The Great Debate in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Geography: Fred K. Schaefer vs. Richard Hartshorne

The mid-twentieth-century debate around whether geography should be ideographic, and descriptively study the unique, or nomothetic, and seek law-like explanatory generalizations, was sparked in 1953 by Fred K. Schaefer. Schaefer was a political refugee from Nazi Germany and not trained as a geographer. Nonetheless, he was a professor in the Geography Department at the University of Iowa, when he penned the paper that attacked America‘s most famous and powerful geographer, Richard Hartshorne. Hartshorne‘s celebrated book, The Nature of Geography (1939) defined, justified and genealogically fixed geography as an ideographic science, that is, “concerned with the description and interpretation of unique cases. …" (Hartshorne 1939, 449). Schaefer‘s paper excoriated all of Hartshorne‘s claims, both historical and philosophical. His alternative was the philosophy of logical positivism originating in Austria during the 1920s with a group of philosophers, scientists and mathematicians collectively known as the Vienna Circle. Logical positivism said that for any knowledge to be taken seriously as knowledge it must be expressible as a law-like generalization. When Hartshorne read Schaefer‘s critique, he was apoplectic. He wrote two virulent replies denying all of Schaefer‘s charges. Schaefer, though, was already dead so couldn‘t reply. But others did. Over the next decade some form of logical positivism took hold in the discipline and geography was never the same again.