Charles Jones

E. H. Carr is widely remembered as an influential theorist of international relations. The scourge of inter-war idealists, he became the best-known Briton in a generation of predominantly American political realists. But Carr's realism differed greatly from that of his contemporaries: a vigorous advocate of social and economic planning and friend of the Soviet Union, he stood closer to Lenin than to Morgenthau. In this book Charles Jones makes sense of Carr's distinctive form of realism by examining his rhetoric and the reciprocal relationship between theory and policy-making in his writings. Close attention is paid to the period from 1936, when Carr left the Foreign Office, through his subsequent career as a one-man foreign ministry at Aberystwyth, the Ministry of Information, and above all The Times, culminating in the final frustration of his schemes for continued British world power in 1947.

E. H. Carr is widely remembered as an influential theorist of international relations. The scourge of inter-war idealists, he became the best-known Briton in a generation of predominantly American political realists. But Carr’s realism differed greatly from that of his contemporaries: a vigorous advocate of social and economic planning and friend of the Soviet Union, he stood closer to Lenin than to Morgenthau. In this book Charles Jones makes sense of Carr’s distinctive form of realism by examining his rhetoric and the reciprocal relationship between theory and policy-making in his writings. Close attention is paid to the period from 1936, when Carr left the Foreign Office, through his subsequent career as a one-man foreign ministry at Aberystwyth, the Ministry of Information, and above all The Times, culminating in the final frustration of his schemes for continued British world power in 1947.

The contributors to this volume cover the international range of scholarship in the field of Historical Linguistics, as well as some of its major themes. The work and ideas they discuss are relevant not only to other aspects of Historical Linguistics but also to more general developments in linguistic theory. Along with Professor Jones' Introduction, their comments provide a major overview of Historical Linguistics that will be the reference point for its development for many years to come and form an important contribution to general theories of linguistic behaviour.

This is an attempt to view historical phonological change as an ongoing, recurrent process. The author sees like events occurring at all periods, a phenomenon which he considers is disguised by too great a reliance upon certain characteristics of the scholarly tradition. Thus he argues that those innovations arrived at by speakers of the English language many years ago are not in principle unlike those that can be seen to be happening today. Phonological mutations are, on the whole, not to be regarded as unique, novel, once only events. Speakers appear to present to speech sound materials, a limited set of evaluative and decoding perceptions, together with what would seem to be a finite number of innovation producing stratagems in response to their interpretation. It is stressed that this interpretation may itself be a direct product of the kinds of data selected for presentation in traditional handbooks and Jones notes the fact that phonological change is often "messy" and responsive to a highly tuned ability to perceive fine phonetic detail of a type which, by definition, rarely has the opportunity to surface in historical data sources.