RADICAL GEOGRAPHY, HISTORY AND MODERNITY (I)

Abstract

The concept of radical geography emerged in the late 1960s and became very popular in America and Europe in the 1970s. Radical geography is a problem-oriented research area in the geographical science united by the ‘concept of social justice’ (D. Harvey). It has distinctive features as follows: a) the uniqueness of the themes, these being concerned with spatial and ecological problems generated by man’s violence against man and against nature; b) signs of ‘scientific underground’ (V.M. Kotlyakov – V.S. Preobrazhensky); c) the ‘leftist’ political orientation of theory and methodology. Radical-geographical intensions have always been present in culture and science. The article traces their evolution from the Greek antiquity to the 1970s. The paper presents and justifies the viewpoint that at the historical stage of ‘modernity’ the transformation of radical geographic ideas is conditioned by a) the historical collapse of Marxism as a project of future society, b) emergence of the newest egalitarian and antiestablishment doctrine of ‘postanarchism’, c) cardinal transformations of historical process connected with the adoption of network principles (in a broad sense) in modern society and eschatological expectations of ecological disaster. Modern geography cannot but be radicalized.