“Not Only … But Also”: Quantitative and Critical Geography

This article argues that the binary between quantitative and critical geography is pseudo rather than real. The duality arose, the article suggests, because of the peculiar postwar intellectual history of human geography in which the critical approach followed the quantitative one. Accordingly, for internal sociological reasons, it was necessary for the critical approach to excise everything that went before in quantitative geography. In contrast, the article argues that there is no inherent contradiction between critical and quantitative approaches, and indeed there are good reasons to join them. The article makes its argument by suggesting, first, that Marx, the ultimate social critic, was sympathetic to mathematics in his own work; second, that this fact was lost to the radical geographers of the late 1960s and early 1970s because of their desire to distance themselves and ultimately to overthrow the dominant quantitative approach; and finally, that the supposed binary of quantitative and critical geography might be dissolved by engaging in what Galison (1998) Galison, P. 1998. Image and logic: A material culture of microphysics., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar], the historian of science, calls “trading zones.”