New Models In Geography

Richard Peet, Nigel Thrift

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134526703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

First published in 1989. It seems such a long time ago, another age—yet it is a mere twenty-odd years since the original Models in Geography was published. It is an even shorter time since the first tentative steps were taken towards an alternative formulation of what might constitute a geographical perspective within the social sciences. What came to be called the political-economy perspective has progressed with remarkable speed and energy to generate its own framework of conceptualization and analysis, its own questions and debates. The papers in these two volumes are witness to the richness and range of the work which has developed over this relatively short period within the political economy approach. Moreover, from being a debate within an institutionally defined 'discipline of geography', to introducing into that discipline ideas and discussions from the wider fields of philosophy and social science and the humanities more generally, it has now flowered into a consistent part of enquiries that span the entire realm of social studies.

Part I

NEW MODELS

1 Political economy and human geography

Richard Peet & Nigel Thrift

Introduction

Since the publication of the original Models in geography (Chorley & Haggett 1967) some 20 years ago, human geography has changed dramatically. It has matured theoretically, it is more directly oriented to social problems, and it has achieved an awareness of politics without sacrificing its advance as a ‘science’. This transformation can be traced to the emergence, and the widespread acceptance, of a new set of models which have a common root in the notion that society is best understood as a political economy.

We use the term ‘political economy’ to encompass a whole range of perspectives which sometimes differ from one another and yet share common concerns and similar viewpoints. The term does not imply geography as a type of economics. Rather economy is understood in its broad sense as social economy, or way of life, founded in production. In turn, social production is viewed not as a neutral act by neutral agents but as a political act carried out by members of classes and other social groupings. Clearly, this definition is influenced by Marxism, the leading class-orientated school of critical thought. But the political-economy approach in geography is not, and never was, confined to Marxism. Marxism was largely unknown to early radical geographers. Humanists and existentialists, who had serious differences with Marxism, have definitely been members of the political-economy school. At present, there are several critical reactions to Marxism, particularly in its stucturalist form, which nevertheless remain broadly within the political-economy stream of geographic thought. So, while political economy refers to a broad spectrum of ideas, these notions have focus and order: political-economic geographers practise their discipline as part of a general, critical theory emphasizing the social production of existence.

A number of themes related to the development and preseir contents of this school of thought are examined in this introductory chapter. We begin by tracing, in barest outline, the history of radical or critical geography. We then consider the development of the structural Marxist conception of society in the 1970s and early 1980s which provided the chief guiding theoretical influence over this development. We follow by noting some of the critical reactions to this conception in the discipline in the mid-1980s which have strongly influenced the current direction of the political-economy approach. Finally, we conclude with a statement of the present position of political-economic geography in the late 1980s. It is important to note that the chapter makes no claim to be all inclusive, noting every byway that the political-economy approach has taken. Rather, we will examine a few of the more important theoretical debates that have taken place in and around the political-economy approach to human geography since it first became of consequence.

The development of a political-economy approach

The critical anti-thesis to the thesis of conventional geography developed unevenly in time and space, so unevenly, indeed, that its various phases have frequently emerged independently rather than in linked sequence. Each phase had its distinct character, its own unique reaction to the events of its time. Each phase was also a particular reaction to themes in conventional explanation of geography at the time. Here we examine three of these phases in the recent development of conventional, geographic, thought and their critical counterparts: environmental determinism and its anarchist and Marxist critics; areal differentiation and its (limited) opposition; and, in more detail, conventional quantitative-theoretical geography and the radical geography movement.

Environmental determinism and its critics

It has been argued that modern geography first emerged as a justification for the renewed Euro-American imperial expansion of the late 19th century (Hudson 1977, Harvey & Smith 1984, Peet 1985b, Stoddart 1986). The need to explain Euro-American dominance compounded with the biological discoveries of Darwin, and Spencer’s ideology of social Darwinism, to produce an explanation of social conquest cast in terms of the varying natural qualities and abilities of different racial groups. In the new modern geography this took the particular form of environmental determinism: differences in humans’ physical and mental abilities, and in the level of their cultural and economic potential and achievement, were attributed to regionally differing natural environments. Euro-American hegemony was the natural, even god-given, consequence of the superior physical environments of Western Europe and North America.

Social Darwinism, and its geographic component environmental determinism, were opposed by the anarchist Russian geographer Kropotkin (1902). Kropotkin agreed that interaction with nature created human qualities, but differed on what these might be. As opposed to the social Darwinists’ theory of inherent competitiveness and aggression as behaviours suggesting capitalism and imperialism as the natural modes of human life, he argued for co-operativeness and sociability as the natural bases for an anarchist form of communism. Only in the 1920s did Wittfogel (1985), a Marxist with geographical interests and training, criticize the environmental thesis from a position opposed to the direct natural causation of inherent human characteristics. For Wittfogel, human labour, organized in different social forms, moulded nature into the different material (economic) bases of regional societies. These in turn were the productive bases of different human personalities and cultures; that is, humans made themselves, rather than were made by nature. Yet Wittfogel remained within the environmental tradition by concluding that nature differentially directed the development of regional labour processes. Specifically, he argued that the climatically determined need for irrigation in the East (India, China) yielded a line of social development greatly different from that followed by rainfall-fed agriculture in the West (Wittfogel 1957). Hence, entirely different kinds of civilization developed in East and West.

Kropotkin and Wittfogel both achieved political and intellectual notoriety outside geography, but they were peripheral to the main lines of development of the discipline. Conventional geography tended to stand firm in support of the current social order. This was certainly one of the reasons for its widespread adoption in schools and universities.

Areal differentiation and its opponents

The 30 years between the late 1920s and the late 1950s must be characterized as the period of conventional geography’s retreat from its position as a science of the origins of human nature, in the light of internal and external critiques of environmental determinism. Possibilism, a leading school of thought of the time, was so vague a formulation of environmental causation as to preclude systematic, theoretical, or even causal generalizations. In the United States, geography turned into areal differentiation (Hartshorne 1939, 1959): the description of the unique features of the regions of the Earth’s surface. Critical reactions to this extremely conservative position, which began to surface in the 1940s and 1950s, were muted by the rampant anti-communism of the Cold War. Some regional geographies carried isolated, critical statements. The Lattimores’ (1944) regional history of China, for example, says of late 19th-century United States foreign-policy makers that they ‘did not propose a cessation of imperialist demands on China; they merely registered a claim of “me too”’. (A few years later Lattimore (1950, p. vii, Harvey 1983, Newman 1983) found himself labelled ‘the top Russian espionage agent in this country’ by US Senator McCarthy.) Hartshorne’s conception of geography as a unique integrating science which, however, precluded generalization in the form of universal laws, also began to be opposed on theoretical grounds. Schaefer (1953) mildly proposed instead that geography explains particular phenomena as instances of general laws. In reply Hartshorne, philosopher-general of geography at the time, had merely to label Schaefer’s criticisms ‘false representation’ to dismiss them. Hartshorne commented on a brief (and critical) mention of Marx in Schaefer’s article:

Whether the analysis of Karl Marx is sound, few readers of the Annals would be competent to judge. They should be competent to judge the appropriateness of including the analogy [between Marx and the geographer Hettner] in a geographic journal (Hartshorne 1955, p. 233).

After such broadsides, criticism was limited to less directly political arenas in the purely quantitative ‘revolution’ (Burton 1963) of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Quantitive theoretical geography and the radical geography movement

We must leap into the late 1960s to find a widespread critical and political geography continuously responding to social crises and conventional geography’s analysis of them. Radical geography originated as a critical reaction to two crises of capitalism at that time: the armed struggle in the Third World periphery, specifically United States involvement in the Vietnamese War, and the eruption of urban social movements in many cities, specifically the civil rights movement in the United States and the ghetto unrest of the middle and late 1960s in the United States, Great Britain, and elsewhere. Conventional geography’s response to these momentous events lacked conviction, in more ways than one.

However, in the late 1960s some geographers already active in broader sociopolitical movements began to turn their attention inwards, towards their own discipline. The Detroit Geographical Expedition, led by William Bunge (Horvath 1971), used its conventional geographical skills on behalf of the black residents of the city’s ghettos. At Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, the radical journal Antipode began publication in 1969, carrying articles on socially relevant geographic topics (Peet 1977a).

But, it soon became apparent that conventional geographic theories and methodologies were inappropriate for a more relevant geography. The search for an alternative theoretical approach is exemplified by the intellectual biography of radical geography’s leading theorist. David Harvey (1969) had previously written a conventional treatise on geographical methodology, but in the early 1970s began exploring ideas in social and moral philosophy – topics neglected in his earlier work. The journey took him through a series of liberal formulations, based on social justice as a matter of eternal morality, to Marxism with its analysis of the injustices built into specific societies; and from an interest in material reality, merely as the place to test academic propositions, to the transformation of capitalist society through revolutionary theory (Harvey 1973, pp. 9–19, 286–314). Harvey’s journey was made by many other young radical geographers in the 1970s. For a few years in the early part of the decade radical geography explored, still from a liberal-geographical perspective, the many social injusticies of advanced capitalism (Peet 1977a). But increasingly, as the 1970s wore on, and environmental crises and economic recession were added to political problems of the 1960s critical liberal formulations were found lacking and radical geographers increasingly turned to the analysis of Marx.

The mid-1970s saw a flowering of radical culture in geography celebrated by the publication of Radical geography (Peet 1977b). Here radical geographers critically examined almost every geographic aspect of life in modern capitalism: the geography of women, the ghetto, the mentally ill, housing, rural areas, school busing, planning, migrant labour, and so on. The period was notable for a series of increasingly sophisticated critiques of conventional geography by Anderson (1973), Slater (1973, 1975, 1977), and Massey (1973). A series of exegetical writings (e.g. Harvey 1975) explored areas of Marx’s writing most applicable to geographical issues. The growing interest in Marxism was broadened to include a comprehension of social anarchism (Breibart 1975, Galois 1976). The geographical expeditionary movement, which had spread to the Canadian cities of Toronto and Vancouver and over the Atlantic to London, was joined in 1974 by the Union of Socialist Geographers, which organized leftist faculty and students in the discipline. In the late 1970s Antipode published issues on the environment and anarchism which, in retrospect, were the last bursts of colour in the fall of its 1960s-style radicalism (Peet 1985a).

The radical geography movement changed again in the 1980s. In general, it became more sober and less combative for at least four reasons. First, the mainstream of Marxist thought was subjected to a number of more or less powerful critiques. Second, the disciplining effect of the 1979–83 economic recession and a greater knowledge of existing socialist countries made revolutionary politics a less certain quantity. Third, the laid-back academic style of the 1970s was replaced by the narrower professionalism of the 1980s. Finally, some of the Young Turks who had battled against the human geography establishment now found themselves part of it.

Yet, such a momentum had been built up in the 1970s that Marxist and related scholarship continued to flourish in geography. For example, major works were published by Harvey (1982, 1987a & b) and Massey (1984). In some areas of research, such as industrial geography, views influenced by Marxism had become engrained (e.g. Massey 1984, Massey & Meegan 1986, Peet 1987, Scott & Storper 1986, Storper & Walker 1988), and even in the last bastion of the traditionalist approach, cultural geography, Marxism and other interpretations of political economy were accepted as at least one valid viewpoint (e.g. Cosgrove 1985, Cosgrove & Jackson 1987). New journals such as Society and Space, founded in 1983, were still springing up, and important collections, such as Social relations and spatial structures (Gregory 8c Urry 1985) have continued to appear.

Thus, the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• PART I NEW MODELS
• 1 Political economy and human geography
• 2 Mathematical models in human geography: 20 years on
• PART II NEW MODELS OF ENVIRONMENT AND RESOURCES
• Introduction
• 3 Resource management and natural hazards
• 4 The challenge for environmentalism
• PART III NEW MODELS OF UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT AND REGIONAL CHANGE
• Introduction
• 5 New models of regional change
• 6 Uneven development and location theory: towards a synthesis
• 7 Rural geography and political economy
• 8 The restructuring debate
• 9 Marxism, post-Marxism, and the geography of development
• PART IV NEW MODELS OF THE NATION, STATE, AND POLITICS
• Introduction
• 10 Nation, space, modernity
• 11 The state, political geography, and geography
• 12 The geography of law
• 13 The political economy of the local state
• Index