Necessary,but not sufficient

Abstract

This response to John Agnew agrees that the history of ideas is never enough for the project of understanding the world but argues that it is a crucial part of that work. The commentary begins by contesting the claim that there is a turn towards this perspective in geography and suggests that much more needs to be done. I engage with Agnew’s article, especially with regard to the question of territory, by clarifying the project undertaken in The Birth of Territory. The inquiry there, I suggest, examined the complicated relation between words, concepts and practices; and many of the texts examined were not detached works of theory but practical texts – either written by or for political actors, or constitutions, treaties, papal bulls, handbooks of land surveying or law. This commentary closes by suggesting that the history of ideas, genealogy and conceptual history can, as part of what Foucault called ‘the history of the present’, offer valuable tools for critical geography. They are one element within such a project, necessary, but not sufficient.