and what attitude should one adopt towards the two principal antagonists? On these particularly dangerous rocks any number of reputations were made and unmade, friendships broken and forged, careers wrecked.
It is very difficult or perhaps impossible for him to get out of his skin, theoretically and ideologically. He is steeped in English empiricism and rationalism, his mind is very far from what to him are abstract dialectical speculations, and so he cannot really break down the barrier between his own way of thinking and Marxism.
Isaac Deutscher on E.H. Carr (1955)1
He calls me ‘a great respecter of policies and a despiser — sometimes — of revolutionary ideas and principles’, and speaks of ‘my impatience with Utopias, dreams and revolutionary agitation’… But does not Deutscher lean to the other side? Are not his eyes sometimes so firmly fixed on revolutionary Utopias and revolutionary ideas as to overlook the expediencies which often governed policy — even in the Lenin period?
E.H. Carr on Isaac Deutscher (1969)2
At first sight their personal amity might seem puzzling: on one side, a self-educated former member of the Polish Communist Party, an exile from Hitler and Stalin stranded in London and on the other an English historian who was an unmistakable product of Cambridge, a former member of the Foreign Office, schooled in a diplomatic service famous as a bastion of British traditionalism.
Tamara Deutscher on E.H. Carr and Isaac Deutscher (1983)3
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Notes
Quoted in Jonathan Haslam, Vices of Integrity: E.H. Carr, 1892–1982 (London: Verso, 1999), p. 140.
See E.H. Carr, ‘Introduction’, in Isaac Deutscher, ed., Heretics and Renegades and Other Essays (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955), pp. 3–4.
On Deutscher’s early years, see Ludger Syre, Isaac Deutscher: Marxist, Publizist, Historiker: Sein Leben und Werk, 1907–1967 (Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 1984), pp. 22–158
Tamara Deutscher, ‘Introduction: The Education of Jewish Child’, in Isaac Deutscher, ed., The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 1–24
and Daniel Singer, ‘Armed with a Pen’, in David Horowitz, ed., Isaac Deutscher: The Man and His Work (London: Macdonald, 1971), pp. 19–56.
E.H. Carr, 1917: Before and After (London: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 128–76.
See E.H. Carr, ‘The Riddle of a Public Face’, The New Republic, 28 November 1949.
See Carr’s ‘Trotsky and Bolshevism’, The Times Literary Supplement, 19 February 1954.
See E.H. Carr, ‘Early Influences’, The Sunday Times, 20 November 1970.
Leopold Labedz, ‘E.H. Carr: An Historian Overtaken by History’, Survey, Vol. 30 (March 1988), p. 104.
Norman Stone, ‘Grim Eminence’, The London Review of Books, 20 January 1983, p. 7.
See Michael Cox, ‘Will the Real E.H. Carr Please Stand up?’, International Affairs, Vol. 75, No. 3 (July 1999), pp. 643–53.
Isaac Deutscher, Russia after Stalin (1953; London: Jonathan Cape, 1969) p. 54.
E.H. Carr, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926–1929:2 (1971: Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 477.
See Carr’s ‘Editor’s Introduction’ in N. Bukharin and E. Preobrajensky, The ABC of Communism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 51.
Quoted from Isaac Deutscher, ‘Between Past and Future’, in his Ironies of History: Essays On Contemporary Communism (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 199–206.
Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, Trotsky: 1929–1940 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 510–23.
Isaac Deutscher, The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917–1967 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 37.
E. H. Carr, ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in N. Bukharin and E. Preobrajensky, The ABC of Communism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 51.
I explore these issues in Michael Cox, Rethinking The Soviet Collapse: Sovietology, The Death of Communism and the New Russia (London: Cassell/Pinter, 1998).
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© 2000 Michael Cox
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Cox, M. (2000). E.H. Carr and Isaac Deutscher: a Very ‘Special Relationship’. In: Cox, M. (eds) E. H. Carr. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08823-9_7
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