Finally, Harvey argues in the piece for a new role for geographers and other scholars, as intellectuals and
academics. This consists in developing arguments of such persuasive strength that “all opposition to that system
of thought” will be made to look ludicrous. And he includes the caution that academics, in such matters, are often
“our own worst opponents.” Here Harvey is clearly referring to the difficulty of challenging the taken-for-granted
categories of thought and scholarly practice that often constrain the shift to new paradigms, particularly those that
also challenge the political status quo within which academics do their work. This, as Harvey concludes, becomes
especially difficult when the intersections between theory and practice are also a part of the changing mix. He lays
down a gauntlet in advocating the need for “real” as opposed to “merely liberal” commitment to social change,
and in the taunt that it is “indeed very comfortable to be a mere liberal.” Many of these challenges continue to
reverberate through much of the work included in the remainder of the book.
Jim Blaut (1927–2000) examines another dimension of the critique embodied in the “normative” turn, the
politics of scholarship, in Chapter 2. As the critique matured, it incorporated an increasing historical sensitivity to
the ways in which geographical knowledge and scholarship had been intertwined with systems of power,
particularly those of imperialism and colonialism. This paper by Blaut is an early formulation of this analysis, and
Blaut, like many of his contemporaries, saw the necessity for this kind of work as the U.S. engaged in yet another
round of neo-imperialism in the Vietnam War.
As in the piece by Harvey, Blaut is interested in the paradigmatic nature of scholarship, and particularly with
its taken for granted, naturalized elements. In the series of papers Blaut wrote at the time (1969, 1975, 1976), he
is interrogating the largely unexamined, and necessarily congruent, relationship between what he terms
“ethnoscience” (the system of beliefs, values, methods, and objects of inquiry characteristic of a specific culture)
and the interests of dominant élites within that culture. His specific focus in this series of papers, including in
Chapter 1, is the way in which Western ethnoscience over the previous 500 years (including geographic
knowledge) has been effectively utilized to justify centuries of oppressive imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism;
and, at the same time, to illustrate how those connections to the interests of the powerful in the West
have served to legitimate those scholarly disciplines (and individuals within them) and establish their value to
society. Indeed, one of the interesting themes that Blaut elaborates here (and which becomes a touchstone for
subsequent theory building in the “normative” vein) is this dialectical (mutually constituting) relationship between