3 CONFERENCES AT PRAGUE AND BERGEN AND THE LOOMING WAR 341In a powerful critique of The Thirty Years’ Crisis, Leonard Woolf con-
tended that was not driven to support Chamberlain’s policy based upon
a sound and sophisticated theory of international relations. Rather,
Woolf stated that Carr was ‘unconsciously infected with the temporary
social psychology of the time,’ a psychology that vulgarly assumed that
‘power, violence and conflict are more “real” elements in society than...
beliefs, law, and co-operation for a common end of common interests.’
Based upon this ‘completely unscientific’ assumption, Woolf declared,
Carr had proceeded to dismiss any policy ‘inconsistent with existing facts’
and the reality of ‘power, violence and conflict’ as utopian and therefore
doomed to failure.^360
It is worth noting here that Woolf had some years earlier levelled
a charge at Zimmern similar to the charge that he now levelled at Carr:
according to Woolf, Zimmern had set out in his The League of Nations
and the Rule of Law to demonstrate that the League had been ‘failure, that
it was bound to be so, and that anyone who “believes in” or “supports”
it is one of “discordant congregation” of impossible “idealists.”^361 This
assessment is misleading and I will explain why this is the case below. For
the moment, let us note how Woolf turned Carr’s allegedly unscientific
assumption against Carr himself. Woolf attacked Carr for entertaining the
crude and fallacious notion ‘that failure...proves somehow or other that
the attempt itself was discreditable and unattainable.’ If Carr discerned
in the collapse of the League evidence of the utopianism on which it was
based, why did he not see, Woolf asked, evidence of utopianism in the pol-
icy of appeasement. The aim of this policy, Woolf pointed out, was ‘cer-
tainly not attained and was probably unattainable,’ adding the observation
that it had now been ‘abandoned for its exact opposite.’^362
(^360) Leonard Woolf, ‘Utopia and Reality,’ Political Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1940): 167–82,
173–74.
(^361) Leonard Woolf, review of Survey of International Affairs, 1934, by Arnold J.
Toynbee, assisted by V. M. Boulton; The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 1918–
1935 , by Alfred Zimmern; International Law, by J. Oppenheim; and The Anti-Drug
Campaign, by S. H. Bailey, Political Quarterly 7, no. 2 (1936): 288–91, 289–90.
(^362) Woolf, ‘Utopia and Reality,’ 172–74.
have been seriously unjust in substance, but it eventually succumbed because it had been
achieved by procedures of dictation which did not provide assurances that it was just.
Germany’s resentment at the treaty was mobilized less against the terms of the treaty than
against its dictated origin’ (ibid., 31–32).