The view that 19th century liberal democracy was based, not on a balance of forces peculiar to the economic development of the period and to countries concerned, but on certain a priori rational principles which had only to be applied in other contexts to produce similar results, was essentially utopian; and it was this view which, under Wilson’s inspiration, dominated the world after the first world war. The characteristic feature of the crisis of the twenty years between 1919 and 1939 was the abrupt descent from the visionary hopes of the first decade to the grim despair of the second, from a utopia which took little account of the reality … Continue reading E. H. Carr