Pre-class Carr

I found this reading refreshing.

I think it is interesting that Carr doesn't really seem to be criticizing the values of the enlightenment, equality ect..

Carr, instead, is pointing out the hypocrisy's of leaders, like Wilson, who, like Kant, believe that they can simply create systems as if the normative Kantian world has already been realized.

Taking a step back, Both Carr and Kant see a positive role for war. Kant believes war is useful for pulling people out of the state of nature and into Civilization. Kant argues that, once everyone has been liberated from the ignorance of the state of nature, nature will guide the world toward disarmament.

I read Carr as saying to policy makers, “hey...the world that Kant says is coming in Perpetual Peace, the one in which we all start to disarm, is NOT the world that we currently live in. And to impose the peace federation that Kant envisioned on the world right now, necessarily ignores the huge inequalities in power exist among nations.”

Carr gives agency to those who get the short end of these power imbalances and argues, that given the current construction of reality, a reality where the rhetoric of the class war has been transformed into rhetoric of war between unequal nations, peace can not be secured by simply telling everyone that they have an equal voice in some assembly while it is perfectly clear that in all other realms "some pigs are more equal."

I am also interested in Carr's understanding of the power/morality relationship on 217 and his uncomfort with the rise of the nation state as the most important actor in history.