Determinism and Indeterminism in Foreign Geography Part I

Abstract

The history of geographical determinism is traced from Antiquity through the Renaissance until, in the author's view, it was first introduced into geography by Carl Ritter. Friedrich Ratzel, by supplementing classical determinism with Social Darwinism, laid the basis for a modern determinism that led ultimately to the school of geopolitics. Geopolitics is found to have interested Western geographers even after its Nazi German version was discredited. The ideas of geographical determinism, aside from being used by the advocates of geopolitics, also led to the environmentalism of Ellen Semple and Ellsworth Huntington and its more modern versions. Efforts to moderate the initially extreme forms of environmentalism (Griffith Taylor's stop-and-go determinism, O. H. K. Spate's probabilism) are analyzed from the Marxist viewpoint.