ABSTRACT
Geography is a social institution. Like all such institutions its value to society varies over time and place. The creators of modern geography are to be found in the bureaucracy of the Prussian state in the period immediately following the creation of the German Empire. The Prussian state education bureaucrats must have thought there was some value to a geographical perspective in Germany. 'Pure' geographers define geography's place in the division of knowledge and promote the status of the discipline within academia. Geography entered the post-war era of economic prosperity and social optimism as an academic anachronism. Regional geography was dismissed as ideographic and geographers were instructed to stop contemplating regions and begin the nomothetic task of finding morphological laws. The radical critique is the most interesting for the future of geography because it seems to have firmly established a Marxist position within modern geography.
