ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a brief retrospective. Indeed for many practitioners, possibly majority, confusion would be a more appropriate description of contemporary human geography as a discipline. The arguments raised in the 1960s are substantial enough: the purely factual nature of idiographic research, its non-cumulative character, the limited search for explanation, all pointed to an incomplete intellectual agenda, which was by no means restricted to human geography. Derek Gregory has noted how systems theory is an ideology of control, and perhaps the best introductory text of a positivist geography concludes with a call to theory in moulding future geographies. It is helpful to see the fragmentation of contemporary human geography as part of a broader expression, not only in social science, but also in the arts, of the cultural codes of modernism. Abstraction and fragmentation in human geography are related facets of broader cultural geographical condition, and as such they should not be confused with a law of nature.
