Practical and historical past. The 20´s crisis and Soviet Russia’s history from E.H. Carr. A compared historiography Essay

Resumen

This article analyzes a fundamental issue for contemporary theory of history and historiography: the types of past represented by the discourses of the social sciences and history. For the development of this problem, I study two works written by the historian and theorist of international relations Edward Hallett Carr: the History of Soviet Russia and The Twenty Years’ Crisis. The thesis of this article is that, while a historiographical work like the History of the Soviet Russia represents in its pages a “historical past”, one of internationalist theory as The Twenty Years’ Crisis represents in theirs a “practical past”. First, I make some clarifications, both about the nature of the texts and about the circumstances in which Carr wrote them; then, I refer to the way in which each one tells the past; finally, I make a general balance of the forms and uses of the past corresponding to each text.