“Not Only … But Also”: Quantitative and Critical Geography

Abstract

This article argues that the binary between quantitative and critical geography is pseudo rather than real. The duality arose, the article suggests, because of the peculiar postwar intellectual history of human geography in which the critical approach followed the quantitative one. Accordingly, for internal sociological reasons, it was necessary for the critical approach to excise everything that went before in quantitative geography. In contrast, the article argues that there is no inherent contradiction between critical and quantitative approaches, and indeed there are good reasons to join them. The article makes its argument by suggesting, first, that Marx, the ultimate social critic, was sympathetic to mathematics in his own work; second, that this fact was lost to the radical geographers of the late 1960s and early 1970s because of their desire to distance themselves and ultimately to overthrow the dominant quantitative approach; and finally, that the supposed binary of quantitative and critical geography might be dissolved by engaging in what Galison (1998), the historian of science, calls “trading zones.”

En este artículo se sostiene que el binario entre la geografía crítica y la cuantitativista es más pretendido que real. El artículo sugiere que esta dualidad apareció debido a la peculiar historia intelectual de la geografía humana de la posguerra, en la que el enfoque crítico ocurrió enseguida del cuantitativo. En consecuencia, por razones sociológicas internas, para los seguidores del enfoque crítico se hizo necesario extirpar todo lo que antes estuvo relacionado con la geografía cuantitativista. En el artículo se arguye, al contrario, que no existe contradicción inherente entre los dos enfoques, y que en verdad hay muy buenas razones para juntarlos. El artículo presenta su argumento sugiriendo, primero, que Marx, el crítico social por excelencia, tenía simpatía por las matemáticas en su propio trabajo; segundo, que este hecho se les extravió a los geógrafos radicales de finales de los 1960 y comienzos de los 1970 por su afán de distanciarse del enfoque cuantitativo dominante y, en últimas, derrocarlo; y finalmente, que el supuesto binario de geografía crítica y la cuantitativista podría ser deshecho concurriendo en lo que Galison (1998), el historiador de la ciencia, denomina “zonas de negociación.”

Key Words:

• critical geography
• Marx
• quantitative revolution
• trading zones

关键词:

• 批判地理学
• 马克思
• 定量革命
• 贸易区

Palabras clave:

• geografía crítica
• Marx
• revolución cuantitativista
• zonas de negociación

TREVOR J. BARNES is a Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia, 1984 West Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include the history of American geography during the Second World War and Cold War, and the urban geography of the new economy.

Notes

¹Kwan (2004, 756) says “the division [between the two camps] seems deeply entrenched… and the rift seems to have magnified over time.”

²The quantitative revolution is reviewed by Barnes (2004a). The relation between the quantitative revolution and GIScience is discussed by Chrisman (2006) and Barnes (forthcoming).

³There is no definitive history and definition of critical geography, although there exist Painter's (2000) Dictionary of Human Geography entry, Blomley's (2006, 2007, 2008) progress reports in Progress in Human Geography, and arguably a house journal, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies (http://www.acme-journal.org). It is possible that by its very constitution and rationale such definitiveness is oxymoronic, making any general claims about the movement necessarily fraught. This is another reason for this article's focus on a narrower set of historical issues.

⁴ Barnbrock (1974), and subsequently, Harvey (1981), recognized the political radical sentiments of von Thünen.

⁵Such an approach is based on the philosophical pragmatist conviction that hope is best given by pluralist conversation and involving many parties who may well disagree with one another. As the pragmatist Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, given “all life is an experiment… we should be eternally vigilant against the attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe” (Holmes, quoted in Menand 2001, 430).