Concepts of Geopolitics
1943; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 8; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2085449
ISSN1939-8271
Autores Tópico(s)Polar Research and Ecology
ResumoAN INVESTIGATION into the concepts of German Geopolitics seems to be proper at a time when American sociologists, and more especially political sociologists, are asking themselves what they can contribute in this emergency. It appears that geopolitics, American style, may be able to fulfill the same mission in this country which it has fulfilled, in its German form, in Germany. It could be a national pedagogical enterprise designed to awake people from a feeling of false security and to show them the interconnectedness of social and political phenomena upon this globe. It could educate them, as the Germans put it, to a thinking in large areas. It could help them to understand peoples and races in terms of the images by which these peoples and races are guided rather than in terms of their own images. It is in this sense that the lesson which a formidable foe teaches could be taken to heart. In doing so, it should be noted that the basic concepts in the field are not strictly peculiar to the German school of Geopolitics. They are shared by German historians and geographers on the one hand and by students of Political Science and Political Geography outside Germany on the other. Karl Haushofer, the leading figure in German Geopolitics, quotes in his various writings many English and American authors among whom Sir Halford Mackinder, once Director of the London School of Eco!nomics and Political Science,' is foremost while the names of Brooks Adams, Turner, Mahan, and Bowman are probably more familiar to American readers. Yet, it is also true that nowhere else but in Germany has
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