Since its publication, "The Twenty Years' Crisis" has been an essential book in the study of international relations. It is still commonly read in undergraduate courses, and the book is considered "one of the founding texts of classical realism". The book has served as the inspiration for numerous other works, such as "The Eighty Years' Crisis", a book written by the International Studies Association as a survey of trends in the discipline, edited by Michael Cox, Tim Dunne, and Ken Booth, who write that "many of the arguments and dilemmas in Carr's "The Twenty Years' Crisis" are relevant to the theory and practice of international politics today", praising the book as "one of the few books in the 80 years of the discipline which leave us nowhere to hide".