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On geography and its history
520
Book Reviews
Social Gospel movement Richard Ely and Walter Rauschenbusch-who questioned socialism, largely on the basis of the fallibilist epistomology of the earlier generation to which they were deeply indebted. These thinkers backed into a set of liberalsL.T.Hobhouse, Leon Bourgeois, Herbert Croly and Walter Lippman, Max Weber and, again, John Dewey-moving to the left. These thinkers variously contributed to a new version of liberalism, i.e. the theory of social democracy, based on a conception of positive liberty which allowed for high-powered policies dealing with education, citizenship, property rights and welfare. Some of these policies are held to have been effectively implemented, particularly in the United States and Great Britain. The tragedy of this reorientation as a whole, however, was that the First World War unleashed social forces that nipped its promise in the bud. Kloppenberg clearly has a prescriptive as well as a descriptive purpose in mind; he thinks we need these thinkers still. The author is formidably well read, albeit he has clearly not mastered many mauscript sources, and much pleasure and enlightenment can be derived from the book. But the book as a whole is dreadfully flawed. The root of the difficulty is that of trying to force rather different figures into too limited a mould. There is much to be said for the view that the common problems faced a particular set of thinkers, but a more sensitive treatment would have noted and tried to explain the dzfferent solutions reached. Many, many examples could be cited to make this point. Hobhouse and Sidgwick do not belong in the same camp in at least one crucial matter: the latter definitively criticised the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ involved in the former’s sloppy and cognitively low-powered version of social evolutionism. Equally Dilthey was characteristically engaged in a search for certainty that makes him some way removed from intellectual intent of, say, William James. Kloppenberg does interestingly point out that Dewey knew more about politics than is often realised, and that Weber’s appreciation of power politics was not such as to rule out a basic liberalism. Nevertheless, these thinkers do not really belong on the same (scale: Weber would never have fallen for the naive view that education can transform society since curricula are, in the last analysis, determined by powerful. More generally, liberal social democracy was at sea when faced with war, comunism and fascism; those who followed Weber, most notably Raymond Aron, were able to make sense of forces of visceral social conflict. This is not to say that Kloppenberg does not notice and is not troubled by some of his figures, and he devotes considerable attention to the authoritarianism and elitism of the Webbs. It is very noticeable, however, that his discussion seeks to explain away these characteristics. I do not have to keep knowledge of all the figures Kloppenberg discusses, and it is all the more disturbing to see him distort his interpretation of those I am familiar with. In the end, prescription outruns description in this book; it should not be accepted as a general guide to the thought of this period. John A. Hall Harvard University and the University of Southampton On Geography
andits
History,
D.R.Stoddart
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1986), xi + 335 pp.,
E22.50. H.C. Over the last decade, work on the history and philosophy of academic geography has assumed a more central role in the discipline’s development. Many of its most active and imaginative practitioners now go out of their way to locate their work within the broad, evolving framework of geographical thought. Many are equally anxious to represent their work as a study in methodology. This collection of essays by the Cambridge biogeographer, David Stoddart, demonstrates this heightened regard for the development of ideas to great effect. Two basic themes run through thevarious essays. First, it suggests
521
Book Reviews
that we can only understand how geographical ideas have developed by seeing them as contingent, bound up with the career paths of particular individuals and the needs of specific circumstances rather than as a neat succession of all-pervasive paradigms. Second, it re-affirms in unequivocal terms that fieldwork serves to constantly refreshen the subject in a way that pure or speculative thought cannot. Most of the essays link together as a commentary on the origins of academic geography over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those which open the book draw out the vital role played by the Royal Geographical Society in campaigning for its establishment as a university subject. The point is made that as definitions over what such a subject should cover became more specific, the range of scientists taking part in the Society’s affairs narrowed with more and more earth scientists especially perceiving the physiographical aspects of an academic geography to be a threat to their own interests. During the early years of its growth as an academic subject, its teaching proved more successful at Oxford (where it was taught by Mackinder and Herbertson) than at Cambridge. Stoddart ascribes its lack of initial success at Cambridge to the personalities involved. Some were too mediocre. Others were too idiosyncratic, though there are times when Stoddart seems equivocal over whether idiosyncrasy is really a handicap in the quest for new modes of thought. His own methodological positions emerge more emphatically as the book progresses. There are powerful pleas for the subject to attach greater importance to field-work as a stimulus to problem-formation and to re-stress its global as opposed to parochial basis. In the closing chapters of the book, these personal emphases are interwoven with a wide-ranging consideration of Darwinian thought and its continuing relevance to geography. Two particular thrusts of argument stand out here. First, he argues that Darwin’s interest in the notion of Cosmos or the inter-relation of things has much to offer the subject as a whole if developed through formal ecosystematic concepts. Second, Stoddart clearly feels that workers in his own field of biogeography need reminding of Darwin’s insistence on theory having ‘precedence over facts’ in the ordering of research. This call for a biogeography grounded in theory is bound up with his call for a renewed interest in the debate over disperal versus vicariance, a problem which he clearly feels has more to offer bio-‘geographers’ than pollen-based studies of vegetation change during the Pleistocene and Holocene. As one would expect of a book by Stoddart, this is a work of great intellect and vitality. It argues passionately and convincingly for a geography that is global in its terms of reference and integrative and systemic in its methodological position. How reassuring it is to find a senior geographer chiding the fellow-travellers of the subject, those who use geography to pursue sectional, non-geographical interests andcontribute little to its wider problems. The breadth of his own interests and the richness of his experience in both field and library are apparent throughout. Only a Stoddart could follow an anecdote about Francis Younghusband and how lavishly he had wined and dined at Chang-pai-shan on the Russo-Chinese border in 1886 with a reference to a meal of boiled bear and vodka which he had enjoyed at Sikhote Alin, north ofVladivostok. Similarly, only someone with the humour of a Stoddart could refer readers hopefully to a ‘little-known paper by Polonskiy’, a paper in Russian which turns out to have been mimeographed at Mimsk in 1963. Robert University College of Wales
A. Dodgshon
Book Reviews
Social Gospel movement Richard Ely and Walter Rauschenbusch-who questioned socialism, largely on the basis of the fallibilist epistomology of the earlier generation to which they were deeply indebted. These thinkers backed into a set of liberalsL.T.Hobhouse, Leon Bourgeois, Herbert Croly and Walter Lippman, Max Weber and, again, John Dewey-moving to the left. These thinkers variously contributed to a new version of liberalism, i.e. the theory of social democracy, based on a conception of positive liberty which allowed for high-powered policies dealing with education, citizenship, property rights and welfare. Some of these policies are held to have been effectively implemented, particularly in the United States and Great Britain. The tragedy of this reorientation as a whole, however, was that the First World War unleashed social forces that nipped its promise in the bud. Kloppenberg clearly has a prescriptive as well as a descriptive purpose in mind; he thinks we need these thinkers still. The author is formidably well read, albeit he has clearly not mastered many mauscript sources, and much pleasure and enlightenment can be derived from the book. But the book as a whole is dreadfully flawed. The root of the difficulty is that of trying to force rather different figures into too limited a mould. There is much to be said for the view that the common problems faced a particular set of thinkers, but a more sensitive treatment would have noted and tried to explain the dzfferent solutions reached. Many, many examples could be cited to make this point. Hobhouse and Sidgwick do not belong in the same camp in at least one crucial matter: the latter definitively criticised the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ involved in the former’s sloppy and cognitively low-powered version of social evolutionism. Equally Dilthey was characteristically engaged in a search for certainty that makes him some way removed from intellectual intent of, say, William James. Kloppenberg does interestingly point out that Dewey knew more about politics than is often realised, and that Weber’s appreciation of power politics was not such as to rule out a basic liberalism. Nevertheless, these thinkers do not really belong on the same (scale: Weber would never have fallen for the naive view that education can transform society since curricula are, in the last analysis, determined by powerful. More generally, liberal social democracy was at sea when faced with war, comunism and fascism; those who followed Weber, most notably Raymond Aron, were able to make sense of forces of visceral social conflict. This is not to say that Kloppenberg does not notice and is not troubled by some of his figures, and he devotes considerable attention to the authoritarianism and elitism of the Webbs. It is very noticeable, however, that his discussion seeks to explain away these characteristics. I do not have to keep knowledge of all the figures Kloppenberg discusses, and it is all the more disturbing to see him distort his interpretation of those I am familiar with. In the end, prescription outruns description in this book; it should not be accepted as a general guide to the thought of this period. John A. Hall Harvard University and the University of Southampton On Geography
andits
History,
D.R.Stoddart
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1986), xi + 335 pp.,
E22.50. H.C. Over the last decade, work on the history and philosophy of academic geography has assumed a more central role in the discipline’s development. Many of its most active and imaginative practitioners now go out of their way to locate their work within the broad, evolving framework of geographical thought. Many are equally anxious to represent their work as a study in methodology. This collection of essays by the Cambridge biogeographer, David Stoddart, demonstrates this heightened regard for the development of ideas to great effect. Two basic themes run through thevarious essays. First, it suggests
521
Book Reviews
that we can only understand how geographical ideas have developed by seeing them as contingent, bound up with the career paths of particular individuals and the needs of specific circumstances rather than as a neat succession of all-pervasive paradigms. Second, it re-affirms in unequivocal terms that fieldwork serves to constantly refreshen the subject in a way that pure or speculative thought cannot. Most of the essays link together as a commentary on the origins of academic geography over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those which open the book draw out the vital role played by the Royal Geographical Society in campaigning for its establishment as a university subject. The point is made that as definitions over what such a subject should cover became more specific, the range of scientists taking part in the Society’s affairs narrowed with more and more earth scientists especially perceiving the physiographical aspects of an academic geography to be a threat to their own interests. During the early years of its growth as an academic subject, its teaching proved more successful at Oxford (where it was taught by Mackinder and Herbertson) than at Cambridge. Stoddart ascribes its lack of initial success at Cambridge to the personalities involved. Some were too mediocre. Others were too idiosyncratic, though there are times when Stoddart seems equivocal over whether idiosyncrasy is really a handicap in the quest for new modes of thought. His own methodological positions emerge more emphatically as the book progresses. There are powerful pleas for the subject to attach greater importance to field-work as a stimulus to problem-formation and to re-stress its global as opposed to parochial basis. In the closing chapters of the book, these personal emphases are interwoven with a wide-ranging consideration of Darwinian thought and its continuing relevance to geography. Two particular thrusts of argument stand out here. First, he argues that Darwin’s interest in the notion of Cosmos or the inter-relation of things has much to offer the subject as a whole if developed through formal ecosystematic concepts. Second, Stoddart clearly feels that workers in his own field of biogeography need reminding of Darwin’s insistence on theory having ‘precedence over facts’ in the ordering of research. This call for a biogeography grounded in theory is bound up with his call for a renewed interest in the debate over disperal versus vicariance, a problem which he clearly feels has more to offer bio-‘geographers’ than pollen-based studies of vegetation change during the Pleistocene and Holocene. As one would expect of a book by Stoddart, this is a work of great intellect and vitality. It argues passionately and convincingly for a geography that is global in its terms of reference and integrative and systemic in its methodological position. How reassuring it is to find a senior geographer chiding the fellow-travellers of the subject, those who use geography to pursue sectional, non-geographical interests andcontribute little to its wider problems. The breadth of his own interests and the richness of his experience in both field and library are apparent throughout. Only a Stoddart could follow an anecdote about Francis Younghusband and how lavishly he had wined and dined at Chang-pai-shan on the Russo-Chinese border in 1886 with a reference to a meal of boiled bear and vodka which he had enjoyed at Sikhote Alin, north ofVladivostok. Similarly, only someone with the humour of a Stoddart could refer readers hopefully to a ‘little-known paper by Polonskiy’, a paper in Russian which turns out to have been mimeographed at Mimsk in 1963. Robert University College of Wales
A. Dodgshon