ABSTRACT
Peter Taylor draws a distinction between ‘Political Geographers’ and ‘political geographers’. As I would not claim to be a ‘Political Geographer’ but rather, like all geographers, ‘political’, I do not feel competent to comment upon the disputes within ‘Political Geography’ beyond making a couple of simple points. First, the identification of ‘Political Geography’ as a discrete sub-discipline and the resulting claims made for it, particularly the assertion that it is non-ideological, perform an important ideological function by attempting to depoliticise politics. Second, the assumptions made within ‘Political Geography’ as to the nature of both ‘the Political’ and ‘Geography’ are of central importance. How, for example, is the political process to be conceptualised – in terms of the geography of voting patterns or in terms of the structure of class relations, most fundamentally those of production? Clearly most ‘Political Geographers’ would not wish to be associated with the latter view which makes its ‘political’ stance explicitly clear.
