ABSTRACT
Since the 1950s, new directions in political geography have developed partly under the aegis of a new political sociology. Systems analysis has supplied a fresh vision of the political process. The State appeared as a machine and its function was to respond to pressures from the population. The whole structure of the nation was conceived in terms of information, feed-backs and inputs and outputs of the political subsystem. The new political geography of the 1960s drew heavily upon this view of government. There was soon some disillusion since it was hard to define a spatial dimension to a political circuit. It is difficult to evaluate information flows when no distinction is made among them, when it is practically impossible to develop the idea of the range of power as economic geography has developed the idea of the range of a good or when casual news of no direct political significance is undifferentiated from information relevant to political actors, i.e. from orders and control. At the beginning of the 1970s, the new political geography had to face a difficult situation. The orientation that looked most promising ten years earlier proved to be difficult to pursue. It was certainly possible to develop it, but for that to happen, attention to the diversity of information flows in the political system was essential. But few geographers understood this situation (Claval 1979).
