Dialectics and Geography

Abstract

During the 1960’s, geography in English speaking countries enjoyed a period of development and enthusiasm without precedent: with new generations flooding the universities and dissent shaking the campuses, old structures seemed ready to crumble and even among academic geographers, new ideas were welcome, sometimes hungrily looked for. Then, the middle-class, in western Europe and North America, became frightened by its own boldness and, moved by changes in the economy, contradicted itself and looked back with nostalgia to the 1950’s. A new generation of graduate students started refusing mathematical methods and, in strong defiance of what it called ‘reason’, advocated personal contacts, ’empathy’ and socially ‘relevant’ issues: a ‘radical’ geography, often strongly colored by Christian ideology, appeared, at the antipodes — or so it seemed — of mathematical modelling. It seems as if a pendulum was endlessly moving from technology to mysticism and back, with little hope to break the vicious cycle.

The dutiful child of modern Civilization is possessed by a fear of departing from the facts which, in the very act of perception, the dominant conventions of science, commerce, and politics-cliché-like — have already molded; his anxiety is none other than the fear of social deviation.

Horkheimer and Adorno, 27: xiv