ABSTRACT
Political geography grew out o f the scientific geography o f the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This view drew heavily on evolutionary biology, the leading natural science o f the day, through the linking device o f the organismic analogy - i.e. the idea that human societies were like natural organisms, evolving and becoming more perfect in relation to the physical environment. These were powerful, socio-biological ideas, apparently backed by the very latest in scientific thought and, more importantly, ideologically functional to the expanding Euro-American powers in the second imperialism o f 1870-1914 (Dorpalen 1942, Peet 1985). Anthropogeographic ideas found their most powerful expression in the emerging schools o f political geography in AngloAmerica and geopolitics in Germany. The prominent British geographer Mackinder (1931, p. 326) was no stranger to organismic thinking, believing, for example, that a common blood flowed through the veins o f generations o f people living in the same natural region; however his widely known sayings were more narrowly geostrategic - for example his generalization that whoever controls the heartland o f central Asia controls the world (Mackinder 1904). In Germany, Haushofer combined Mackinder's heartland idea with Ratzel's organismic notion of Lebensraum (a state's 'living space') in a world model o f pan-regions dominated by Germany, Japan, and Anglo-America. Haushofer's ideas were influential in Nazi Germany and derivations (heartland-rimland) survived as explanations o f US-Soviet rivalry in the Cold War (Taylor 1985, pp. 40-3).
