Reconstructions

Abstract

The history of geography is often represented as an intellectual arc descending from the past to the present, and its path is illuminated by a series of progressions which, characteristically, conflate historical relations and logical dependencies. Hartshorne’s The Nature of Geography is perhaps the most obvious example. Its descriptive journey ‘from Kant through Humboldt and Ritter to Richthofen and Hettner’ is also, as Stoddart recognises, unequivocally prescriptive: ‘the actors in the history are readily characterised into those who followed the track (and who were therefore right) and those who blundered off (and were hence wrong)’.¹ Much the same point was made by Gouldner:

The search for convergences with and in the past…seeks to reveal a tacit consensus of great minds and, by showing this, to lend credence to the conclusions that they are held to have converged upon unwittingly. Convergence thus becomes a rhetoric, a way of persuading men to accept certain views. The implication is that if these great men, tacitly or explicitly, agreed on a given view, it must have a prima facie cogency.²

There are all sorts of reasons why there is no past era one knows so little about as the three to five decades that lie between one’s own twentieth year and one’s father’s twentieth year.

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities