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Geopolitics shared Ratzel's scientific materialism and geographic determinism, and held that human society was determined by external influences—in the face of which qualities held innately by individuals or groups were of reduced or no significance. National Socialism rejected in principle both materialism and determinism and also elevated ...
Friedrich Ratzel (August 30, 1844 – August 9, 1904) was a German geographer and ethnographer, notable for first using the term Lebensraum ("living space") in the sense that the National Socialists later would.
Rudolph Kjellén was Ratzel's Swedish student who would further elaborate on organic state theory and first coined the term "geopolitics". [21] Kjellén's State as a Form of Life would outline five key concepts that would shape German geopolitik. [22] Reich was a territorial concept that comprised Raum, Lebensraum, and strategic military shape ...
Friedrich Ratzel's metaphoric concept of society as an organism—which grows and shrinks in logical relation to its Lebensraum (habitat)—proved especially influential upon the Swedish political scientist and conservative politician Johan Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922), who interpreted that biological metaphor as a geopolitical natural-law. [18]
Kjellén was Ratzel's student and would further elaborate on organic state theory, coining the term "geopolitics" in the process. Geopolitics for Kjellén was theory and war its "experimental field." [1] He was also influenced by John Robert Seeley and Heinrich von Treitschke, who were advocates of imperialism.
At the same time, Ratzel was creating a theory of states based around the concepts of Lebensraum and Social Darwinism. He argued that states were analogous to 'organisms' that needed sufficient room in which to live. Both of these writers created the idea of a political and geographical science, with an objective view of the world.
Haushofer was exposed to Ratzel, who was friends with Haushofer's father, a teacher of economic geography, [27] and would integrate Ratzel's ideas on the division between sea and land powers into his theories, saying that only a country with both could overcome this conflict. [28] Haushofer's geopolitik expands upon that of Ratzel and Kjellén.
Mearsheimer traces back the roots of his theory to classic thinkers such as Thucydides and Machiavelli, whereas Specter draws a line back from the late 19th century's naval historians and geographers such as Friedrich Ratzel and Alfred Mahan, to influential German politicians and legal theorists such as Karl Haushofer and Carl Schmitt, and then ...