Political Geography 19 (2000) 943955

www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo

Friedrich Ratzel and the nature of (political)

geography
Franco Farinelli

Dipartimento di Comunicazione, Universita` di Bologna, Via Toffano, 2/2, 40125 Bologna, Italy

Abstract
It is impossible to understand Ratzels Politische Geographie without placing the figure of
its author in the perspective of the critical bourgeois geography of the eighteenth century and
the first half of the nineteenth century. From this point of view, Ratzel is the last representative
of this bourgeois movement born in the first part of the eighteenth century in Germany with
the name of pure geography or natural geography, and developed in the following century
thanks to the great works of Karl Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt. The purpose of bourgeois critical geography was to create a geographical discourse (a reasoning) able to transcend
the identification between geographic knowledge and cartographic representation that was
maintained by the Staatsgeographenthat is by the state geographers who defended the feudal
aristocratic regime. But it is precisely this identification that German bourgeois geographers
appropriated in the second half of the nineteenth century, after the bourgeoisie came into
power through a compromise with its ancient political opponent. Only Ratzel, direct heir of
the Erdkunde tradition of Ritter and von Humboldt, was an exception by opposing the new
bourgeois state geography with his own state-based geography. 2000 Published by Elsevier
Science Ltd.
Keywords: Political geography; Friedrich Ratzel; History of geography; Landscape; Politics

Introduction
It is important to define at the outset what I mean in this paper by bourgeois.
This is not an ideological term but an historical one: bourgeois is the translation
of burgerlich, whichas the Grimm brothers explainmeans plebeian but also
civilian, in contrast to noble and aristocratic (Grimm, 1860, p. 539). It is in
* Tel.: +39-051-301521; fax: +39-051-300006.
E-mail address: farinell@dsc.unibo.it (F. Farinelli).
0962-6298/00/$ - see front matter 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.
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F. Farinelli / Political Geography 19 (2000) 943955

Germany that contemporary geographical knowledge originated at the beginning of

the eighteenth century, with a very precise and political purposethe destruction of
the court of the old truth, that is of the absolute, aristocratic, feudal statein which
the new facts were transformed into signs and miracles (Habermas, 1971, p. 29).
For reasons that will become clear by the end of this paper, the history of geography
has forgotten this origin. However, as far as the term political, it is at this point
impossible to pin down precisely its meaning. My argument here will in fact revolve
around the structural mutations of the political function of geography, with special
reference to Ratzels Politische Geographie (1897). While this book is usually understood as the beginning of political geography (Douglas Jackson and Samuel, 1971,
p. 1; Matzenetter, 1977, pp. 78), it paradoxically also signals its end. In fact, in
the history of geographic thought, Ratzels geography of the state represents an alternative to state geography, which, in the middle of the nineteenth century, arose from
the ashes and continued to dominate this discipline until the end of the Second
World War.
The nature of aristocratic-feudal geography and the power of cartographic
reason
Ironically drawn towards the imitation of the very logic it opposes, bourgeois
geography shows right from the beginning characteristics that are between the monstrous and the prodigious, confluent with other mythological productions (Reynaud,
1979). It was born tamed and with expertise, and behind its innocent appearance and
infantile forms, hides a terrible astuteness. Its very name conceals a deceit because it
serves to cover its real intentions. German historiography alone keeps the record of
its birth which dates to 1726, the year in which Polycarpus Leyser publishes at
Helmstedt his Comment of the real method of geography in Latin. According to
Emil Wisotzki (1897, p. 197), this work transformed geography into a completely
different discipline and, despite the fact that its content was not very original, Leysers study pursued something that up to that point was merely hinted at and existed
only in the form of an aphorism, by transforming it into an overt protest against a
purely political representation of the earths surface.
Political representation meant (at this time) a representation that consideredas
Leyser writesthe political aspects of countries, that is the distributions of the territories and places within a state according to the political interests (but also boundaries: fines) of those who had the power (imperantes). By contrast, according to
Leyser, true geography must leave these preoccupations to the statesman, and deal
with the variations of the ecumene (orbis habitatus) imposed and constituted by
nature itself; it deals therefore with natural divisions. The discipline was for this
reason also called natural geography or pure geography, where pure designates
the rejection of the utility of geographical knowledge, a refusal to serve a political
function. It is significant that it was precisely with the label of pure geography
that the first form of bourgeois geography came to light. Apparently, this was a
geography for the sake of geography, that claimed the right of geographical knowledge to be neutral and to be of no use other than geographical.

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We have to read the prompt response of the state geographers (Staatsgeographen)

to these ideas to realize that it is precisely this claim, apparently so humble, that
represented the only form of criticism possible not in geography but through geography. Among the most lively voices in this debate was that of Gustav Conrad Hering,
the Prussian imperial war adviser and author of Thoughts upon the utility and the
necessity of geography published in Berlin in 1728. He summed up Leysers theory
in the following manner. So far, nobody has employed the right criteria in geographical classification. This was neither a lexical onethat is an alphabetical cataloguing
of different placesnor one based on the political boundaries of different regions
(Lander), but it was one perspective on a natural situation, on the way in which
regions and places are situated in relation to the sea, the rivers and other unchangeable vicinities. At all times, political divisions and the naming (Benennungen) that
originates from them have represented the main rule, states Hering, but the so-called
geographia naturalis was not following this rule any longer. For Hering, on the
contrary, the naming of the space must remain strictly linked to political divisions
and the criteria in geography books must reflect this hierarchy of power: first must
come the greatest parts of the political space followed by the smaller ones (Hering,
1728, pp. 1415, 20, 21, 4748, 27).
As can be noted, the issue of the discourse on geographical method is connected
through the question of its instrumentality to the relationship between knowledge
and power. To call this relationship into question again, as Leyser did, means to
reject the existing power, beginning with its primordial expression, the very power
that decides what has a name and what has not, effectively deciding what exists and
what does not exist. The aristocratic feudal geography implicitly and completely
gave this function to the map. How could we call, wondered Eberhard David Hauber,
author in 1727 of the Useful discourse on the present state of geography, the
natural spaces that Leyser was talking about? Take your maps, said Hauber, and
have a look: what kind of names can you find? According to Hauber, natural
geography cannot offer an answer, because only the space that is politically divided
can have a namethe name of the state and its organs. Therefore, Hauber concludes,
political divisions must remain the foundation of geography, and it is from there that
everything must begin, not least because the majority of readers are more inclined
towards this kind of geography. If it were otherwise, he goes on, just imagine the
disorder that would result from an inverted order! (Hauber, 1727, p. 71).
As this reference to the readers shows, this prospect of disorder is to be intended
literally. The criticism of the order of geographic discourse is equivalent in fact to
the criticism of the existing social order, as the old-fashioned state geographers were
well aware. Leysers attempts to go against the political nature of geography is an
attempt to transcend the existing political situation. However, theorizing a kind of
knowledge that does not serve a political function serves to free it from the contingent
political reality, in turn only serving to subordinate it to another kind of politics
founded on another kind of domination. Only in the name of a fictitious purity can
natural geography criticize state geography, that is a form of geographic knowledge
that was immediately instrumental to the interests of aristocratic feudal power. This
polarization between natural geography and state geography reflects the polariz-

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ation in the eighteenth century between morality and politics. As Reinhardt Koselleck
(1976, pp. 118119) has stated, bourgeois political criticism was not based simply
on a moral issue, but already existed in the separation between a moral and a political
issue. In this way, the separation within geographic knowledge of two fields, a natural
one and a political one, is historically both a premise and a consequence of a political
criticism that comes from geography. Like moral judgement, geographical judgement, and more generally scientific judgement, functions as a critique of politics,
not simply because it judges politics, but mostly because it is a judging subject that
stays outside the traditional realm of politics. Both the moral judgement and the
scientific-geographic judgement conform to the strategy of the Weltburgerplan, that
is of the bourgeois plan of world dominion. This plan was founded on what Koselleck
(1976, p. 194) calls an indirect taking overa breaking away first from the absolute state in a stage of the development of civil society, and second to occupy the
state in a way that seems apolitical precisely because of this separation.
The civil war between state geographers and pure geographers lasted a whole
century. The former were firm in considering space as political production; the latter
tried to individualize and systematically classify natural spaces. In Hering and Haubers booklets, the words Land (region) and Staat (state) are synonyms; they are two
different words even though they do not mean different things. On the contrary
and this is only one such exampleJohann Christian Gatterer in his Manual of
geography published in Gottingen in 1775 anticipated the development of Landerkunde (that is regional geography) as something different from Staatenkunde (that
is political geography). But the Landerkunde was simply nothing but the attempt to
describe political boundaries as natural lines. In other words the regions for Gatterer
were nothing but states to which the author gives natural names; for example, he
defined the reigns of Spain and Portugal as the Pireneis Peninsula. It was a device
that did not last long. The limitation of Gatterers study was contained in its own
premises, because it was impossible to describe the peninsula without separating it
again into two different states (Gatterer, 1775, pp. 5, 187; Wisotzki, 1897, p. 202).
In the last instance for Gatterer too, a regional geography could not practically be
differentiated from a simple political description.
In a period of the transition from a feudal view of the world (Weltbild) to a
bourgeois one, this example is only one instance of the impotence of the geographer
to prefigurewithout running into contradictory and shaky definitionsthe destruction of the narrow spatial limits of the absolute states that made up Germany at the
dawn of the organization of German public opinion. This is also a demonstration of
the impossibility of imposing a bourgeois view of the world unless it was within a
wider and more complex Weltanschauung, a complex and elaborated theory of
knowledge. According to Habermas, the world images are always ideological
because they legitimate power. They have the paradoxical task of justifying a principle of social norms without allowing a spontaneous discourse that would unveil
the false pretences of the existing institutions. The representations of the world which
legitimate power give an apparently objective justification to those norms that cannot
be justified in relation to social norms in general. Therefore, these norms, in order
to be established, need an apparent justification and legitimation (Habermas, 1973,

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p. 174). And what Habermas says about representation of the world in general is,
above all, true for maps.

The attempt of the Erdkunde: a new society for a new state

Johann Gottfried Ludde, the first historian of the methodology of bourgeois
geography, has provided the most apt definition of Erdkunde: a scientific discourse
too complicated to be re-absorbed in a simple writing, that is in a map (Ludde,
1849, p. XI). This definition unveils the secret intentions of pure geography: to
escape, through the discursive practices of the republic of the savants, the control
of geographical knowledge imposed by state geographers. The skeptical opinion of
Hering (1728, pp. 1516) on Leysers theories was devastating:
I would like (therefore) for someone to explain to me how one can build a
geography for geographys sake, or a geography which serves an historical purpose or any other purpose, without using political partitions. For this one would
need alternative regional maps, because the present ones are based on such partitions. I still cannot comprehend how the author can reject political divisions and,
at the same time, think that the regional maps that have been used until today
are valid.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the separation of state and society in
Germany was, as opposed to the United Kingdom and France, only in its initial
stages but the Napoleonic compromise between the state and civil society was scrutinized also in Germany. In the Allgemeine Landrecht, the civil code promulgated in
1794, reflecting the idea of a state inspired by a monarchy, went hand in hand with
emancipation and conservatorism (Conze, 1958, pp. 2, 6, 8). In the first half of the
nineteenth century, in Prussia between reformation and revolution, to quote the title
of the Kosellecks major work, the first signs of the institutionalization of the
expression of society through the state was beginning to appear. An example of such
institutionalization is the teaching of bourgeois geography at the University and the
Military Academy of Berlin in 1820 by Carl Ritter. In his prefatory notes to the first
edition of Politische Geographie, Ratzel (1923, p. III) stresses the importance of the
work of Ritter for the development of the political character of geography. This
remark was very telling because during the forty years that passed from the death
of Ritter to the systematization of geographical knowledge by Ratzel, Ritters contribution to political geography was totally forgotten. In this regard, a recent French
translation of Ritters theoretical essays is significant. At the beginning of this translation is the introduction to the first volume, written in 1817, of a huge Erdkunde
(Geography). Here, Ritter indicated who he is addressing, namely der sittliche
Mensch, that is literally the moral man. But in the French translation this is
rendered into a general expression of every man who conforms to a certain code
of behaviour (Ritter, 1974, p. 41) with the result that the specific historical and
political significance of Ritters original expression is lost.

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Taking inspiration from Koselleck, we have already noted the important function
of morality in bourgeois claims to power, claims that rested on the separation and
autonomy of morality from the political sphere. Ritter was the first geographer to
describe earth in the image and likeness of the moral man, that is of the social man,
defined as a historically determined member of society belonging to the bourgeois
public sphere, the subject of a new private law and the agent of an ever-expanding
market economy. In a word, he is an individual. Earth, according to Ritter, is a
big and autonomous planetary individual and the natural divisions of earth, beginning with the continents, were described as minor individuals. The purpose of composing a general comparative geography was above all to individualize precisely
(Individualisierung) natural objects in order to establish fundamental types of formations that constitute the space filled with earthly things, and its reciprocal
relationships through the determination of all autonomous and specific forms. This
was because earth independently from man, without man and before man is the
theatre of natural events. Ultimately, Ritters purpose was to fully comprehend the
history of man and people from the point of view of the whole of their activities
which has until this time been overlooked. To put this another way, Ritter sought
to understand earth in its essential relationship to mankind. All this is done with
an anticipatory intention: to predict the necessary evolutionary pattern of a certain
people starting from general data, a pattern which should be followed by that people
in order to gain prosperity, which an eternal and just destiny bestows on those who
have faith (Ritter, 1852, pp. 6, 8, 10, 20, 23, 7073; Daniel, 1862, pp. 1617, 32).
At this point, we are no longer simply talking about geography but about Herder
and the romantic version of the philosophy of history, as Ratzel first pointed out
(Ratzel, 1882, p. 24; Lehmann, 1883). According to Koselleck, here lies the form
through which the moral bourgeois transcends the division between a moral stance
and power. This vision conceals the prognosis that arose from the pretension of the
dominion of the state on the one hand, and society on the other, effectively coinciding with the political and social revolution. (Koselleck, 1976, pp. 174175, 180). In
fact, this kind of knowledge is no longer called geography but Erdkunde, that is
knowledge of the earth. As Ritter used to say in his lectures, this was not simply
a pure and simple knowledge (Kenntniss), but a penetrating re-cognition (Erkenntniss) of space of the earth (Daniel, 1862, p. 18).
The realization that objective knowledgeor rather an attempt at objective knowledgeis nothing but a recognition of the objectivity of the sum of subjective values
gives scientific importance to the Erdkunde. The legitimation of aristocratic and feudal geography consisted in its being directly functional for a particular regime of
political power. In this way there was not, strictly speaking, any need for legitimation
in the bourgeois sense of the word. On the contrary, bourgeois knowledge that was
the expression of a struggle against the state could not be legitimated by the existing
power, as it could not openly declare it had a political function. For this reason it
had to fix rules, goals, and procedures whose natures were not political but scientific,
internal to knowledge itself. Political legitimation was then substituted by an epistemological legitimation that was, however, a clandestine way in which a society
expressed its political impotence while it was not yet politically enfranchised. The

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attempt by Ritter, the geographer who together with von Humboldt best represents
this historical moment, was founded precisely and fundamentally on the effort to
settle the relationship between an old form of knowledge and a new one, between
ideology (an indispensable stage in the process towards knowledge) and science.
The latter is nothing but the attempt to go beyond ideology, the ideal background
that one ideally should inhabit. This is a subjective background, historically changeable, and therefore for Ritter the Erdkunde means only the individual knowledge
that we have acquired of the earth up to that moment (Daniel, 1862, p. 17). Many
contemporary geographers are Ritters (unaware) followers, when they say, for
instance, that scientific objectivity has to go through the recognition of its subjective
character and point of view and that it is only by choosing the method of transparency . . . the preliminary declaration of ones ideology, that one can hope to
suggest nothing but honest true declarations. (Racine, 1981, pp. 8889).
The characteristic of this pre-scientific hypothesis or thesis, whose formulation
allows us to transform the multiplicity of empirical facts into a unity (Ritter, 1852,
p. 26), reveals the political limits of Ritters ideas. These are the same limits that
Carl Schmitt applied to political romanticism, that consisted in moving away from
the sphere in which the conflict takes placethat is the politicaltowards what is
considered a higher spherethat is religion. And in Ritters case, too, we end up
with a decidedly pro-government attitude (Schmitt, 1981, p. 239). But the Prussia
of Friedrich Wilhelm III was a country in which, in the university as well as in the
Military Academy, the geographer had the task of critiquing existing geographic
thought (Kramer, 1875, p. 375).
For Alexander von Humboldt also, the Erdkunde was a theory of earth (von
Humboldt, 1793, p. 9); he argued that we wrongly believe to receive from the world
outside what we ourselves have placed in it (von Humboldt, 1845, p. 8). In opposition to Ritters position, Humboldts relationship with institutions was more articulated and dialectical, to a point that it almost creates an opposing position. In contradistinction to Ritter, his theory was founded on an open admission of the political
project that sustained it. A republican at the court of the King, von Humboldt was
never to abandon the ethical grounds of the French revolution and subsequently
behaved according to the latter up to his death (Beck, 1961, p. 188). If Georg
Forster, the Jacobin from Mainz who took von Humboldt to Paris in 1790, was
perhaps the first one to introduce into Germany the modern idea of public opinion
as a means of common and public reflection on the foundation of social order
(Habermas, 1971, pp. 119, 125), it was von Humboldts role to employ science to
establish in his own country a more solid relationship between the public literary
sphere and the political one.
Towards the end of 1827, von Humboldt read in Berlin the first of his Lectures
on the cosmos (Kosmosvorlesungen). Chronicles of this period have commented on
the kind of public, important ladies of rank, artisans, princes, master builders and
carpenters (Beck, 1961, pp. 9192), that together constituted the civil society to
which von Humboldt appealed. It was stated that the Kosmosvorlesungen introduced
in Germany a new image of the universe of natural sciences and marked the beginning of the substitution of religion and philosophy for the clarity of science (Linden,

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1940, p. 7). Von Humboldts intention was to shake the German bourgeoisie from
its contemplative attitude, and to use Franz Mehrings (1957, pp. 1648) phrase, to
take it away from the realm of aesthetic appearance, in order to build a knowledge
which allowed the domination of the earth, in short to realize the idea of the Weltburgerplan. At the beginning of Kosmos, the work that, by the middle of the nineteenth
century, convinced the European and American bourgeoisie to study natural sciences,
Humboldt declares that the precise purpose of his dialogue on Nature was to correct some of the mistakes which had originated from a simplistic and imperfect
empiricism typical of the highest social classes (in den hoheren Volksklassen), who
very often have a good literary education (von Humboldt, 1845, p. 18). This kind
of education inspired Humboldts prose in his most popular studies. How could we
otherwise explain the strategic use he makes of the concept of landscape that starting
with von Humboldt becomes one of the most popular concepts in geography? Von
Humboldts problem was to transform the knowledge of pictures, novels and poem,
typical of bourgeois culture, into natural science. The medium he cunningly
employed for this purpose was the concept of landscape, with his charge of ambiguity. For the first time, in the works of Humboldt, the concept of landscape shifted
from the aesthetic realm to the scientific one, from artistic and poetic literature to
geographic discipline. From the point of view of the history of knowledge, the landscape acquires an original and revolutionary meaning. In the same way, the opinion
born from aesthetic knowledge is transformed into political criticisma way to
establish a direct parallelism between the latter and geographical science (Farinelli,
1992, pp. 201210; 1998).
However, when at last the revolutionary movements spread across Germany, von
Humboldt was forced to be silent. On March 21, 1848, von Humboldt was the only
one among the members of the court who, by silently bowing in front of everyone,
managed to calm the crowd that had gathered in front to the royal castle to commemorate those who had died just a few hours before in the Berlin barricades. This was
not simply a diplomatic silence, as Hanno Beck thinks (Beck, 1961, pp. 195196).
The Berlin revolts marked the climax of the pressure of Prussian society on the state,
and the bloody repression that followed constituted the end of this revolutionary
moment. What could a savant like von Humboldt say against the direct and immediate language of power; he who was the strategist of public opinion and who had
chosen the word as his language and reasoning as his weapon?
This initial silence was followed by the recognition of a completely different,
indeed almost opposite, reality in relation to the ancient prognosis. As von Humboldt
used to repeat during his last days, 1848 was the year of the revolution, but 1849
was the year of the reaction (Beck, 1961, p. 201). It is on the wave of this reactionary movement that in 1850, state and society reached a compromise through which
the new bourgeois movement entered into a situation of political co-administration
(Mitbestimmung) (Conze, 1958, p. 34). But the new state was by then ready to
annihilate all the old bourgeois tensions and becomeamong other thingsthe only
surreptitious object of a new (political) geography, that is a geography by now
unaware of his real political function.

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Geography of the state versus state geography: the crisis of Ratzel

Is it true that, as Claude Raffestin (1981, pp. 2535, 51) argues, the coincidence
of political geography and geography of the state represents the final step of the
process of institutionalization of geographic knowledge?
The question is complex and, even before trying to answer, one must consider
the historical explanation for the criticism of Ratzel by Karl Wittofogel at the end
of the 1920s, a question that geographers have failed to confront for the past seventy
years. The state, for Ratzel, is nothing but the organized society wrote Wittfogel
(1929), p. 27). Raffestin criticized exactly this kind of equivalence but we must note
that the equivalence of society and state was not invented by Ratzel and does not
belong solely to the Zeitgeist. We have already seen that the conflation of society
and state occurs in Germany at the end of the first half of the nineteenth century.
In the following twenty years with the birth of the Reich, it would reach its highest
popularity. Coincident with the structural mutation of the society and in particular
with the change from a culturally critical public to a public who consumes culture
(Habermas, 1971, pp. 192209) was the fact that geography lost all its critical functions.
But I must quickly stress that Ratzels Politische Geographie was not the result
of this process. On the contrary, Ratzels tragic paradox consisted of the effort to
critically conceive a geographic form of knowledge as a knowledge in which criticism was still possible; in other words he tried to keep alive the individual scientists
search for knowledge despite the disappearance of the rights historically connected
to the values of society. He tried, in fact, to reconciliate the knowledge of the subject
with total subordination of knowledge to the interest of the state. Ratzel was the last
individual in geography who wanted to serve both society and the state and he was
therefore an individual in crisis. His less-than-stellar social origins prompted his
critical stance that was rejected by the state. The work of Johannes Steinmetzler
(1956) illustrates well that Ratzel borrowed from Herder and Ritter rather than from
evolutionism and the positivist tradition. Ratzel was the last representative of the
Erdkunde because he was the first one to realize that it is impossible to change its
political function without destroying it completely.
For Ratzelas for Ritter and von Humboldt and other pure geographers as well
as their opponentsno form of geographical knowledge can exist if it lacks a political function. The difference between Ratzel and his precursors is that for the first
time Ratzel does not use bourgeois geography to criticize the state. On the contrary,
the state, which he sees as the greatest achievement of man on earth is the climax
of all phenomena connected to the spread of life (Ratzel, 1923, pp. IV, 2). In this
manner the state takes possession of geography and becomes its supreme object.
Ratzel in this manner overturned the relationship between science and state power
as articulated by the German bourgeois geographers in the first half of the nineteenth
century. Whereas according to the latter, the attempt to construct a scientific geography went hand in hand with a criticism of the existing state, Ratzel tries to legimate
on a scientific basis the existence of the state. Ratzel did not seek to negate the
political function of geographic knowledge; on the contrary, he attempted to adapt

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this function to the new requirements of bourgeois organization that coincided tout
court with those of the state. But Ratzel, the first geographer to order and subdivide
geographic knowledge in different subdisciplines, was vigilant not to limit geography
to the state geography, and the geography of the state to the Politische Geographie.
Anthropogeographie can be explained, according to Ratzel, only as a preliminary
stage in a more urgent task, the foundation of the science of political geography,
the form of geographic knowledge that is understood to be the least scientific, but
also the oldest branch of geography (Ratzel, 1891, p. 8). All geography becomes
for Ratzel the geography of the state and the Politische Geographie is nothing but
its acme.
What stops the geography of the state from becoming a state geography? What
distinguishes the two is the realization that all relationships in the world have a
political nature, and, therefore, all knowledge also has a political matrix. Those who,
in referring to Ratzel, separate what cannot be separated, those who, in other words,
read the Anthropogeographie as something different to Politische Geographie (Vidal
de la Blache, for example) reveal how easy it is reduce the geography of the state
to a state geography. The political side of reality, Ratzel wrote at the beginning
of the twentieth century, does not admit confusion with what is generally human
(allgemein menschlichen) (Ratzel, 1906a, p. 237). A few years earlier, Vidal de la
Blache (1898, p. 98) wrote regarding Ratzels Politische Geographie that:
political geography narrowly represents a special development of human
geography. Ratzel seems to understand the former in this way. In the application
of geography to men, we always deal with men in society or in groups, so that
one can legitimately give to the term of political geography a wider meaning that
extends also to human geography.
But in this way, exactly contrary to what Ratzel said, one reduces the geography
of the state to a generic human geography, under the pretence that, in each case,
Ratzel focuses on human associations. According to Vidal, it is as if for Ratzel the
problem was the object and not the function of geography, that is its sense! It is
only because of this incorrect substitution of the question of the object with that of
the functionor sensethat human geography can remove from its conscience the
political and rigid state logic that marks it from the beginning. It becomes in this
way ideologynot in the Ritterian sensebut in the contemporary meaning of
the term, as a kind of knowledge that hides its own nature and its true meaning.
Vidals interpretation was the initial position of all classical French geography
(Claval, 1972, pp. 6797). But silently, this position had already imposed itself in
Germany against Ratzels ideas. The topographical map is a instrument of precision,
the exact document which straightens out all false notions Vidal states in 1904 (p.
120). But in 1883 (p. 9), in the indication of the Methods and purposes of geography, Ferdinand von Richthofen already considered the regional map as the concrete
image of earth, and as a basis for geographical research much more significant
than a photograph of a rock inscription is say for archaeological research. In 1876
in his New problems in comparative Erdkunde Oskar Peschel had announced a

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new procedure for the resolution of geography: the research of similarities in

nature as they are represented by the cartographer (Peschel, 1876, pp. 35). On a
later occasion, Otto Schluter (1906) had constructed modern cultural geography, the
Geographie des Menschen (the equivalent of the geographie humaine) exactly on
the model of the Peschels geomorphology. In this way, it is possible to recognize
an identification between the geographical homology (Lautensach, 1934, p. 222)
and what we can term the carto-topographical one (Farinelli, 1981, pp. 1222).
Is the topographic map anything but an image that the state produces and through
which it promotes itself or, as Raffestin (1981, p. 150) says, the image of its own
spectacle? Or, in other words, the place of the transformation of social and historical
productions into physical shapes (Farinelli, 1976, pp. 626654)? It is only Ratzel, the
champion of the geography of the state, who criticizes this return of the geographer to
a practice in which geographic knowledge was the protocol of state cartography and
which bourgeois geography had fought over for a century. The only difference was
that in Ratzels time the state was no longer the aristocratic-feudal state but was the
aristocratic-bourgeois state. According to Ratzel, the introduction of the cartographic
image, in its specific topographical form, as an image that influences geographical
knowledge dates to the period between 1860 and 1870, just before the constitution
of the new German empire. In this regard, Ratzel laments that German cartography
decidedly stood at the top, but where was the science? (Ratzel, 1906b, p. 439).
After Ritter, no geographer in the nineteenth century has warned us so clearly as
Ratzel did against the inadequacy of cartographic expression, against the dangers of
reducing geography to cartography. Also for Ratzelas before for von Humboldt,
Ritter and pure geographersthe discourse comes before the cartographic writing
and imposes itself over it, because to know means to establish relationships
between objects beginning from hypotheses that come before all maps and which
no maps can represent. The position of a place, for instance, implies, according to
Ratzel, the concept of relation and connection but the map can in no way reveal
the connection amongst things because the connection is a mental process and it
can only be spiritually (geistig) conceived and grasped (Ratzel, 1901, pp. 938,
935). In the last analysis, Ratzel, in contrast to all the state geographers of his own
timethose who consciously accepted the silent topographical image determined by
the state as the only scientific basis for researchcontinued to interrogate the problem of knowledge, that is the problem of the relationship between a vision of the
world (or ideology) and science.
Ratzel was engaged with the problem of ideology and science throughout his life
and especially so during his later years. Hans Helmolt (1906, p. XIII) was the first
to notice the mistake of those who thought that Ratzel in his later work from the
clarity of his earlier works sank into a mystic confusion. However, Helmolt does
not provide a sufficient explanation of why the later Ratzel sounds like the teleological Ritter, as when he wrote that a vision of the world (Weltanschauung) that aims
to correspond to the truth cannot merely be grounded on science, but must also be
grounded on faith (Glauben) (Ratzel, 1906c, p. 297). Or why, for the later Ratzel,
and also for Ritter and von Humboldt, science becomes re-cognition (Er-kenntniss)
(Ratzel, 1906d, p. 318). Ratzel, as soon as he completed the Erdkunde, realized that,

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F. Farinelli / Political Geography 19 (2000) 943955

in the process of writing it, he had sacrificed the problem of knowledge, which, in
the second half of the nineteenth century, made geography a critical and challenging
discipline. Ratzels confusion was nothing but a kind of desperate answer to these
questions, as Ratzel himself confessed when he talked metaphorically about the
grey sea of ignorance which everywhere surrounds the puzzling rocks of our exist ber Naturschilderung (On the
ence and our knowledge. (Ratzel, 1906c, p. 318). U
interpretation of nature), which can be considered the scientific last testament of
Ratzel, the last act of the geography of the state, dramatically shows the impossibility
of the author in finding again the interrupted path of the Erdkunde. In the Naturschilderung, knowledge in its entirety is returned to the philosophy of nature, and science
is taken back to art. Yet, this does not happen solely because of a sort of mysticism
but because Goethes idealistic morphology is for the later Ratzel the only possible
epistemological model (Ratzel, 1904, pp. 4749, 94). None of the state geographers
of the time (almost all other German geographers) was able to understand the meaning of Ratzels last work, which should be interpreted as the extreme effort to reintroduce, in the form of a hopeless vindication of the rights of the knowing subject, the
geographical reflection, that is the legitimation of the geographical knowledge. This
dilemma still lies at the heart of what today we call (because of Ratzel and despite
Ratzel) political geography; there is still a crisis, Ratzels crisis. But this crisis is
still our own.

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