Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) was a geographer who dedicated himself to studying and exposing the relationships between the population and its geographic space. However, his contribution to science was overshadowed for years by being part of the Nazi postulate in his expansionist ideas.
He was born on August 30, 1844 in Karlsruhe, Germany, so he lived through the unification process that took place in the German country between 1860-1870. For some time he worked as a pharmacist, while studying Greek and Latin. His interest in natural sciences led him to study geography since 1866. These studies were started in Karlsruhe, but finished at the University of Heidelberg in 1868..
He also worked as a correspondent for the newspaper Koelnische Zeitung in 1871, thanks to which he traveled to Italy, North America, Hungary, Mexico, France and Cuba. He was professor of geography at the Munich Higher Technical School from 1876. He also taught at the University of Leipzig from 1878.
His work revolved around the question of whether universal history and natural laws have something to do with it. Evolutionary anthropology also occupied part of his research and ended up being one of the greatest exponents of geopolitics..
He fought for a time as a volunteer soldier in the Franco-Prussian War until he was wounded.
For him, the economic growth of Germany required a territorial expansion that would make it possible to control the space between the North, Baltic, Black and Adriatic seas..
These ideas were a support for National Socialism to use its approaches to justify its expansionism, it was discredited although at present it is gradually being taken up again..
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The bottom line of his approach is that the life of a State resembles the life of an organism. He captured this in his notion of "living space" (Lebensraum).
According to Ratzel's conception, human societies develop in a natural setting (Rahmen), occupy a position (Stella) and need a certain space to nourish themselves (Raum).
For him, the state exists in a constant struggle for survival, which results in natural selection. This organicist vision of the state was, to a large extent, influenced by the Darwinian zoologist Moritz Wagner, between 1871 and 1872.
It could be said that Ratzel was one of the creators of social geography. According to him, primitive societies were organized by emigration and isolation.
In the time that Ratzel lived, Germany had just been unified in Europe and politics revolved around the exaltation of nationalism and imperialist interests..
Positivism was the prevailing current of thought and he could not escape from that fact. It was this philosophical stance that led him to use biological concepts in the interpretation of the facts of political geography..
For example, his comparison of the State with a living organism, in which institutions are organs that evolve (born, grow, mature, age and die), and fulfill a certain function.
On the other hand, his work received influences from Friedrich List, Heinrich von Treitschke and Ernst Haeckel, evident in their evolutionist and positivist positions..
Ratzel's teaching activity, as well as his progress in his studies, enabled him to produce some textbooks. Here are several of their titles:
In general terms, these works lay the foundations of the geographical determinism that postulates that human activity depends on the physical space it occupies..
They also reflect the search for an interpretation in which the territory is a political power. He contributed a theoretical body necessary for the acceptance of a theory of geographic space.
Friedrich Ratzel's work contributed to the development of Mexican anthropology and geography, so useful in the reconstruction process that followed the revolution in that country..
Works like The great national problems by Andrés Molina Enríquez, and The reconstruction of Mexico by Salvador Alvarado, were inspired by Ratzelian ideas of revaluation of the territory.
The territory was a key element in issues such as indigenous integration, land tenure and corruption of the public administration in Mexico.
Andrés Molina Enríquez, prominent jurist and member of the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics, also presented an organic conception of the State and related it to the territory.
For this Mexican author, human groups depend on the soil from something as basic as their food. From there they develop a relationship with the territory that determines its degree of evolutionary development. In this he agrees with Ratzel.
Some of the main followers of Friedrich Ratzel's approaches are:
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