ABSTRACT
This chapter turns to disciplinary history—stories the field tells about its past—as a particular subset of factual international relations narratives. Within this subset, the chapter focuses on the well-known British scholar E. H. Carr and examines disciplinary representations of his legacy as one of the founding fathers of modern academic international relations. It lays out Carr’s standard image as an early realist but promptly complicates it by noticing an alternative image: Carr as a progenitor of critical international theory, a perspective at odds with the realist approach. After unpacking this alternative image, the chapter performs a comparative analysis of the two representations and arrives at a curious discovery: although mutually incommensurable, both narratives of Carr’s bequest are factually accurate. To solve this paradox, the chapter uses White’s tropology of factual narrative discourse to suggest that the truth of each representation contains a nonempirical dimension and reflects the unique poetic style of its proponents. Carr thus emerges as a literary artifact. The chapter concludes by teasing out the justificatory function of Carr’s images and disciplinary historiography in general in the ongoing struggle among competing paradigms of international relations theory today.
