PHILOSOPHY & GEOGRAPHY, VOL. 6, NO.

1, 2003

ARTICLE

Nietzsche and postmodernism in geography: an idealist critique

LEONARD GUELKE
Department of Geography, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Abstract The suitability of a new philosophical paradigm for geography needs to be assessed in the context of the questions it was designed to address and on the basis of clearly articulated criteria. Postmodernism, the latest contender for the attention of geographers, is here assessed in relation to Collingwoodian idealism. As an intellectual movement postmodernism arose in the unique circumstances of academic life in post Second World War France. In this rigidly structured academic environment a new generation of French scholars, well schooled in the philosophies of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger and the ideas of Marx and Freud, discovered the radical nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and drew upon his ethical and philosophical writings to address contemporary issues of power, knowledge, truth and modernity. All the central anti-humanist ideas of what was to become postmodernism are to be found in Nietzsche: a distrust of science and knowledge truth claims, the notion of multiple interpretations and the subordination of knowledge to power. This situated knowledge, set in the traditions of Continental thought, is not easily incorporated into the empiricist philosophies that have hitherto dened the mainstream of Anglo-American science and humanist scholarship including geography. Geographers need to retain a commitment to the foundational value of science, recognize human agency in the form of the conscious, thinking individual, and continue to afrm the empirical nature of human geographical research. People who selected to study geography did not usually do so to devote their academic energies to the study of philosophy. Yet philosophical viewpoints and positions have had a major impact on the practice of geography, and geographers, whether they like it or not, have had to grapple with philosophical questions. In grappling with these questions most geographers have done so without the benet of a solid knowledge of philosophy. In consequence the broader philosophical context within which issues of importance to geographers have arisen has often been obscure, and geographers have been obliged to make decisions about ways of approaching geography in somewhat of a philosophical vacuum. This situation has not been helped by the fact that geographers dealing with philosophical questions have usually found it convenient to rely on other geographers for their philosophical education.1 This education was ne as far as it went, but it seldom went far enough. The understanding of a philosophical tradition requires that the
ISSN 1090-3771 print/ISSN 1472-7242 online/03/010097-20 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1090377032000063342

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scholar understand its history or genealogy, and appreciate the questions a particular philosopher or philosophical school sought to address. This context permits the scholar to match up his or her philosophical needs as a geographer in a much broader and comprehensive fashion than is the case when that context is lacking, and lacking it often is in the hands of geographers bent on promoting a new philosophical approach with uncritical enthusiasm. The discipline of geography has in the course of this century witnessed a number of major intellectual shifts in the way its practitioners have approached geographical topics. These shifts have included such diverse approaches as environmental determinism, empiricism, regionalism, quantitative analysis, Marxism and several varieties of humanism.2 The most recent philosophical contender for the attention of geographers is postmodernism which is taken here to include the allied movement of poststructuralism. As an approach to geography this new addition is as surprising a development as any yet witnessed. The inspiration for this latest academic movement has come, as others before it, from sources outside the discipline itself. Indeed, geography must be considered a latecomer to postmodernism, the principal themes of which had been set out by its French innovators in the 1960s, 70s and early 80s.3 The advocacy of postmodernism as a paradigm for geography has elements in common with the way the Quantitative Revolution was presented to geographers in the 1960s. In the latter case Ian Burtons persuasive article The Quantitative Revolution and Theoretical Geography provided a well-argued case in support of the adoption of quantitative methods in geography.4 In retrospect it can be seen that this article captured the enthusiasm of the times, without in fact providing a secure philosophical foundation for the approach being advocated. In the 1980s an increasing number of publications appeared incorporating postmodern ideas. If any particular one of these publications captures the spirit of the times, as Burton did for the quantitative revolution, I would propose the article The Postmodern Challenge: Reconstructing Human Geography, by Michael Dear.5 In this article Dear announces the importance of postmodernism for geography with all the persuasiveness and condence of Burtons earlier effort on behalf of quantication. He sums up his article with these words: The fundamental message in this essay has been the need to reconstruct human geography by realigning it with the mainstream of [postmodern] social theory. This revitalization, and perhaps even the survival of the discipline depends upon our willingness to embark upon a constructive engagement with this mainstream.6 The basic message is that the movement is here to stay and geographers had better adopt it if they wish to be part of the contemporary academic scene. A signicant number of geographers have embraced elements of postmodernism, but the movement lacks the coherence and general enthusiasm characteristic of the Quantitative Revolution. Geographers have taken ideas from postmodernism in ways that suit their particular purposes, and as bets a movement critical of foundational knowledge have not concerned themselves with establishing a unied approach.7 In spite of the many varieties of postmodern geography they all to some degree incorporate ideas associated with Nietzsche and French postmodern philosophers.

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An Idealist Perspective This assessment and critique of postmodernism is grounded in the philosophy of Collingwoodian idealism, which shares with postmodernism a concern with representation and the social construction of reality.8 In both approaches it is emphasized that the world does not naively present itself to its human inhabitants, but is constructed by them on the basis of ideas. The postmodernist asserts that the world thus envisaged or represented is always a copy and that there is no way to compare any particular copy with an unknowable real world.9 While sharing the view that each representation of the world is not the real world, some idealists maintain that science has developed models of the world that are reasonably accurate representations of the real thing, providing a basis on which other representation can be assessed. In other words, the idealist believes that we know a good deal about the real world and that we can use this knowledge to help us in understanding how people have represented (or misrepresented) it in their mental models of it.10 In developing his idealist ideas Collingwood classied human (historical) actions or events as having an outside and an inside.11 The outside of an event had to do with bodies and their movements and encompassed any elements of a historical event that could have been observed and described in such terms. The inside of the event involving human movement or action incorporated the thought embedded in such movement. The assumption here is that people think about what they are doing and act on the basis of thought. These two parts of a human action involve an external component, which can be described and validated from external sources of evidence open to general scrutiny by scholars, and an internal one, which involves an inference or interpretation about what a person was thinking when he or she embarked upon the action in question. The distinction set out above has important implications for scholarship in both history and other social disciplines. It implies that scholars are able to provide an objective, evidence-based account of what happened. Such accounts will describe what happened at a specic place and time drawing on any evidence that might be available. In searching for facts and evidence the scholar will use both theoretical and empirical approaches. In the former case a theory might support the existence of an event leading to a search for the evidence that conrms or invalidates it. In the latter case the existence of an event will not be in question, but its theoretical signicance might become the topic of debate. Whatever the actual procedures used in the elaboration of facts about the past the critical point is that the outsides of events can become facts if sufcient, credible evidence is assembled in their support. We have in this process a means of creating a past made up of events that happened and can be shown to have happened in this or that way at a particular place and time. This material provides a foundation for historical interpretation and analysis. Facts supported by appropriate evidence become the building blocks on which interpretation rests, but this does not mean that any particular fact will be necessarily socially or historically signicant. Signicance is a function of how events play out in supporting or changing the way people think about themselves and each other and the world in which they live. Particular facts, which rest on physical evidence, can become in turn evidence in support of interpretations of particular social and historical events and episodes. The voyage of Christopher Columbus made to the West Indies in 1492 becomes a fact of historical signicance, because it changed the way many Europeans thought about their world and opened the way for the European invasion of the Americas. This

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signicance, in turn, gives the voyage itself an interest many later voyages across the Atlantic do not have. What did Columbus think he was doing? Was his voyage a reckless gamble or a carefully thought out project? As soon as one is concerned with the explanation of events involving human decisions and thinking, one is concerned with getting at their insides. This task is trickier than establishing that something happened, because one has to infer what was in a persons mind. The task, however, is not psychic-mind reading, but an enquiry that uses available evidence to reconstruct what a person believed. The process of working out what might have prompted Columbus to sail West becomes in part an investigation of his geographical knowledge, which we can seek to recover from an examination of the intellectual world Columbus inhabited together with any written comments of his own or about him that might have been made. The task of interpretation is to make an intelligible connection between what Columbus thought and what he did supporting this interpretation with as much evidence as can be mustered. One does not assume the world was naively given to Columbus, but to the contrary one assumes Columbus represented the world on the basis of what he had read, heard and thought. One tries to understand his actions by uncovering his beliefs about the world in which he lived, and connecting these beliefs to what he actually did in the real world. In idealism we have a philosophy that emphasizes that people must be understood on the basis of what they believe and how they understand themselves and represent the world in which they live. This task is coupled to the parallel one of gathering evidence as a basis for the interpretations presented. The idea of facts existing as potential evidence for interpretation means that the scholarly endeavor is built on an independent foundation. Although one is dealing with the way human beings have represented themselves and the world, one is at the same time grounding ones work on a body of material that exists independently of particular scholarly interpretations of such representations. The idealist in acknowledging there are different ways in which the world can be understood adopts a position that divides the mental world of human life from that of the natural world of phenomena. Although the idealist is aware that science is itself a human creation, it is seen as one that has had most success in describing and understanding the world of nature. The methods of science have also achieved some success in the study of certain aspects of human society, but there are many areas involving human cultural and historical life that have not been amenable to explanation using a scientic approach. Here the scholar who wishes to explain why a person or people behaved as they did needs, the idealist maintains, to recreate and understand the thought expressed in such actions. In distinction to the postmodernist the idealist is well disposed to science, recognizing that its most compelling results have been achieved in the domain of natural phenomena.12 The vantage point sketched out above provides the foundation of the critique of postmodernism in this essay, and is developed in more detail in the material that follows. Nietzsche In keeping with the contention set out above concerning the importance of understanding the context of a philosophical movement, this paper will seek to provide such a context for postmodernism. In looking at the origins of postmodernism and linking its leading thinkers back to their immediate predecessors. I hope to make clear how

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postmodernism emerged as a philosophical movement and what questions its creators sought to address. An important key to postmodernism as an academic movement is its origin in France. Indeed, it is difcult to imagine this movement would have emerged at all had it not been for the peculiar situation of French intellectuals in the period after the Second World War. The social context included a centralized and rigid university system with few of the democratic outlets generally available in North American universities. This oppressive academic structure culminated in a mini revolt of students and professors in 1968, precipitating some long overdue reforms. The intellectual environment was almost as rigid in the pre-1968 period with a philosophical orthodoxy constructed around the writings of Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Marx. It was this academic and intellectual environment that provided the point of departure for the scholars who were to become the seminal thinkers of the poststructural and postmodern movement.13 If Hegel et al. provided a point of departure the movement gained its dening essence from the incorporation of the ideas of the nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The works of Nietzsche inspired such scholars as Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard and Cixous to develop distinctive new approaches to the analysis of social life, and his inuence is openly acknowledged by all of them.14 Anyone seeking to understand the foundations of French poststructuralism and postmodernism needs in the rst instance to study Nietzsche. Nietzsche is a difcult philosopher. He wrote extensively and left, in addition to his published works, voluminous writings and unnished notes. Although his writings do not endorse totalitarianism as such, there was enough there for him to be enthusiastically adopted as a precursor of German National Socialism. In the context of British and American philosophical tradition Nietzsche is an eccentric indeed, although he is now the focus of a vigorous scholarly industry intent on making his philosophical contributions more accessible to English readers. He is primarily a philosopher of ethics and a literary gure. He was by training a philologist and his early work focused on re-interpreting ancient Greek literature and philosophy. When he turned his attention to ethics it was to criticize the values of his time. Nietzsche is famous for the pronouncement God is dead, and his view that an Ubermensch (superman) was required to overcome the pathetic herd-like values associated with the common man. Nietzsche was an extreme misogynist viewing women as inferior to men in every way, suitable only as recreation for warriors. Nietzsche wrote about the Ubermensch in Thus Spoke Zarathustra as an individual who would be elevated, indeed would overcome, the ordinary man whose values and ideas and herd-like morality had guaranteed the mediocre society that passed for Western civilization. As Nietzsche was an elitist with contempt for inferior people who made up in his mind practically all of humanity, it is indeed a paradox that his philosophical ideas have been adopted by an intellectual movement one of whose achievements has involved drawing attention to historically oppressed peoples such as women and homosexuals. The standing of Nietzsches political and ethical ideas on their heads would not pose unduly troubling questions were it possible to detach Nietzsche the philosopher of power from Nietzsche the ethicist. The very postmodernists who have insisted on the inseparability of politics and knowledge in their own positions have evidently had no difculty dissociating themselves from Nietzsches elitism at the same time they have embraced his philosophy of knowledge. In his History of Western Philosophy Bertrand Russell categorized Nietzsche as a literary philosopher. He wrote:

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Nietzsche, though a professor, was a literary rather than an academic philosopher. He invented no new technical theories in ontology or epistemology: his importance is primarily in ethics, and secondarily as an acute historical critic.15 This assessment, which does not nd support among modern Nietzschean scholars, is nevertheless helpful for understanding Nietzsche in the context of Western philosophy.16 Nietzsche himself complements Russells description of him, describing his writings as those of a psychologist. That psychologist without equal speaks from my writings, is perhaps the rst insight reached by a good readera reader as I deserve him, who reads me the way good old philologists read their Horace.17 Nietzsche with his background in classical philology approached philosophy from an unconventional perspective seeking to establish that questions of knowledge were tied up with human motivations. In his works Nietzsche has much to say about literature, art, language, human nature and beliefs.18 He deals with these topics in the form of critical commentaries frequently destabilizing his readers who are confronted with a world in which conventional values are questioned and often turned upside down.19 Nietzsches purpose in these writings is to undermine and discredit the foundations of much Western thought from religion (Christianity), to moral values to the principles of knowledge. As a literary and ethical critic Nietzsche is on reasonably rm ground, because in this realm of thought psychological analysis can often provide one with valuable insights into why people behave as they do. In this realm of literature art and ethical criticism there is, moreover, no ultimate or foundational reality to which critics can appeal, in support of their evaluations. All art is interpretation. In developing his ideas on knowledge and truth Nietzsche makes much of the fact that people experience the world from different perspectives and in different ways.20 This perspectivist point of view asserts: that one always knows or perceives or thinks about something from a particular perspectivenot just a spatial viewpoint, of course, but a particular context of surrounding impressions, inuences, and ideas, conceived of through ones language and social upbringing and, ultimately, determined by virtually everything about oneself, ones psychological make-up, and ones history. There is no perspective-free global viewpoint, no Gods eye view, only this or that particular perspective. There is, therefore, no external comparison or correspondence to be made between what we believe and truth in itself but only the comparison, competition or differences in quality within and between the perspectives themselves.21 This line of reasoning permits Nietzsche to entertain the possibility that we live in a world capable of supporting an innite number of interpretations.22 According to Nietzsche, there are no facts, only interpretations. Nietzsches perspectival view of knowledge and his literary inclinations made him suspicious of science and its claims to objectivity and truth, which he dismissed as prejudices and irrefutable errors.23 This negative view of science and indeed knowledge in general needs to be assessed in the context of Nietzsches explorations of the nature of human beings, in particular their will to power. This will, according to Nietzsche, overwhelms reason making the study of human activity an exercise in

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psychology as much as one of understanding rationality. Nietzsche does what he can to demolish the idea of truth, putting forward his own famous denition of it. What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensied, transferred, and, embellished, and which, after long usage seem to a people to be xed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coin.24 Nietzsche was very much his own philosopher producing an original body of work that stands in its own right, but his work also presents a view of humanity that connects him with thinkers such as Marx and Freud. Although all of these individuals presented quite different ideas on the forces that shaped societies, they all shared the idea that people were products of forces they did not control and seldom understood. In Nietzsche the force that matters is the will to power, and it is this blind will that drives individuals to act as they do. In this scheme, thought is not the source of human action, but a pathetic rationalization of acts whose driving power has nothing to do with reason or intellect. In Nietzsche power takes over from Marxs forces of production that determine the structure of societies and dene their corresponding varieties of human consciousness and from Freuds unconscious mind that is shaped by sexual forces of which the individual has little or no understanding.

French Postmodernism The appeal Nietzsches work had for a new generation of frustrated French intellectuals already well schooled in continental philosophy and the ideas of Freud and Marx is not difcult to understand. Nietzsche provided them with a heady mix of destabilizing ideas, combining a devastating critique of traditional Western values with a frontal attack on knowledge and its subordination to the dictates of power. If the French scholars, who found in Nietzsche the means of confronting the conventional wisdom, were not misogynists they were willing to overlook Nietzsches views on women (notwithstanding Nietzsches admonition to his readers that they should accept his philosophy in full or not at all). The essential themes of the poststructuralism and postmodernism are all to be found in the works of Nietzsche: the deconstruction of Derrida, the power-knowledge thesis of Foucault and the distrust of reason and science found in both of their writings and those of practically all thinkers associated with this movement. The Nietzschean legacy has been built on and modied by his many French interpreters and its principles have been extended into new domains of empirical analysis.25 Yet notwithstanding the enormous effort that post-World War Two scholars have put into rening and extending the ideas of one of Germanys great philosophers, they are still very much in Nietzsches debt for the fundamental propositions and ideas that underpin their endeavors. In geography Foucault has been the most important source of Nietzschean ideas, in spite of the opaqueness of much of his translated work.26 It helps to know that Foucault held the position of professor of systems of thought, and his concept of episteme comes close to endorsing the idea that people need to be understood in terms of their beliefs and ideas. Indeed, Foucault lives up to the title of his professorship in the way he analyzed the intellectual characteristics of the epistemes he identied. There is not

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much to complain about here. Foucaults views, however, quickly acquire Nietzschean overtones with the notion that systems of thought or discourses are embedded in power relations. In this power nexus people lose their autonomy as independent subjects and become inscribed as products of the discourses over which they have little or no control. In this world of power discourse the individual thinker is subordinated as a responsible subject as fully as he/she becomes a product of economic or sexual forces in the works of Marx and Freud respectively. Foucault adopted Nietzsches ideas on power as the basis of his approach to understanding society, but he did not regard himself as an interpreter of Nietzsches work. He is quite blunt about this. Nietzsches contemporary presence (as the philosopher of power) is increasingly important. But I am tired of people studying him only to produce the same kind of commentaries that are written on Hegel or Mallarme. For myself, I prefer to utilize the writers I like. The only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsches is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest. And if commentators then say I am being faithful or unfaithful to Nietzsche, that is of absolutely no interest.27 To conclude his remarks Foucault might have quoted (which he did not) the following sentence from Nietzsche that supports this position: One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil. It is important to understand how completely Foucault undermines our common sense ideas about how societies function. The individual subject is not a free agent making decisions about what to do on the basis of his or her goals and a deliberate assessment of the possibilities of achieving them in a given situation, but the unconscious product of the systems of thought that dene an individuals identity in a nexus of power relations. On this view people are not responsible self-conscious agents. How could they be, if the power that really drives them to do what they do is not fully comprehended if comprehended at all. In Foucault power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives.28 The death of the subject is, therefore, also the death of the accountable person, who is responsible for his or her actions as a conscious decision maker. The power relations governing societies have implications that go beyond the individual. The whole idea of knowledge is something that exists independently of a particular subject is undermined. Megill has explicated this important dimension of Foucaults thought: Foucault views all claims to knowledge as irremediably tied up with the exercise of power. There is no such thing as an objective knowledge, no possibility of retreating into the Cartesian poele. Any claims to objective knowledge, to valid theory, are merely attempts to exercise power of one sort or another. The corollary of this is that theory has no status as theory; on the contrary, it is nothing other than practice.29 The reduction of theory to practice is the nal blow against the possibility of a science of society in which theoretical claims have to have empirical status to be acceptable. The idea that people might be the products of forces over which they have little or no control will not be a novel idea to geographers familiar with the history of their discipline. The movement of environmental determinism was premised on the idea that

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the physical geography of a place controlled the nature of its human development and people became under this theory products of their physical situations. Ironically, the idea of people as products of forces they do not control re-emerged at the end of the twentieth century to complete the circle with geography as practiced at its beginning. The new poststructural and postmodernist view of people to be sure eschews the environment as a causal factor and calls upon a very different set of forces, but in both cases people are not the authors of their own lives with their successes and failures (however dened) but essentially products of the circumstances (sites of discourse) they do not control. Like the environmental determinists before them postmodern geographers sometimes relax their strict principles and acknowledge that individuals are sometimes able to modify, if not substantially change, the circumstances in which they nd themselves through their own intellectual efforts. In spite of many differences among the French poststructuralists and postmodernists they share a view of the world that has certain key characteristics. Whether these characteristics have always been properly translated into English contexts is a moot point, the fact is there is a constellation of ideas that forms the foundation of a particular way of looking at the world. The key ideas include the view that people are products of forces they do not control, that power not reason prevails in the shaping of ideas, that subjectivity or authorship has little meaning in such a world as does the notion of truth where knowledge is dened by equations of power. All these ideas are challenges to idealism and traditional humanism and are considered in this light to be anti-humanist.30 This description is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather to provide a general characterization of a movement that has done much to destroy the independent subject as the maker of his or her own destiny. It is not unduly surprising that many French intellectuals should have been susceptible to the ideas of Nietzsche. The academic situation had prepared them for his ideas and it served their scholarly purposes. What is far more difcult to understand is the widespread appeal of French Nietzschean thought to scholars and academics in the English-speaking world. The common sense empirical and scientic traditions of England and the United States have not been ruptured, but many scholars have been lost to the appeals of Continental thinking.31 I must leave it to sociologists of knowledge and other specialists to explain this perplexing phenomenon. In this paper I wish to examine the merits of the poststructural/postmodernist movement itself with a view to highlighting its shortcomings. This examination will not be entirely negative, because it will include a proposal for a return to a securer world in which science is afrmed, the author is resurrected and truth is rediscovered. Science Afrmed First, I will examine the anti-scientic posture of postmodernism. Although there are good reasons to question whether human activity will ever be adequately explained on the basis of science, there seems to be little point in denying the validity of wellconrmed scientic knowledge of the natural world. The principles governing, say, electricity, blood transfusions or moon rocketry are the same whoever one is or wherever one happens to be. It is self-evident that well-conrmed scientic knowledge of natural phenomena does not rest for its validity on the peculiarities, culture or social positions of the scientists responsible for this knowledge. A decision to accept the well-tested theories and results of science in providing foundational knowledge of the world does not mean that people without science have no valid knowledge or that science is equally

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applicable in all domains of knowledge. A commitment to science is essentially a commitment to test knowledge claims in ways that eliminate individual bias and to ensure that what knowledge is accepted is grounded on objective, veriable evidence. If science provides a means to acquire knowledge of phenomena capable of independent verication, this does not suggest scientists are infallible or that all claims scientists make are of equal merit. Much so-called scientic knowledge is inadequately supported with evidence or is at a hypothesis testing stage, but there are also vast areas where scientic knowledge is well conrmed and secure, providing the foundations on which reliable predictions and inferences can be made and constituting the basis of modern technology.32 Science has had less success in providing secure knowledge of human societies, and in this domain its claims are often contested. Whatever the status of scientic knowledge might be, its great strength lies in its testing procedures, which ultimately ensure that inadequate theories can be refuted of restated in ways that align them with empirical evidence.33 Scientists do not have the freedom to interpret the world as they might see it. Their constructions or reconstructions of the world must be grounded in evidence from that world. Unlike the artist, scientists must set out criteria on the basis of which their hypotheses and theories can be tested against the world they seek to explain. Not only are such criteria required, but just as important, it is not the authors of new theories or interpretations who get to decide on their validity, but the scientic community as a whole whose responsibility it is to evaluate all signicant new knowledge claims. These constraints on the scientic imagination mean that many theories do not achieve the status of secure knowledge. Although there are many scholars who question the appropriateness of applying the methods of natural science to human societies, there is no shortage of social scientists who have adopted such procedures. These scientists seek to discover laws and theories applying to human activity. The status of such knowledge is dependent, as it is in the natural sciences, on connecting ones conjectures about society to a body of empirical evidence. The efforts of social scientists do not come close to replicating the success of natural scientists in establishing well-conrmed laws and theories, but social scientists in disciplines such as psychology and economics have produced a body of general knowledge that is reasonably well conrmed by empirical evidence.34 If postmodernism rejects science, it does not reject the idea of theory, but frees it from the constraints that unite both natural and social scientists in a quest for objective, veriable knowledge. The postmodernist endorses the notion that there are multiple interpretations of events, providing an opening for every scholar to become his or her interpreter of social theorist.35 There is a vast difference between scientists construing their task as one of making a contribution to a particular body of knowledge that will stand independently of their own individual personalities and that of construing it as an opportunity to inform the world about their own interpretations on the matters they might care to investigate.36 The latter approach to scholarship apart from demanding that individual authors possess the kind of mind and literary skills that would make their musings and reections of general interest militates against the notion of research and scholarship as a communal effort. This notion is crucial to the whole idea that knowledge accumulates on the basis of the combined efforts of many individuals. The anti-scientic position of postmodernism has an important self-serving consequence for such scholars by making it unnecessary for them to present their social theory for empirical verication. Science of whatever description has been concerned with providing empirical evidence in support of its theories. Hypotheses, theories and laws

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are only as good as the tests to which they have been subjected. If one rejects the whole idea of empirical verication and testing one creates an environment in which theoretical work can proceed without limits. The lack of clear criteria on which theoretical propositions can be tested and, if necessary, rejected makes nonsense of theory in all disciplines seeking to say something about the world in which we live. Scholars are given carte blanche to afrm what they want to afrm, to reject what they do not like without having to do the hard work of providing the evidence on which their selections are made. The anti-humanist notion that people are largely unaware of who they are or what motivates them to do what they do might ironically provide an agenda for psychological science dedicated to producing well-conrmed knowledge of the factors that channel people in this or that direction. A recent study, for example, made a case for younger siblings are more likely to rebel than their rst born brothers or sisters.37 This thesis is exactly the kind of thesis that lends itself to scientic testing if it is to have a status beyond personal speculation. If birth order can affect ones personality so too can a host of other factors and they should be investigated by social scientists with appropriate qualications. Similarly, the idea that people are products of their particular situations or can be dened in terms of such attributes as gender, race or class provides a weak basis for social research if it is not connected to the procedures of science. Ironically the research agenda of social theory, precisely because it is primarily concerned with forces that are acting on people at a subconscious or unconscious level, is ideally tailored to the methods of quantitative research. In the absence of such methods social theory not surprisingly becomes speculative philosophy in the tradition of Nietzsche, whose works have been so inuential in promoting this line of thought. The emergence of postmodern social theory with little or no emphasis on procedures of verication (or falsication) has encouraged much ungrounded speculation.38 The value of any theory or interpretation in all academic endeavors that purport to say something about real or empirical phenomena lies in the condence we can have in their truth or correctness. A theory or interpretation must have sufcient empirical evidence in its support to provide one with a basis for accepting it: not just evidence that illustrates the theory, but evidence that seeks to test it. The question any inquiring scholar needs to ask is: What is the evidence in support of this interpretation that compels me to accept it? Without such evidential support a theory remains a speculation or conjecture without status as empirical knowledge. Such unsupported theory might well promote a particular cause and encourage political action or support. But theory must do better than this, if it is to escape the fate of political ideologytrue for supporters and few else. Resurrecting the Author/Subject The postmodern view of people as unwitting or unconscious victims of forces they do not control or understand makes the study of human consciousness a secondary issue to the study of power relations, and the idea of the active subject as the maker of his or her own life all but disappears. This view is rejected. Instead it is proposed that human beings are the makers of their own societies as self-conscious agents aware and in control of what they are doing. In constructing their societies people have done so as physical and psychological beings and have sought (successfully or not) to create societies in which these elements are taken into account. The essence of this humanist approach to understanding the nature of human life gives priority to the analysis of what people have made of themselves in a multitude of historical, environmental and social situations.

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The idea that people have the freedom to make themselves (within the constraints of historical circumstances and their human bodily existence) contrasts with the view that thought is brought-up, so to speak behind basic instincts or forces that are propelling individuals in this or that direction The view set out above has a strong and vital history in the modern era beginning with the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico and continued by major thinkers such as Herder, Dilthey, Croce and Collingwood.39 All these individuals remain inuential within philosophy and each of them has become the focus of what amounts to an academic cottage industry. The idea that people have made their own histories as conscious intellectual beings, that societies are human creations, is here classied as an idealist approach. If the term idealist is somewhat broad it serves nevertheless as a general description of a position in which the thinking subject is accorded the major role in dening and making human society, that people construct the worlds in which they live giving them meaning in terms of their objectives and particular traditions of thought. The idealist does not dispute the importance of looking at people in the context of the power positions they occupy in a given social formation. People, however, are not seen as inscribed by their historical legacies, but rather are viewed as active, conscious historical agents who grasp who they are and where they t in a given social order. Individuals will organize their lives according to their understanding of what is possible for them as individuals and members of larger groups. This understanding will vary as individuals will differ on ways to advance themselves or change society. In this area we have a contest of competing conscious individuals and groups working within a historical legacy that provides the ground rules of engagement. In this contest the strategies adopted by this or that person or group of people can be seen as incorporating their ideals and goals and understood as an intellectual process. The resurrection of the dead author of postmodernism as a thinking person capable of responsible action does not imply that people do not have a biological and psychological existence. The important issue from a historical and social point of view is how such phenomena are understood. The scholar is not primarily concerned with modern ideas about what factors really account for this or that kind of personality or behavior, but how the peoples of the past understood themselves and attributed (causal) responsibility for various kinds of action. In the ctional world of Erewhon the sick were jailed and criminals hospitalized, under a system which reversed the usual causal connections relating to individual accountability.40 Yet however different this and other societies might be, they need to be understood in terms of the way their members constructed reality, because such constructions provide the basis on which people make judgments about each other and the world around them. In looking at societies as made up of conscious, thinking individuals, who make decisions for themselves about the conduct of their lives, one does not imply that people are driven by rational goals, but maintains that whatever their unconscious goals might be they must be achieved within the social and cultural contexts of the societies in which they nd themselves. The historical and social focus is not primarily on the nature of human drives, but rather on how human drives are expressed, or dealt with in particular social and historical settings. There are specic goals to which people aspire in seeking to satisfy their unconscious drives or desires and the scholar is in a position to assess and follow the strategies adopted to reach such goals. There is a world of understanding that deals with the causes of human action at the level of consciousness. These causes are the conscious motives of people acting or responding to the people and events around them. In these action and responses people make reasoned assessments of their situations as

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members of particular groups and societies, and their conduct needs to be understood in these terms. The restoration of the independent, conscious subject to a place of pre-eminence in human geography does not mean that social forces and social movements should be ignored. The individual is fully capable to understanding that his or her interests might be best advanced in an organized way. The workers in a particular industry might form a trade union to protect and advance their interests, but on the position presented here they would do so as individuals who understood what they were doing. In whatever circumstances people nd themselves, they have to make decisions about what their interests and objectives are and how best to secure them. In this process one nds the drama of great mass movements and the heroism of individual action and the mundane give and take of everyday life. Whatever the scale, human society is construed as the product of conscious individual subjects interacting with each other and the world around them. The idea that people have made their own societies takes on enormous signicance for history and the social sciences in the hands of Vico and other like-minded philosophers.41 Vico argued that not only had people made their societies, but as a consequence of this fact scholars could understand what they had done, because scholars were thinking beings like the people they were studying. In contrast Vico maintained that the human understanding of nature would always be limited to describing and modeling its external attributes, because it was (as he put it) Gods creation not ours. Once it is accepted that people have created their own societies (its culture, institutions and technologies), individuals become the active agents of historical change, and analysis can take place at the conscious level of human thought and ideas. Scholars who approach their tasks within the idealist tradition study past societies by seeking to understand how the individuals who comprised them thought about themselves and the world around them. In recovering the ways of thinking of past peoples the historian is in a position to understand why they acted as they did. This mode of analysis involves seeing the world with the ideas, concepts and theories of the people under study, connecting theories to their thought in a coherent and logical way. If there is a probing of anything at the unconscious level it is to uncover the presuppositions or taken-for-granted assumptions on which conscious thinking rests.42 In this type of approach the subject is reconstructed as the basis of analysis: the scholar must interpret what was said and done in the context of what the subject thought and wanted to achieve. The Nietzchean thesis on perspectivism which has its modern counterpart in the idea of situated knowledge is a useful concept if it is seen as a methodological device apart from its epistemological status. That people will interpret the world differently depending on their backgrounds, personalities and situations is afrmed by idealist scholars. The idealist seeks to rethink or reenact the thoughts that people have about who they are and the strategies they develop to pursue their goals. The variety of perspectives that might be present in a social or historical situation are seen as components of the whole, because taken together they provide a basis for understanding how the people involved in a given event or episode interacted with each other. The assumption here is that the scholar needs to understand what people are doing in terms of the various ways in which they have constructed their worlds. These partial perspectives when integrated into an account of the entire event or episode can help to explain why what happened happened in the way it did. There is a vast literature on the ways and means available to scholars desiring to

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reconstruct the thought of past people. Vico himself talked about imaginative reenactment, Herder used the term einfuhlen.43 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the German word verstehen was widely adopted by followers of Dilthey and Weber. In England, R.G. Collingwood used the term re-enactment and rethinking to describe the scholars task of understanding the mindsets of the people he/she was studying.44 More recently these terms have been re-employed by Dray and other Collingwood scholars seeking to elucidate his philosophy for the modern scholar.45 Whatever name one wishes to use here, there is nothing further from the idealist position than the idea of rethinking as some kind of psychic mind reading. The emphasis is on intelligible conscious thought, the kind of thought that is expressed when people communicate with each other. The scholar who desires to drop in on a historical conversation needs to know the issues that concerned the people he or she is studying and understand their language. He/she wants to recover the contemporary mindsets with a view to the critical analysis of why the various individuals and groups acted as they did. It is focused on self-conscious individual subjects and groups, whose utterances, statements and writings are analyzed as expressions of thought usually designed with an audience in mind and not to be taken at face value. In recognizing human communication is usually directed at an audience scholars should be aware that people can be devious and dishonest in their dealings with each other, revealing very little of the thought that underpins their observed activities. Nietzsche understood this element of human nature better than most when he wrote: This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in man. Deception, attering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneselfin short, a continuous uttering around the solitary ame of vanityis so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.46 The possible deviousness of human actions, however, provides no grounds for abandoning the idea that people think about what they want and adopt rational strategies dependent on context to achieve them. Rediscovering Truth The psychological Nietzsche was convinced that human concern with truth was as unlikely a development as any, given the preoccupation people had with power and their own survival, and he was skeptical about the whole idea. A number of scholars have interpreted his writings as undermining the very idea of truth. Clark has described the views of some of them. Many assume that Nietzsche has demonstrated that there are no facts and no truths, but only interpretations, or different perspectives on reality. It is therefore apparently a mistake to attempt to give the correct interpretation of anything, including, if not especially, of Nietzsches own philosophy. His writings can only be supposed to offer a model of what lies on the other side of philosophythe liberated intellect playing joyfully with itself, rather than engaged in the ascetic activity of offering arguments and theories, or even attempting to, say something true.47

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The above position might have some philosophical merit, but it provides no help for the empirical scholar. The possibility of creating a body of empirical knowledge depends on there being objective ways of connecting theories, ideas and interpretations to a tangible or real world. However unlikely a development it might have been, the idea of truth did gain hold and with the emergence of empirical procedures it became possible for contending theories and ideas to be tested against facts. In open societies the acceptance of a specic theory or interpretation is in the long run dependent on its empirical success, making the social position of the individual who might have proposed it irrelevant. This ideal can and has been corrupted, but spurious claims in science and outright propaganda have a tendency to expose themselves. The role of facts and evidence in science can be thought of as performing a role that is similar to that of the market in capitalist economies, namely that of an impartial arbiter whose authority is able to overwhelm any individual or group claim. (Whatever happened to cold fusion?) It is convenient to describe well-conrmed knowledge as the truth, and there does not seem to be much point in abandoning a word or concept whose meaning poses no difculty for general understanding, however contested its meaning might be among professional philosophers. The Nietzschean-inspired view that science is one among many possible interpretations of the world of human experience has merit in its recognition that scientic reality is a human construction. In the same way a map is not the territory it depicts, science is not the reality it describes. It is useful to keep such distinctions in mind particularly when ones model of reality does not appear to t with experience. Yet in many cases models have been so well tested that it makes good sense to elide this distinction. The model in such cases becomes for all intents and purposes reality. Would it be going too far to claim the world is round is a true fact not an interpretation? I do not think so. The well-conrmed facts of science might still be models, but to call such facts real would not privilege science, but rather would privilege what is self evident to any reasonable person. There might be a reality that is beyond the one just described but it is a reality that can safely be left to metaphysical philosophers and theologians to dene. The idea that there are well-conrmed facts that cannot be denied by any reasonable person is at odds with the view that knowledge is a product of power. In ancient Britain King Canute, in a demonstration of the limits of royal power for the sycophants around him, ordered the advancing tide back, but he was not obeyed.48 Human beings can harness the power of nature with accurate knowledge of how nature works, but they cannot change natures laws on the basis of social power. If the view that knowledge is a function of power is clearly nonsensical in the realm of natural science the same principle must also apply to other realms of empirical knowledge. The very idea of knowledge grounded on empirical observations and evidence creates a principle of knowledge acceptance and rejection that rules out power as a relevant factor in the discovery of new knowledge.49 The notion that interpretations must be grounded on evidence is a principle that applies to all disciplines dealing with the real or nonctional world. A common principle or goal, however, does not imply that only one method or approach is consistent with it. In the natural and social sciences, theories and laws provide the principal tools of explanation, and their value is dependent on their ability to make accurate predictions of the systems to which they apply. In the realm of human activity there is much that can be learned from science, but also much that is beyond its reach. If it is assumed that people are thinking agents with the capacity of making free decisions and choices the

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methods of natural science have to give way to procedures aimed at recovering the thought that is incorporated in the activity one is concerned to understand. In history and some social sciences the task of explanation is often better construed as one of understanding the thinking and mindsets of the people whose actions one is investigating. This focus in no way dispenses with the requirement that scholars support their interpretations with evidence. Collingwood has identied three rules of method to which the historian, but not the artist or novelist is bound.50 First, the historian must localize his or her interpretation of an event in space and time. Second, there is only one historical world and all historical accounts must stand in relationship to it and each other. Third, the historian must provide the evidence on the basis of which the truth of his or her historical statements can be justied and defended. This task requires the imagination of the scholar as much as any natural scientic endeavor, but the historian is no freer than the scientist to imagine connections, in this case between what people thought and did, that are not supported by appropriate empirical evidence. The requirement that interpretations be supported by evidence seeks to provide a criterion separating fact from ction. The objective of scholars concerned about people as social and geographical agents is to describe and interpret what they did. It is assumed that it is possible to focus on signicant factors in any human enterprise or activity, those factors that were consciously taken into account by the social agents whose actions helped shape the outcome of a particular social or historical process. In the way that one can describe a chemical reaction in terms of the chemical agents involved in it without including all the particularities of the laboratory in which it occurred in a similar way one can identify signicant factors in a human situation, without in any way coming close to reproducing the past as it actually happened. A scholarly or scientic community in agreeing on criteria of relevance creates a situation in which the limits of knowledge are dened in ways that transcend the individuals own particular and unique perspective on any phenomenon or event of general interest. The historical utterance, text or action is not open to re-interpretation by the scholar. What was said, written or done must be assessed in terms of what the individuals who spoke, wrote or acted intended by their deeds whether or not they were successful in achieving them. The historical scholar who interprets the American Declaration of Independence must do so in terms of what its signers thought they were doing and why they produced it in the way they did. One could in a separate study look at the impact of the Declaration in terms of what it meant to later generations, but this would be a different study. The scholar concerned with the Declaration of Independence as it was written in 1776 has no liberty to interpret it except as an expression of the ideas and objectives of these responsible for it. On this principle there is a correct interpretation of this document: the interpretation that reveals the actual intentions and thinking of the individuals who produced and signed the document. Such an interpretation might elude historians, but in acknowledging it exists as a possibility one provides a goal for serious scholarly engagement. The idealist assumes that the objective of scholarship is to provide a truthful account of the episodes and human activities being studied, not in the sense of replicating what happened but in the sense of identifying the signicant facts and factors that provide an explanation of the topic selected for study. Truth or the concept of truth provides the regulating idea of humanist scholarship, making it obligatory for scholars to defend their theories and interpretations with evidence open to public scrutiny. The concept of truth as a regulating goal aims at ensuring productive scholarly debate, in which biases prejudices and poorly-supported interpretations are ruthlessly uncovered.

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The truth as some absolute ideal might never be achievable, but a quest for it can certainly provide a basis for more responsible and accountable scholarship, that steers clear of irrefutable speculation and interpretations unsupported with empirical evidence. In the words of the historian G.R. Elton it is the duty of historians to understand the people of the past, not to invent an alternative existence for them.51 The concept of knowledge set out above is an ideal that is more easily achieved in the natural sciences than it is in the social sciences and history. In this respect the Nietzschean idea of perspectivism, in which individual interpretation takes precedence over facts, is not entirely without merit, but it can be restated more positively. The individual scholar might indeed make every effort to ensure that his or her account of an event or phenomenon took account of all relevant particulars and accorded with the available evidence, but no one is capable of escaping their own social position in a contemporary society. This situatedness has important implications for history and the social sciences where human interests and values are frequently involved in the scholars quest for understanding. Croce acknowledged this problem of history with his famous statement to the effect that all history is contemporary history. The practical requirements which underlie every historical judgment give to all history the character of contemporary history because, however remote in time events there recounted may seem to be, the history in reality refers to present needs and present situations wherein those events vibrate.52The scholars positionality, however, does not give him or her leave to abandon a commitment to interpreting human activities on the basis of evidence or facts, but it is recognized that the knowledge, interests and values of each generation of scholars will nd expression in the kinds of studies that it is possible for them to produce. Conclusion In areas where there is no requirement that images and ideas have to connect to anything except themselves postmodernism has much to offer. These areas would include such subjects as art, theatre, literature and other cultural activities. In all subjects where what is studied has an existence of its own in the world there is a need for a philosophy or epistemology that provides a grounding for the knowledge that is proposed, a philosophy that establishes criteria on which genuine knowledge can be differentiated from error and nonsense. The disciplines of engineering and medicine would be of little value if their interpretations of how things worked had no connection to a reality that actually worked as theorized. The same requirement holds for all disciplines that seek to understand or explain phenomena that exist or every existed as real entities. Thus geography, sociology, history, economics and other social sciences are all concerned with a real world and this concern means that there must be some way of connecting theories or interpretations of this world to the world itself, in deciding which of these constructs should be given the status of knowledge. Geography does not need postmodernism to accomplish its academic mission. The movement emerged among French scholars as a means for them to address their particular problems, which were clearly situated within the nexus of French academic life. Ironically they addressed these problems by taking up the extreme, anti-humanist philosophy of Nietzsche who was primarily a literary philosopher and trenchant social critic with a peculiar nihilistic interest in epistemology. The French Nietzschean philosophers have little of importance to say to geographers, whose principal concern with philosophy has to do with nding an epistemology that supports their empirical

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work.53 Few geographers would want geography to return to the scientism of the quantitative revolution era, but most geographers do have a concern with producing valid knowledge as a means of understanding how people have used and arranged themselves on the face of the earth, and even providing recommendations and suggestions for how specic groups might improve on their past records. Geographers need philosophy as a foundation on which to build a body of secure geographical knowledge. An idealist approach dedicated to understanding people as conscious agents of their own activities and creations, and insistent on the central role of evidence is well-suited to geographical scholarship. Geography is the study of what people have made of themselves as creatures whose existence is inseparable from the earth they inhabit and on whose resources they depend for a living. How and why have people arranged themselves in physical spaces and used the resources of the earth in the ways they have? would be the kinds of questions a geographer might seek to answer within this tradition of scholarship. When one looks at the way people have occupied and used the earth one is looking at what people have done as conscious, thinking creatures. In everything that people have done to, with and on the earth as self conscious, social and purposeful beings there are embedded human thoughts and ideas that the geographer can seek to unravel and understand in a systematic and accountable way.

Notes
1. D. Harvey, Explanation in Geography (London: Edward Arnold, 1969); C. Harris, Power, Modernity, and Historical Geography, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 81 (1991), 67183; D. Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). 2. R. J. Johnston, Geography and Geographers: Anglo-American Human Geography since 1945, 5th ed. (London: Edward Arnold, 1997); D. N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). 3. J. Lechte, Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1994). 4. I. Burton, The Quantitative Revolution and Theoretical Geography, The Canadian Geographer, 7 (1963): 15162. 5. M. Dear, The Postmodern Challenge: Reconstructing Human Geography, Transactions, Institute of British Geographers, NS 13 (1988): 26274. 6. M. Dear, Postmodern Challenge, 271. 7. The extent to which geographers have explored postmodern methodologies has varied widely ranging from adopting certain of its terms to embracing its key elements concerned with power, knowledge and modernity. A sense of the different ways in which postmodern ideas have impacted some parts of geography can be found in the following articles: G. Wynn, A Fine Balance: Geography at the Millennium, The Canadian Geographer, 43, no. 4 (1999): 22043; T. Barnes, Retheorizing Economic Geography: From the Quantitative Revolution to the Cultural Turn, Annals, Association of American Geographers, 91, no. 3 (2001): 54665; R. Heyman, Pedagogy and the Cultural Turn in Geography, Environment and Planning D, 19, no. 1 (2001); and C. Harris, Postmodern Patriotism: Canadian Reections, The Canadian Geographer, 45, no. 1 (2001): 193207. 8. The term idealism has been frequently used to describe Collingwoods view of history articulated in his Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946). Whether this term is appropriately used in a strict philosophical sense is doubtful, because Collingwood does not reject the idea that science can provide us with useful and reliable information about the natural world. Collingwood becomes a more conventional idealist when it comes to understanding human actions. Such actions are seen as incorporating human thought that exists independently of the natural world within which they are embedded. The term idealism to describe Collingwoods philosophy has been widely adopted by geographers following its use by L. Guelke in An Idealist Alternative in Human Geography, Annals, Association of American Geographers, 66, no. 2 (1974): 193202. See also Idealism, in The Dictionary of Human Geography, 3rd ed., eds R. J. Johnston, D. Gregory and D. M. Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 27071.

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9. P. M. Rosenau, Postmodernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads and Intrusions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 96. 10. The idealist, however he or she might use the results of science to support a particular knowledge claim considers that the nomothetic approach of science is not appropriate for an understanding of cultural and historical aspects of human societies dependent on human thought and creativity. 11. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 213. 12. As an idealist I remain skeptical of the application of natural scientic methods to the study of human societies, but would acknowledge that the massive efforts of social scientists in disciplines such as psychology and economics have produced some reasonably secure knowledge. 13. L. Ferry and A. Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990 [1985]). 14. A. D. Schrift, Nietzsches French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism (London: Routledge, 1995). 15. B. Russell, History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944), 760. 16. R. Schacht, Nietzsche (London: Routledge, 1983), ixx. 17. R. C. Solomon, Nietzsche ad hominem: Perspectivism, Personality and ressentiment, in The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, eds. B. Magnus and K. M. Higgins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 180. 18. R. Schacht, Nietzsche: Selections (New York: Macmillan, 1993). 19. W. Kaufman, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); Schacht, Nietzsche. 20. M. Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 21. Solomon, Nietzsche ad hominem, 195. 22. F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (New York: Vintage Books, 1974 [1882]), 336. 23. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 334335. 24. Schacht, Nietzsche: Selections, 49. 25. C. Koelb, ed., Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Con (Albany: State University of New York, 1990). 26. M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, (New York: Vintage Books, 1965 [1961]); M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1971 [1966]); M. Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972 [1969]); M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 19721977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980). 27. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 5354. 28. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 98. 29. A. Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 195. 30. A. Renaut, The Era of the Individual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997 [1989]). 31. A. Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 194240. 32. Science can, in fact, provide foundational knowledge on which humanistic interpretations of society might rest. The use of carbon 14 as a means of dating settlement sites or the scientic analysis of historical documents illustrate how science can help provide a secure basis for an interpretation that might itself not incorporate a scientic philosophy. 33. Feminist scholars have pointed out the male biases that affected many areas of social science making women invisible or undervaluing their contributions to social and economic life. They have made the important case that male scientists to the extent that they imposed their gendered thinking on their subjects were not in the least bit objective. These correctives to the way the world was interpreted far from undermining the objectives of social science contributed to them by helping ensure a more balanced and truer account of how societies functioned. 34. There are also disciplines such as history and political science where the methods of the natural sciences have been less successful. Here analyses that are more idiographic and less theoretical have had greater success, but most scholars who are skeptical about the formulation of general theory remain concerned about supporting their specic (idiographic) interpretations with empirical evidence. 35. Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences, 7791. 36. It should go without saying that in an age of where science needs money to forward its mission that sciences agenda becomes a political agenda. The decision about who gets what money is not science, but politics or social power. It is about the social priorities of a people or nation. Science is about discovering how things work. The research of scientists can certainly be advanced with strong funding, but strong

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37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

funding alone cannot generate scientic discoveries. Scientic discoveries exist in the realm of science and scientic conrmation. This realm might be supported by public funds, but it is a realm of its own in which discoveries exist in their own right and independently of the forces that might have helped produce them. F. J. Sulloway, Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996). F. R. Ankersmit, Historiography and Postmodernism, History and Theory, 26 (1989), 13753; K. Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering our Past (New York: The Free Press, 1997). T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch, The New Science of Giambattista Vico (Ithaca: Cornell, 1968); I. Berlin, Vico and Herder (London: Hogarth, 1976); M. Ermath, Wilhelm Dilthey: A Critique of Historical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); B. Croce, History: Its Theory and Practice (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921) and B. Croce, History as the Story of Liberty (New York: Norton, 1941); Collingwood, Idea of History. S. Butler, Erewhon or Over the Range (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1981 [1872]). L. Pompa, Vico: A Study of the New Science (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975). R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940). Berlin, Vico and Herder, 173. Collingwood, Idea of History, 21718. W. H. Dray, History as Re-enactment: R.G. Collingwoods Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) and L. Mink, Mind, History and Dialectic: The Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1969). Schacht, Nietzsche: Selections, 46. Clark, Nietzsche on Truth, 2. This episode is not, of course, decisive in proving power does not play a role in the production of knowledge, but it does suggest that there are limits to what power can achieve. This rules out power in the long run. In any given society it might be possible for those in power to promulgate unproven or false ideas, but it is not within their power to conrm such ideas with appropriate scientic evidence if such evidence does not exist. Collingwood, Idea of History, 245. G. R. Elton, History According to Saint Joan, American Scholar, 54 (1985): 55155. Croce, Story of Liberty, 19. The English-speaking reader of translated works and commentaries on French thinkers would likely have drawn the conclusion that all modern French academics were poststructuralists or postmodernists. This conclusion is not warranted. There is, in fact, a lively resistance movement to postmodernism in France, and the works of this movement are now becoming available in English translation. An important early anti-postmodernist work was Luc Ferry and Alain Renauts French Philosophy of the Sixties (1990). These well-read philosophers provide a carefully-argued critique of leading French thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and other postmodernists. This work has been followed by others among which are Renaults The Era of the Individual: A Contribution to a History of Subjectivity (1997) and a multi-authored work edited by Ferry and Renaut with the provocative title Why We are Not Nietzcheans (1997). The new anti-postmodern authors are intent on breaking away from the Nietzschean foundations of postmodernism, which they see as having a debilitating hold on scholars who would understand the nature of human societies.

Note on contributor
Leonard Guelke is an historical geographer with a long-standing interest in philosophical issues in geography. He has published many articles dealing with such matters and is the author of Historical Understanding in Geography: An Idealist Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).