Edward Hallett Carr CBE FBA (28 June 1892 – 3 November 1982) was a British historian, diplomat, journalist and international relations theorist, and an opponent of empiricism within historiography.

Educated at the Merchant Taylors' School, London, and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, Carr began his career as a diplomat in 1916; three years later, he participated at the Paris Peace Conference as a member of the British delegation.

Becoming increasingly preoccupied with the study of international relations and of the Soviet Union, he resigned from the Foreign Office in 1936 to begin an academic career.

From 1941 to 1946, Carr worked as an assistant editor at The Times, where he was noted for his leaders (editorials) urging a socialist system and an Anglo-Soviet alliance as the basis of a post-war order.

[2] When Joseph Chamberlain proclaimed his opposition to free trade and announced in favour of Imperial Preference, Carr's father, to whom all tariffs were abhorrent, switched his political loyalties.

[2] As a diplomat, Carr was later praised by the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax as someone who had "distinguished himself not only by sound learning and political understanding, but also in administrative ability".

[7] He later wrote that in the spring of 1919 he "was disappointed when he [Lloyd George] gave way (in part) on the Russian question in order to buy French consent to concessions to Germany".

[20] In an article entitled "Age of Reason" published in the Spectator on 26 April 1930, Carr attacked what he regarded as the prevailing culture of pessimism within the West, which he blamed on the French writer Marcel Proust.

[24] In his 1934 biography of Marx, Carr presented his subject as a highly intelligent man and a gifted writer, but one whose talents were devoted entirely to destruction.

[28] In his books such as The Romantic Exiles and Dostoevsky, Carr was noted for his highly ironical treatment of his subjects, implying that their lives were of interest but not of great importance.

[31] In an essay published in February 1933 in the Fortnightly Review, Carr blamed what he regarded as a punitive Versailles treaty for the recent accession to power of Adolf Hitler.

[22] Additionally, in articles published in The Christian Science Monitor on 2 December 1936 and in the January 1937 edition of Fortnightly Review, Carr argued that the Soviet Union and France were not working for collective security but rather "a division of the Great Powers into two armored camps", supported non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War, and asserted that King Leopold III of Belgium had made a major step towards peace with his declaration of neutrality of 14 October 1936.

[35] Two major intellectual influences on Carr in the mid-1930s were Karl Mannheim's 1936 book Ideology and Utopia, and the work of Reinhold Niebuhr on the need to combine morality with realism.

[37] Lord Davies had established the Wilson Chair in 1924 with the intention of increasing public support for his beloved League, which helps to explain his chagrin at Carr's anti-League lectures.

[44] In his writings on international affairs in British newspapers, Carr criticised the Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš for clinging to the alliance with France, rather than accepting that it was his country's destiny to be in the German sphere of influence.

[35] At the same time, Carr strongly praised the Polish Foreign Minister Colonel Józef Beck for his balancing act between France, Germany, and the Soviet Union.

[35] In the late 1930s, Carr started to become even more sympathetic toward the Soviet Union, as he was much impressed by the achievements of the Five-Year Plans, which stood in marked contrast to the failures of capitalism during the Great Depression.

[14][62] In his leaders on foreign affairs, Carr was very consistent in arguing after 1941 that, once the war ended, it was the fate of Eastern Europe to come into the Soviet sphere of influence, and claimed that any effort to the contrary was both vain and immoral.

[1] In his books, and his Times leaders, Carr urged for the creation of a socialist European federation anchored by an Anglo-German partnership that would be aligned with the Soviet Union against the United States.

[62] The next month, Carr's relations with the Polish government were further worsened by the storm caused by the discovery of the Katyn massacre committed by the Russian NKVD in 1940.

In a leader entitled "Russia and Poland" on 28 April 1943, Carr blasted the Polish government for accusing the Soviets of committing the Katyn massacre and for asking the Red Cross to investigate.

[72] In contrast to his support for EAM/ELAS, Carr was strongly critical of the legitimate Polish government in exile and its Armia Krajowa (Home Army) resistance organisation.

"[66] During a 1945 lecture series entitled The Soviet Impact on the Western World, which was published as a book in 1946, Carr argued that "The trend away from individualism and towards totalitarianism is everywhere unmistakable", that Marxism was the by far the most successful type of totalitarianism as proved by Soviet industrial growth and the Red Army's role in defeating Germany, and that only the "blind and incurable ignored these trends".

[80] Carr was a reclusive man whom few knew well, but his circle of close friends included Isaac Deutscher, A. J. P. Taylor, Harold Laski and Karl Mannheim.

[16]: 78–79  In the early 1950s, when Carr sat on the editorial board of Chatham House, he attempted to block the publication of the manuscript that eventually became The Origins of the Communist Autocracy by Leonard Schapiro on the ground that the subject of repression in the Soviet Union was not a serious topic for a historian.

[14] That same year, Carr wrote in an essay that in India, where "liberalism is professed and to some extent practised, millions of people would die without American charity.

[85] In 1961, Carr published an anonymous and very favourable review of his friend A. J. P. Taylor's contentious book The Origins of the Second World War, which caused much controversy.

The contributors included Sir Isaiah Berlin, Arthur Lehning, G. A. Cohen, Monica Partridge, Beryl Williams, Eleonore Breuning, D. C. Watt, Mary Holdsworth, Roger Morgan, Alec Nove, John Erickson, Michael Kaser, R. W. Davies, Moshe Lewin, Maurice Dobb, and Lionel Kochan.

[96] Like many others, Carr argued that the emergence of Russia from a backward peasant economy to a leading industrial power was the most important event of the 20th century.

[109] Hans Morgenthau, a fellow realist, wrote of Carr's work that it "provides a most lucid and brilliant exposure of the faults of contemporary political thought in the Western world... especially in so far as it concerns international affairs.