Encyclopedia Entries
Hettner, Alfred. The Columbia Encyclopedia
Association
of American Geographers Annual Meeting
... "The Reception and Transformation of
Alfred Hettner's System of Geography in Richard Hartshorne's The Nature of
Geography." Abstract ... http://convention.allacademic.com/aag2002/browse_abstract.html?conv_num=786
Critiques of Richard Hartshorne's point to exceptionalist arguments in
The Nature of Geography, a work that relies heavily on German geography,
especially the work of Alfred Hettner. Following Hartshorne's assertions,
many geographers claim Hartshorne is also the prestigious intellectual
heir of Hettner and Kantian traditions in German geography. In this paper,
we challenge this claim by pointing to substantial epistemological and
methodological differences. To understand these differences we focus on
their respective geographies as responses to contemporary milieux
described in terms of political, social, and economic dimensions. The
degree of difference becomes evident through a socio-historic study of the
development of German geography from liberal academics in the Kaiserreich
to anti-modern intellectual thought following World War I. Under the
influence of holistic, mythological and anti-modern geographic theories,
by the mid-1930s Hettner's liberal chorographic geography had been
rejected outright by most German geographers as an empirical-analytical
approach that culminated in series of regional monographs. While
Hartshorne retained the liberal ideology of Hettner he erased Hettner's
anti-Kantian positioning of geography among the sciences and transformed
chorography into a vehicle for Hartshorne's ambitious project to establish
a geographic intellectual corpus. We argue that in the process Hartshorne
erased key components of Hettner's geographic system and produced an
exceptionalist geography that relies more on the 1920s and 1930s German
reception and transformation of Hettner's Länderkunde. In summary, our
argument is that Hartshorne's The Nature of Geography transformed Hettner
and German geographic thought into a distinct American geography.
Geography is the chorological science of the earth or the science of the earth areas and places in terms of their difference and their spatial relations. The goal of the chorological point of view is to know the character of regions and places through comprehension of the existence together and inter-relations among the differing realms of reality and their varied manifestations, and to comprehend the earth surface as a whole in its actual arrangement in continents, larger and smaller regions, and places.