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A Materialist Framework for Political Geography Author(s): Peter J. Taylor Source: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1982), pp. 15-34Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/621909Accessed: 16-07-2015 09:07 UTC

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A materialist framework for political geography PETER J. TAYLOR

Lecturer in Geography, University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Revised MS received 16 February 1981

ABSTRACT. It is proposed to locate political geography within the holistic approach of political economy. The problem of defining the 'political' is seen as crucial for developing political geography and our conclusions point us away from recent excessive concentration upon the state. A geographical perspective is identified in terms of the three scales of analysis found in many current textbooks. The political and geographical are brought together in a political economy of scale where the world-economy is the scale of reality, the state and nation represent the scale of ideology and the city is the scale of experience. The materialist framework offered specifies these geographical scales as structurally related in the form of ideology separating experience from reality.

The basic purpose of this paper is to describe a new framework for teaching and research in political geography. It is presented in full knowledge that this area of geography is already over- provided with such articles. In fact the classic papers of political geography typically consist of descriptions of approaches which are then faithfully reproduced in most modern textbooks--see for instance reproduction of, or discussions of Whittlesey (1939), Hartshorne (1950), Gottmann (1952) and Jones (1954) in Kasperson and Minghi (1969), De Blij (1967), Muir (1975) and Bergman (1975). The decade of the seventies has been marked by a seemingly ubiquitous call for employing a new systems framework. My justification for this paper is simply that I find these earlier statements fundamentally unsatisfactory as guides to either teaching or research.

In his introduction to Geography and politics in a world divided Cohen (1973) begins by defining geography before going on to define political geography out of the six past approaches to the subject that he identifies. In this paper we shall concentrate more on defining the 'political' part of our subject-matter which Cohen, along with most other writers on this topic, ignores. Hence the first section is devoted to the question of what is the 'political' in our studies, which is treated as far more fundamental than what is the geography bit. The second section then out- lines our 'geographical perspective' before both arguments are combined in the main section of the paper entitled 'A political economy of scale'. This is our description of the framework presented here for political geography.

POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

The political geography framework presented here is distinctive in that it is explicitly materialist in origin. In simplest terms it is based upon the notion that political institutions and ideas cannot be understood as separate from the underlying material needs of society. This implies that political studies such as political geography must be viewed as part of a wider concern for the overall structure of society and economy. This materialist viewpoint is usually identified as political economy.

Trans. Inst. Br. Geogr. N.S. 7, 15-34 (1982) Printed in Great Britain



16 PETER J. TAYLOR

The ideas of political economy have become popular in geography as radical Marxist viewpoints have become more common (Peet, 1977). They have been instrumental in making human geography as a whole more politically orientated. This trend has proved embarrassing for the traditionally conservative field of political geography (Taylor, 1979). The paradox to emerge is that a 'political geography without politics' (Johnston, 1980) has evolved to become the most 'apolitical' part of human geography (Taylor, 1977). This contribution may be viewed as part of an attempt to remove this contradiction.

The argument presented in this paper, however, goes further than those of other recent critics of political geography. It is not enough simply to reorientate political geography towards studying conflicts (Cox, 1973, 1979) and the operation of the state (Johnston, 1979b, 1980) so as to make it in some sense more 'political'. The argument developed here starts from the assumption that:

the classical lines of division within social science are meaningless. Anthropology, economics, political science, sociology-and history---are divisions of the discipline anchored in a certain liberal conception of the state and its relation to functional and geographical sectors of the social order. (Wallerstein, 1974a, p. 11)

Wallerstein goes on to call not for a multidisciplinary approach, but for a unidisciplinary approach. This is usually termed political economy, although Wallerstein himself seems to avoid this name. The essence of the political economy approach is its holism-the tight integration of the historical with the social, economic and political in a single framework, so that the traditional divisions of social science are not recognized as separate bodies of knowledge. Of course human geography mimics social science in its own division of knowledge to produce 'sub-disciplines' such as political geography, the topic of this paper. From the materialist viewpoint expounded here there can be no distinctive political-geographical theory but only a political-geographical perspective within the wider context of political economy: there is no sub-discipline of political geography.

We have now argued ourselves into a position where we cannot use the social science notion of a 'natural' division of man's activities as a justification for studying political geography (or in fact any other discipline or sub-discipline of human activities). We can easily overcome this problem on pragmatic grounds. Obviously a practical division of knowledge is required in teaching and research for simple reasons of organization. This is acceptable as long as the overall holism is respected. Furthermore, since we teach in institutions of higher education that do divide up knowledge on social science principles, we find ourselves allocated to different departments and within those departments allocated different teaching specialisms. To some degree, therefore, this paper represents a personal solution to teaching a pre-existing course called political geography to which I was 'assigned' some years ago. Such pragmatic justifications are not fully satisfactory however realistic they may seem in our daily work. The only truly meaningful justification for political geography arises if it can provide a useful perspective by organizing ideas to suggest fresh insights for political economy theory. It is the thesis of this paper that such a perspective is possible.

The problem of defining the 'political' Consider the following definitions of political geography:

(i) the study of areal differences and similarities in political character' (Hartshorne, 1954, p. 178);



A materialist framework for political geography 17

(ii) 'Political geography is concerned with politically organised areas' (Pounds, 1963, p. 1); (iii) 'the study of political phenomena in their areal context' (Jackson, 1964, p. 1); (iv) 'the study of the interaction of geographical area and political process' (National Academy

of Science-National Research Council 1965, p. 32); (v) 'the spatial analysis of political phenomena' (Kasperson and Minghi, 1969, p. xi); (vi) 'the spatial consequences of political processes' (Cohen, 1973, p. 6); (vii) 'a central concern of the political geographer is "who gets what, where?"' (Cox, 1979,

p. 3).

In some ways they neatly encapsulate trends experienced generally in human geography (Johnston, 1979a) as they move from areal description through spatial analysis to welfare geography. This sequence of concerns is not unlike that which occurred in political science, starting with description of political institutions and then moving on to more process-orientated approaches recently emphasizing public policy studies (Easton, 1968). From our perspective all of these definitions and approaches have one basic common denominator-they all treat the 'political' as given. Whether the adjective political is attached to character, area, process, phenomena or institutions, it is assumed that what is meant by 'political' is known. Hence the problem of defining the 'political'-the subject matter of this section-does not exist for typical social science approaches. In contrast, in political economy the definition of 'political' is a fundamental question, the answer to which will profoundly affect the subsequent study. It is not enough simply to allocate frontiers and boundaries, capital cities and administrative areas, and, more recently, elections and referenda, to the political part of geography without enquiring why these topics are considered to be political.

Part of the problem is that what is and what is not political varies greatly over time. In fact Laclau (1975, p. 107) claims that 'the separation between the economic and the political has not been verified in modes of production prior to capitalism'. Certainly the modern conception of political only emerged with the disintegration of feudal society and the freeing of private property from political restrictions. This resulted in the separation of the economic and social spheres from the political (or, in early Marxist terms, civil society from the state). Currently the scope of the political is a controversial topic in terms of the on-going debate on the size of the public sector in western societies. In fact the definitions provided above reflect the growing quantity of state activities in recent generations. Thus Cox's (1979) welfare approach may be interpreted as less of a fundamental change in political geography and more like a belated recognition in the field of the wider scope of the political with the modern growth of the state.

The welfare approach in geography is, however, related to the only group of political geographers who do recognize the question of what is political. The 'public choice paradigm' (Archer, 1981) is explicitly concerned with distinguishing what should be individual decisions and what should be collective (public) decisions. In this way Reynolds (1981) attempts to develop political geography theory around the concept of 'A Geography of Social Choice' and Cox (1979) refers to his welfare-orientated political geography as 'Location and Public Choice'. In political science these approaches are sometimes referred to as 'the new political economy', largely because they apply economic concepts to political events (e.g. 'buying' votes). (There is no integration of political and economic as in the classical political economy employed here and the two approaches should in no way be confused.) In its normative and positive contributions this public choice paradigm usually postulates minimal public involvement on the basis of liberal assumptions about individuals. These relatively abstract formulations (e.g. Reynolds, 1981) define the scope of the political but in a completely ahistorical manner and with very restricted assumptions which do not even fit current political realities.



18 PETER J. TAYLOR

The political economy employed in this paper uses collectives (classes, nations, states, urban labour markets) as basic objects of interest. Liberal assumptions are replaced by neo-Marxist assumptions and it is in this respect that the problem of defining the political becomes acute. In Marxist thought politics expresses class domination and this has two important implications for our argument. First, it gives politics an essentially negative function in that the culmination of Marxist politics is the abolition of politics itself (Shaw, 1974, p. 434). The revolution is to be followed by the withering away of the state and the politics of class conflict is replaced by mere administrative functions in a classless society. Secondly, the linking of the political to class conflict makes the political all-pervasive as, in fact, the term political economy implies. In this sense all activities in capitalist societies relate to the power and domination inherent in the economic structure and as such are all highly 'political'. Of course, such an argument precludes any activities being distinctively political and is one of the reasons Miliband (1977) gives for the lack of development of political theory in Marxist thought. Recently, however, there has been an upsurge of Marxist interest in the state. It is from the recent debates on this theme that we will develop the principles for our materialist framework for political geography.

Recent Marxist debates on the state The starting point for most discussion of the political in Marxist thought is the simple economic base-political superstructure model first found in the 1846 German Ideology but most explicitly developed in the 1859 Preface to a Critique of Political Economy.

These productive relations as a whole form the economic structure of society, the real base upon which legal and political superstructure rise and to which particular forms of model consciousness correspond. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and mental life processes in general.

It is the last sentence of this commonly quoted statement that has generated problems for Marxist political studies. As Miliband (1977, p. 7) points out, 'At its extreme this turns Marxism into an "economic determinism" which deprives politics of any substantial degree of autonomy.' In fact much of recent Marxist political debate has been concerned to refute such simplistic economism where politics is seen as a mere reflection of economic structure. Miliband (1977), for instance, goes on to quote other statements of Marx and Engels to show that they never intended any.extreme determinism. This viewpoint promotes the relative autonomy of the political and is summarized by Miliband (1977, p. 8) as follows:

'Base' and 'superstructure' must be taken in Gramsci's phrase, as elements of an 'historical block'; and the different elements that make up that 'block' vary in their relative weight and importance according to time, place, circumstance and human intervention.

A similar argument for the relative autonomy of the economic from the political is made by Poulantzas (1973). Hence although the Miliband-Poulantzas debate on the nature of the capitalist state has received much attention (Gold et al., 1975; Dear & Clark, 1978), on the matter of the relation of the political to the economic, they hold very similar positions (Holloway and Picciotto, 1978, p. 4). This viewpoint has been recently summarized by Scase (1980) and consists of two basic propositions: (i) 'the state in any capitalist country must try to meet the needs of capital; it has to provide conditions under which the accumulation process can take place', but (ii) 'although it has to cope with general needs of the capitalist mode of production, the manner and direction in which it does this will be highly variable, depending upon the conjecture of a wide range of not only economic but also social and political forces' (Scase, 1980,



A materialist framework for political geography 19

p. 13). It is this variety in political superstructure which can become the subject matter of viable political studies within a neo-Marxist tradition.

Although at first sight the relative-autonomy argument is very persuasive, it has been criticized for taking the separation of the political from the economic too far. The German 'state-derivation' school argues that the relative-autonomy argument, like its economism opponents, continues the general failure to specify precisely the links between the political and the economic. For the relative-autonomy position this is a serious criticism because it means that it has cut itself off from the principal source of change in capitalist society, the contradictions inherent in capital accumulation (Holloway and Picciotto, 1978, p. 6). One important consequence for our subsequent discussion is that:

It is also very characteristic of a 'Poulantzian' approach that.. . the global patterns of capital accumulation are either ignored or granted no real effect on the political, so that the bourgeois nation-state is always accepted as the de facto political field. (Holloway and Picciotto, 1978, p. 9)

This is clearly not very far removed from the general social science position of accepting the political as given which we have criticized above.

The fact that both Marxist and non-Marxist writers generally equate the political with activities of the state requires some clarification. Such a position merely accepts the world as it is presented to us in the current social formation. The state is certainly the locus for a majority of current political decisions but we should not be over-impressed with overt decisions and explicit decision-making. Many more perceptive social analyses have argued that non-decisions and non-decision-making are at least as important if not more important, owing to their hidden nature (e.g. Bachrach and Baratz, 1970). One of the most notable features of the world we live in is the lack of decision-making on a global scale, as is often bemoaned by ecologists and other scientists who worry about total global resources. Clearly the fact that global political institutions are weak and global political decision-making negligible does not mean that the global scale is any less 'political' than activities that go on within the boundaries of separate states. Global non- decision-making by political actors is a prime characteristic of the world economy which we will develop later. The point to emphasize here is that we must avoid being directed away from the global activities towards the state by emphasizing overt political activity.

The alternative Marxist approach to studying the political can liberate our work from a political fixation on the state although this has not always been the case in practice. The German school attempts to derive political categories, including the state, from the economic relations in Marx's Capital. In this way the unity of the political with the economic is preserved while crude determinism is avoided. This is not referred to as an economic theory but as 'a materialist theory of the state' (Holloway and Picciotto, 1978, p. 14):

It follows that a study of the political must not be an attempt to develop some autonomous 'political science', but should rather be a critique of political science which attempts to decipher the political categories as forms of social relations. (Holloway and Picciotto, 1978, p. 17)

Hence the interesting question is not 'in what way the "economic base" determines the "political superstructure" but . . . what is it about social relations in bourgeois society that makes them appear in separate forms as economic relations and political relations?' (Holloway and Picciotto, 1978, p. 18).

It is this materialist approach that is applied to political geography below and it is important



20 PETER J. TAYLOR

for our argument to separate out this materialist position from the specific application of the approach within the German school. The latter has been criticized both within and outside the school but without undermining the basic theory. For instance within the German school criticism has centred upon the ahistorical nature and the continuing lack of appreciation of the global dimension in the early attempts at derivation of the state (Holloway and Picciotto, 1978, p. 28-9). In fact the original derivation as a necessary condition of the self-destructive tendencies within capitalism is strangely reminiscent of the public-choice liberal derivation of public decision-making to regulate market failure! Such criticisms are not of the materialist position per se but only if its early applications and essays within the Holloway and Picciotto (1978) collection begin to correct these deficiencies (e.g. von Braunmuhl, 1978). In fact, following on from our earlier comments, Barker (1978, p. 36) argues that it is a fundamental mistake to derive the state only from capital relations within its boundaries. This criticism is endorsed emphatically in this paper.

Outside the German school Scase (1980) has argued that state derivation is incapable of adequately explaining the wide variety of state responses which the essays in his volume describe. This position is an example of confusing the issue of the separation of the political from the economic with the relative autonomy of the state from capitalist classes. On the first issue the materialist position is clear-the unity of the political with the economic. On the second issue the relative autonomy of the state can be shown to be quite compatible with the materialist position. Although this may not be the case in the original German arguments, Barker (1978, p. 20) is able to derive state autonomy from the competitive nature of capitalist social relations. Hence the materialist position, far from precluding the relative autonomy of the state, can actually include it as a basic part of its theory.

A materialist position for political geography The following conclusions are drawn from the above debates to form the guidelines for developing the new framework for political geography.

First, at the most abstract level we accept the fundamental materialist argument for the basic unity of the political with the economic. This reinforces the essential holism of the political economy approach. It follows that there cannot be an independent political geography, but rather we seek to develop a critical perspective on the topics commonly studied by political geography and to set these topics within a wider political economy structure.

Second, at a more concrete level we accept the relative autonomy of the state. This is compatible with the first materialist position since, following Barker (1978), the autonomy of the state is derived from the inherent disunity of the capitalist class. Hence, as originally argued by Millband (1977) and Scase (1980), the variety of state responses to capitalist needs will be a major topic for consideration for political studies such as political geography.

Finally in terms of methodology our materialist position directs us away from the state as our starting point and towards the fundamental political economy dynamic of capital accumulation. This is in keeping with Marx's advice that the concrete (i.e. what appears to be) should not be our starting point but should rather be the result, the object to be explained. Our argument is simply that since 'capitalism, from its beginnings, presupposed a world market' (Barker, 1978, p. 19) it follows that 'Properly, analysis of the world-economy should be the starting point for the analysis of the nation-state' (Barker, 1978, p. 33). This will be our starting point for developing a materialist framework for political geography.

GEOGRAPHICAL SCALE AS AN ORGANIZING PRINCIPLE

Now that we have agreed upon how we interpret the political in our political geography we can



A materialistframework for political geography 21 turn to consider the geography. Strangely, because geography itself has traditional claims to an holistic approach, the incorporation of this part of our subject into a political-economy framework entails none of the problems of specialization discussed in the previous section. It is generally conceded that there are no uniquely 'geographical facts' so that human geography does not fit into the 'natural' division of social science as politics does. Rather, geography is a point of view, a perspective upon topics which are also dealt with in other disciplines. This is entirely consistent with our conclusions that political geography cannot be an independent sub- discipline. Instead we sought a critical perspective; we now merely add that we will build a critical geographical perspective.

What is this geographical element of our perspective? Traditionally geography has sought a synthesis within areas (regional geography) but such static, descriptive approaches have now given way to an emphasis upon locational or spatial attributes. This spatial perspective clearly runs the danger of attempting to generate an independent geography as a spatial discipline (Bunge, 1966). In fact some critics have argued that for geographers 'space' has become a fetish obscuring the true processes they examine by guiding their explanations towards very limited spatial 'solutions'. In fact we will argue here that our geographical perspective is indeed spatial in orientation but we will avoid searching for explanations in abstract spatial terms. Our explanations will be grounded in the materialistic position we developed in the last section, so that the spatial perspective is merely a way of organizing our materialist ideas.

The next question concerns how we can use a spatial perspective within our materialist framework. Initially this seems to raise some difficulties because the geography school associated with spatial approaches has been largely inductive as epitomized by the emphasis upon quantitative spatial analysis. This runs counter to our materialist position that concrete situations should be the result of our deliberations rather than the starting point. Our spatial organizing principle will not be based therefore upon such commonly used features as types of spatial distributions or dimensional elements of distributions, both of which have been applied to political geography (Cole and King, 1968, pp. 621-36 and Soja, 1971, p. 6). The materialist position adopted here has already specified our starting point as the world-economy and this gives us the clue to devising our spatial organization. The world-economy exists at the largest geographical scale, the global. Furthermore our acceptance of relative autonomy of the state means that much of our subject-matter will be at the scale of the nation-state. We will add a further commonly identified geographical scale, the urban, to produce a spatial organization using scale as the basic principle. We will show that this organization fits in very well with our materialist position although we must always remember that the ultimate test is whether any fresh insights are provided for political economy.

Recent uses of scale in political geography Identifying geographical scale as a way of organizing the subject-matter of political geography is hardly original. In fact the use of this principle has become almost ubiquitous in recent political and welfare geography. The most intriguing thing about this development, however, is the lack of any attempt to justify this form of organization. The implication is that the three scales-global, national and urban-are as 'natural' as social science's division of activities into economic, social and political. This spatial organization is simply given.

Let us document this situation. If we start in 1975 with the two new textbooks entitled Modern political geography we find that the American version employs scales to divide the book into parts but the only discussion merely states that the 'parts of this book follow a hierarchy of political-territorial organization from the most local level of politics, involving small areas and populations, to international affairs and global concerns' (Bergman, 1975, preface). In contrast



22 PETER J. TAYLOR

the British version concentrates more on the scale of the state because 'The great majority of political-geographical enquiries have been made with reference to the state', but a section is added entitled 'Political Regions and Scale' because 'A valuable minority of studies have dealt with political-geographical phenomena operating at intra- and supra-national levels' (Muir, 1975, p. 191). These simple statements exhaust the 'theoretical' ( = non-substantive) discussion of scale within each book and they have proved to be typical. Cox's (1979) 'contemporary political geography' provides a conceptual scheme which 'is applied to an understanding of public problems of successively smaller scales: international, intranational, and metropolitan or intra-urban' (Cox, 1979, p. 15), the whole idea being that the scheme be equally valid at all scales. In welfare geography Smith (1979, p. 11) organizes his material into the three scales but only tells us that he 'seeks to reveal the nature and extent of place-to-place variations at different geographical scales: among nations, among regions and cities within nations, and within individual cities.' In fact the only discussion of choice of scales is to be found in another recent welfare geography book where we are informed that:

The selection of spatial scales at which to operate is a critical question. Here, attention is focused on three main levels which have been found elsewhere to provide useful frame- works for examination of spatial patterns, spatial structures and spatial systems'. (Coates, Johnston and Knox, 1977, p. 2)

The onus of answering the 'critical question' is shifted elsewhere, in fact to an earlier book of one of the co-authors, where the three scales were justified as 'providing a relatively closed or self- sufficient system the majority of whose interactions remain within its boundaries' (Johnston, 1973, pp. 13-14). Here at least we find some justification-the three scales represent three spatial systems-global, national and urban. This argument has the merit of being consistent with recent emphasis upon systems approaches within political geography, but it still treats the three 'systems' simply as given. There is no attempt to query why these 'systems' exist at these three scales or what is the relationship between them. In fact the most feeble aspect of all the books referred to above is the way in which inter-relations between the scales are largely ignored so that no overall framework is presented; all we are given is three separate hooks upon which to hang sets of ideas at different scales of occurrence.

The most recent discussion of the content of political geography (Johnston, 1980) comes closest to meeting our criticism, where we find 'a general plea for a more politically-orientated political geography at all spatial scales'. In this case relations between scales are discussed but only in terms of thestate. By emphasizing the 'political', Johnston's approach leads him to locate state activities as the core of political geography. In this way international state relations and local state activities are identified as representing the two other scales but no overall framework linking local to global is provided. In contrast our materialist approach identifies the global scale, the level at which capital accumulation is ultimately organized, as our starting point. This indicates that the global scale has priority in our explanation, and study of national and urban scales will require to be set within an overall global perspective. Before we develop these ideas, however, we continue our review of the use of geographical scale as an organizing principle by considering other human geography treatments and finally how these scales appear in other social sciences.

Liberal theories of geographical scale Other parts of human geography have been less naive in their treatment of geographical scale. In particular urban geography incorporates central place theory where functional scale organization is an integral part of the derivation of spatial structure. We will discuss Philbrick's (1957) more



A materialistframeworkfor political geography 23 general economic geography derivation of functional scale organization, which essentially extends ideas from central place theory to national and global economic patterns, because this represents the only comprehensive treatment of scale in modern geography.

Although Philbrick claims to be contributing to a 'regional human geography' and so is in no sense overtly 'political', our political economy standpoint inclines us nevertheless to find the ubiquitous political basis to his 'economic' argument. In fact Philbrick's paper is an extreme liberal theory of geographical scales. He starts by asking the rhetorical question:

is it not a basic principle of social science that the critical developments in the evolution of the pattern and functional organisation of human occupance are most understandable as the outgrowth of human creative choice in a frame of the total setting of resources and culture in space and time? (Philbrick, 1957, p. 300)

This leads Philbrick to start his search for functional organization with 'The simplest unit of occupance... the single establishment occupied by a person or small group of persons' (Philbrick, 1957, p. 303). Hence he starts at the individual scale and then builds up his functional organization through local central place systems to the world-economy. The result is the complete opposite to the materialist approach adopted here. Philbrick builds up to the world-economy, we will start at this scale and work our way down to individual experience in urban areas. For Philbrick the determining scale is the individual through 'human creative choice', for us it is the world-economy and the constraints imposed by the needs for maintaining capital accumulation. Here we have a classic contrast of approaches, liberal versus materialist. Since Philbrick's aim is to provide 'a generally accepted body of principles capable of serving as the basis for regional analysis of world society' (Philbrick, 1957, p. 300), one interpretation we can make for the present paper is that it offers a long overdue materialist alternative to his well- established liberal theory of geographical scales.

One of the 'findings' of Philbrick is his derivation of seven scales of organization as he builds up to the global scale (Philbrick, 1957, Table V, p. 331). As far as I am aware this finding has not been used by other researchers. As our discussion of modern political geography textbooks suggests, there seems to be a distinct preference for just three scales despite the lack of any articulated theory on the matter. They do seem to be 'natural' and this viewpoint is bolstered by reference to other social sciences beyond human geography (Taylor, 1981b). This generally reflects a concentration on the scale of the state with 'sub-disciplines' dealing with global affairs (international politics, comparative sociology) and urban studies (urban politics, urban sociology). The latter has really been a twentieth-century phenomenon as social science has become positivistly orientated and has used cities as 'laboratories' (Taylor, 1981b). Furthermore the recent revival of Marxist thought has incorporated these three scales with global (world-economy), national (theories of the state) and urban scales (Tabb and Sawers, 1978) being represented. The point of bringing up this seeming agreement among a wide range of researchers is to suggest that this threefold arrangement has an important general function within modern capitalism. We need a political economy of scale to unravel this situation.

A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SCALE

We shall refer to our interpretation of the three-scale structure as a political economy of scale. This is consistent with the fact that we are not developing any specifically geographical framework emphasizing so-called spatial processes but rather that our approach is both holistic in scope and materialist in orientation: the three-scale structure will be derived in terms of basic political economy concepts.



24 PETERJ. TAYLOR

We can begin our discussion by asking two related questions. First, why do we seem to be concerned with three scales? Why not two or four, or eleven for that matter? Secondly, if there are to be three scales, why these particular three scales? Obviously the answers to these questions will need to be intimately related and we shall find that our answer to the first question leads directly to our interpretation of the particular three-scales identified.

Ideology between reality and experience Wallerstein (1975) identifies three basic elements of the modern world-economy--the single world market, a fragmented political structure and

The third essential element of a capitalist world-economy is that the appropriation of surplus labor takes place in such a way that there are not two, but three, tiers to the exploitative process . . . Such a three-tiered format is essentially stabilizing in effect, whereas a two-tiered format is essentially disintegrating. (Wallerstein, 1975, p. 368)

The political argument is simply that forces favouring the status quo promote a threefold structure whereas their opponents attempt to polarize the situation into just two sides. This is, in Wallerstein's (1975, p. 368) terms, 'the core issue around which the class struggle is centred'. He gives several examples of such three-tiered arrangements and his argument is most developed for the spatial structure of the world-economy into core, periphery and semi- periphery. The purpose of the latter is 'to make a capitalist world-economy run smoothly' (Wallerstein, 1974b, p. 403) so that its role 'is less economic than political' (Wallerstein, 1974b, p. 405):

The existence of the third category means precisely that the upper stratum is not faced with the unified opposition of all the others. (Wallerstein, 1974b, p. 405)

This is a form of control based upon separation. In Wallerstein's spatial model of the world- economy this separation is by area horizontally. Here I propose the existence of another separation using a three-tiered structure but organized in terms of geographical scale vertically.

The middle category in our framework is the nation-state which 'separates' our daily experience in urban life from the reality of accumulation at the global scale. In this sense our theory of the state is as an ideological structure (Althusser, 1971). The purpose of this ideology is simply to separate experience from reality. Hence the three scales become the scale of reality (global), the scale of ideology (state) and the scale of experience (urban). These three categories are illustrated in Figure 1 and compared with Wallerstein's threefold division. Clearly the main difference is that Wallerstein presents a single pattern of the world-economy which we may term an absolute spatial structure whereas our structure is a relative spatial structure separating various experiences from reality by ideology. Hence we do not propose three processes operating at three scales but simply a single manifestation of capitalist accumulation within which the arrangement of three scales is functionally important. For instance, the needs of accumulation will be experienced locally (e.g. closure of a hospital) and justified nationally (e.g. to promote national solvency) for the ultimate benefits organized globally (e.g. by multi-national corporations paying less tax).

Because the previous statements do need amplification, we will illustrate the argument in concrete terms relative to personal experiences of the author. In political discussion in the Wallsend Constituency in north-east England a major topic of concern has been the health of the shipbuilding industry. This is to be expected since the Swan Hunter yards are the major



A materialistframework for political geography 25

(i) Vertical Division by Scale (ii) Horizontal Division by Area

gEALI -r E 9 1 P WE

xoEO

LO G Y ?;E I f.

EXPERIENCE CORE

UrbanExploiter

Urban

tion-St0 nSri and\

0rld-Econ0 o0 1i t e

FIGURE 1. Alternative three-tiered formats of separation and control

employer in the area. If the yards close, the resulting unemployment will affect the whole town, making Wallsend the 'Jarrow of the Eighties'. This is the scale of experience. It is at the scale of ideology that policy emerges, however. The response to local pressures was for the Labour Government to nationalize British shipbuilding including Swan Hunter. This is ideological since it reflects only a partial view of the situation. It may protect jobs and ease the flow of state subsidies into the area, but it does not tackle the basic problem affecting shipbuilding. Both demand and supply in the industry are global. The current problems in the industry can be directly traced to the fall in demand following the 1973/74 oil price rise and the emergence of competitive suppliers from such countries as South Korea. Clearly a policy of nationalization is a long way away from solving the problem of Wallsend's shipyards. Nevertheless this is a basic response of those experiencing the problem and represents a national ideological distortion of (potentially) progressive politics which will not challenge accumulation of capital at the global scale.

The scale of reality The scale of reality is the global scale and we have previously derived the primacy of this level as the basic materialist position. In a previous paper (Taylor, 1981a) I have argued that Wallerstein's (1976) world-economy approach should form the basis of a global political geography. This provides the framework of a dynamic spatial structure in terms of historically concrete situations. Possibly from the sixteenth century, but certainly from about 1780 onwards, the 'world-system' has experienced a cyclic growth pattern generated by the contradictions of the accumulation process. At this scale the most interesting cycles are the 50-year ones (Kondratieff cycles) which have been traced back through the nineteenth century with the possibility of equivalent but longer cycles earlier. From this materialist base Wallerstein and his research associates are able to derive such additional sets of processes as the changing pattern of the spatial division of labour and the changing pattern of political power with its relation to



26 PETER J. TAYLOR mercantilist policies and imperialism (Research Working Group, 1979). The political non- decision-making and decision-making associated with both sets of processes will form an intregal part of a materialist-based political geography.

One point should be briefly mentioned at this stage of the argument. Wallerstein's work, and that of Frank (1969) and Baran (1957) from which it derives, is part of a debate within Marxist circles on the nature of capitalism and its relation to the world-market (Taylor, 1981a, and see Bergesen, 1980). This has been introduced into the geography literature by Harvey (1975) but I do not want to enter this debate here except to point out that it is not the scale of analysis that is criticized. The global characteristic of accumulation, the basic driving force behind capitalism, is not doubted: the global is the ultimate scale or the scale of reality.

But what exactly do we mean by 'reality' in this context? It is obviously provocative, since all geographers ultimately claim to be studying the 'real world'. In our usage of the term we are not emphasizing our empirical credentials but rather the notion that this is the scale that 'really matters'. We will theoretically refine this argument by equating reality with totality using the discussion of Jakubowski (1976). This follows our previous identification of a holistic political economy and neatly encompasses national ideology within the global argument.

Jakubowski (1976) develops the argument that we can distinguish reality from ideology by its totality:

a historical understanding of social relationships, of reality, is only possible if facts are brought out of the isolated position in which they appear to superficial consideration. Apparently isolated facts must be looked at in their relationship to the whole, if their supra-historical appearance is to be penetrated. (Jakubowski, 1976, p. 102)

This is the basic political economy position and is the justification for its holism. Jakubowski goes on to identify 'the category of the concrete totality' as 'the actual category of reality'. From our geographical perspective this concrete totality is equated with the world-economy, so that the global level becomes our scale of reality.

Identification of our reality enables us to go on and discover the ideology, or as Jakubowski (1976, p. 103) puts it:

It allows us to verify how far consciousness accords with reality, and how far it has an ideological character. Ideology is false, partial consciousness to the extent that it does not locate its object within the concrete totality, and thus to the extent that it is not adequate to the whole reality.

Now that we have set out the reality we can confront it with ideology. From our political geographical perspective we will equate partial consciousness with nationalism and statism, whereby the global totality is filtered through nation-centred ideologies. It is this argument that allows us to identify the geography of nation-states as our scale of ideology.

The scale of ideology In political studies ideologies are usually equated with political systems of thought- conservatism, liberalism, social democracy, etc.--often espoused by political parties in competition for control of government. Each of these political ideologies are similar to the extent that they accept the state system as the basic spatial organization of the world and devote their energies to operations within this system. We will treat all such ideologies as merely subdivisions of the overarching ideology of statism and nationalism. This is an ideology in the Marxist sense of false consciousness argued above in that it makes the fundamental mistake of treating



A materialist framework for political geography 27 the world market as a sum of national markets, a sum of nation-states, rather than beginning with the totality and treating each national segment and each nation-state within it as a particular field within the whole. (Barker, 1978, p. 36)

The overwhelming strength of this ideology is such that it is normal for both popular and academic discussion to view the division of the world into about 150 sovereign states as literally 'natural'. I have argued elsewhere in some detail (Taylor, 1981a) that there is nothing 'natural' about the modern state since it is man-made, reflecting past victories and defeats in social conflicts. However the point is so important to our argument, particularly for countering Johnston's (1980) recent reformation of political geography around state activities, that we will present further debating points on this theme.

The development of the modern state system, like capitalism, is usually dated as beginning around about 1500. At that time Europe had a cultural homogeneity involving the Roman legacy of law and language, a common social system ruled by a set of interlocking families and a shared culture emanating from a centralized church (Tilly, 1975). In this society sovereignty was a personal matter and not a definition of territorial states (Gottmann, 1973). From this basic position in 1500, Tilly (1975) argues that there were at least five alternative 'futures' which can be postulated. As well as some form of continued feudal arrangements and the resulting state system itself, these also include a political federation or empire loosely controlled from a single centre, a theocratic federation and an intensive trading network with no central authority. This is not to argue that all were equally likely, of course. Wallerstein (1974a, pp. 124-5) argues that 1557 marks a key date where both the French Kings and the Spanish Hapsburgs went bankrupt in their futile attempts to convert the emerging world-economy into a world-empire:

The year 1557 marked, if you will, the defeat of that attempt, and the establishment of a balance of power in Europe which would permit states which aimed at being nations (let us call them nation-states) to come into their own and to batten on the still flourishing world- economy.

The particular state system that was legitimized in the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648 represents a pattern of survivors and victors depending on such features as availability of resources, patterns of local conditions between princes, landowners and merchants and other specific items. In general, however, the important result was the state system itself and Wallerstein (1974a) argues that it is concomitant with the growth of capitalism as a world-economy:

It is the peculiarity of the modern world-system that a world-economy has survived for 500 years and yet has not come to be transformed into a world-empire--a peculiarity that is the secret of its strength ... Capitalism is based on the constant absorption of economic loss by political entities, while economic gain is distributed to 'private' hands. What I am arguing . . is that capitalism as an economic mode is based upon the fact that the economic factors operate within an arena larger than that which any political entity can totally control. This gives capitalists a freedom of manoeuvre that is structurally based. It has made possible the constant economic expansion of the world-system, albeit a very skewed distribution of its rewards. (Wallerstein, 1974a, p. 230)

Wallerstein's analyses cover the sixteenth century, but we can easily relate these ideas to the twentieth century and the dominant role of multi-national corporations in the fragmented world of today with its political non-decision-making described previously. It is this fragmented world which is justified by the ideologies of statism and nationalism. We will briefly link these two sets of ideas to the development of the world-economy and our scale of reality.



28 PETER J. TAYLOR

In the sixteenth century the ideology of absolutism, or the divine right of kings, developed as a means of legitimating the newly emerging centralized states. However Wallerstein (1974a, p. 102) argues that:

it might be perhaps wise to de-emphasize the concentration on the person of the king and simply talk of a strengthened state, or more 'stateness'. We might better call the ideology 'statism'. Statism is a claim for increased power in the hands of the state machinery. In the sixteenth century this meant power in the hands of the absolute monarch.

This should not, of course, be confused with the rise of nationalism which formed a very different type of legitimation as sovereignty became transferred from the person of the king to the people in the wake of the French Revolution (Gottmann, 1973). In fact Wallerstein (1974a, p. 102) points out that:

At an early point, statism could almost be said to be anti-nationalistic, since the boundaries of 'nationalist' sentiment were often narrower than the bounds of the monarch's state. Only much later would the managers of the state machinery seek to create 'integrated' states in which the dominant ethnic group would 'assimilate' the outlying areas.

Since 1789, however, our scale of ideology has been dominated by various forms of nationalism culminating in the crushing defeat of socialist internationalism in 1914 and the acceptance of national self-determination as a prime criterion at Versailles in 1919 (Cobban, 1969). The twentieth century has seen the political triumph of the nation-state in Europe and its imitation throughout all other continents. It is fairly easy to derive a materialist argument linking statism with its mercantilist policies to the emerging world-economy but it is far more difficult in the case of nationalism.

We require a materialist formulation of the nation-state to fit into our new political geography framework. This has been recently provided in the writings of Tom Nairn (1977). He begins with the simple assertion that 'The theory of nationalism represents Marxism's greatest failure' arguing that the Marxist debate on nationalism before 1914 was doomed to errors because the full development of nationalism within capitalism had not then revealed itself:

'nationalism' in its most general sense is determined by certain features of the world political economy, in the era between the French and Industrial Revolutions and the present day. We are still living in this era. (Nairn, 1977, p. 332)

However, at the present day we are more able to interpret the meaning of nationalism than the classical Marxists and the result is that nationalism is brought towards the centre of the world stage-'Nationalism is a crucial, fairly central feature of the modern capitalist development of world history' (Nairn, 1977, p. 331).

Nairn's discussion is entirely consistent with our argument concerning nationalism as a general ideology within the world-economy:

My belief is that the only frame of reference which is of any utility here is world history as a whole . . . Most approaches to the question are vitiated from the start by a country-by- country attitude. Of course it is the ideology of world nationalism itself which induces also this road by suggesting that human society consists essentially of several hundred different and discrete 'nations', each of which has (or ought to have) its own postage stamps and national soul. The secret of the forest is the trees, so to speak. (Nairn, 1977, p. 332)

The world-economy is the 'forest' which we should study and it is capitalism's generation of uneven economic development at the global scale in which we look for the origins of nationalism.



A materialistframeworkforpolitical geography 29 In effect nationalism is a peripheral or semi-peripheral reaction to core economic dominance. It is the defensive mechanism of local bourgeoisies to mobilize local populations in their economic conflicts with core bourgeoisies (Wallerstein, 1974b, p. 402). They use the particularities of language and culture to form an alliance against 'foreign' domination. The proving ground for this development was the reorganization of the geographical areas of Germany and Italy into nation-states in the middle of the nineteenth century, whence this strategy has diffused to disrupt the old empires of eastern Europe and finally to become global in its operation as a ubiquitous characteristic of decolonization movements in the middle of the twentieth century. The result is the contradiction between capitalism spreading over the world to unify society while concomitant nationalism has fragmented society:

The socio-historical cost of this rapid implantation of capitalism into world society was nationalism . . . The world market, world industries and world literature predicted with such exaltation in The Communist Manifesto all conducted, in fact, to the world of nationalism. (Nairn, 1977, p. 341)

This nationalism is a mixture of idealist populism with hard-headed economic protectionism. There is a continuity with the pre-1789 situation if we think of this nation-building as popular mercantilism following the early sovereign mercantilism of the state-builders. Between them statism and nationalism have produced our scale of ideology.

The scale of experience In our framework the urban is designated the scale of experience. Quite literally this is the scale at which we live our daily lives. In Wallerstein's argument it is implied that experience should be interpreted in relation to the term 'world'. For Wallerstein a 'world' scale is a scale where the division of labour defines a social formation larger than the immediate experiences of individuals. Hence the world-economy was not initially 'global' in extent and only became global in the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless there existed before that time a world system, the capitalist world-economy, which overlay and indeed dominated, the experiences of individuals. Hence the world-economy is by definition an aggregation of individual scales of experience.

In modern societies economic activities may be viewed geographically as being divided up into sets of daily urban systems. Within these systems the inhabitants experience employment opportunities depending upon the historical industrial mix of the area and its survival in the world of accumulation. During recessions unemployment is an 'urban problem' as investment curtailment is reflected in cutbacks in employment opportunities at particular urban locations. Conversely an investment boom may give particular urban dwellers new shopping centres in which to yield their wages and incomes. The point is that the effects of accumulation and investment or disinvestment are experienced in localized form within daily urban systems. This is perhaps most clearly seen when private accumulation needs lead to state expenditure cuts so that hospital closures, cut-backs in house building programmes, and reductions in education and social services budgets are all ultimately experienced as local effects. The daily urban system, therefore, defines the opportunities and services available to the individual which are often summarized by the phrase 'quality of life'. In fact Higerstrand (1975) has explicitly defined this concept in terms of access to opportunities within daily urban systems.

Strangely there has been no major tradition of urban studies within political economy:

while cities were considered to be the site of class struggle, the space itself hardly seemed important or worthy of special study. (Tabb and Sawers, 1978, p. 5)

This is despite the fact that the concentration of the proletariats in cities has long been a source



30 PETER J. TAYLOR

of concern for capitalist interests. The bringing together of large numbers of individuals into close proximity, with their sharing of common, unpleasant experiences was thought of as the ideal environment for fermenting class conflict and developing class consciousness. Gordon (1976) has developed a 'socialist' location theory around this theme to explain changes in the location of industry first to the suburbs and then to the 'Sunbelt' in the U.S.A. His work represents part of a new awareness of the urban phenomenon in Marxist studies in the wake of the 'urban crises' of the late 1960s and 1970s. Of course from our perspective such crises are not 'urban' in cause but reflect wider global processes that are manifest in cities. The current global crisis follows a period of expansion of state activity especially in the realm of consumption (O'Connor, 1973) which has been concentrated in urban areas. As the problems of the world- economy induce state expenditure cuts these are felt locally in urban areas. Hence we are living in an age of 'urban problems' with western governments devising urban policies alongside their expenditure cuts!

Modern urban political geography has been concerned with conflicts in the city over externalities and administrative boundaries (Cox, 1973) and direct consumption issues over 'who gets what where?' (Burnett, 1981). From our perspective these studies all have the limitation of treating urban areas as isolated territories suspended, as it were, in space and time with no spatial context or time horizon. The major attraction of recent Marxist urban studies is the way they overcome this problem and set urban issues firmly within the current development of world capitalism.

It is in the work of David Harvey that we find the most explicit treatment of urbanism as an expression of the accumulation process within capitalism:

Urbanism may be regarded as a particular form of patterning of the social process ... The city can therefore be regarded as a tangible, built environment--an environment which is a social product. (Harvey, 1973, p. 196)

This theme has been developed (Harvey, 1977 and 1978) by linking it directly to the circulations of capital described by Marx in Capital. The purpose of the second circuit of capital is to syphon off surplus accumulation generated from the primary production cycle. This is achieved through fixed capital investment including the built environment of urbanism. This process can then be linked to the global scale of accumulation by showing how uneven economic growth in the world-economy is exploited by transfer investments between areas, as for instance occurred in the complementary pattern of building cycles between U.S.A. and Britain in the nineteenth century (Harvey, 1978, p. 118). In the twentieth century suburbanization and central area redevelopment can be similarly equated with Harvey's second circuit of capital. This links the city as a built environment to accumulation at the world-scale and so defines the arena in which urban experience occurs. We now need to link the human activities that are carried out in this arena to our materialist framework.

Harvey (1978) also considers class struggle in an urban context over issues surrounding the reproduction of labour power and shows that such consumptions as housing and health services must be consistent with accumulation in the long term. This theme is most explicitly developed by the most influential urban Marxist theorist, Manuel Castells. In Castells's (1977, 1978) work we find the urban scale explicitly linked to the state. Modern states are typified by massive provision of services and subsidies to provide the services required by the labour force. In this sense the state is taking over private capital's role of reproducing labour power. This process Castells terms collective consumption, which he then identifies with the concept of 'urban' as a residential unit:



A materialistframework for political geography 31 An urban unit is not a unit in terms of production. On the other hand, it possesses a certain specificity in terms of residence, in terms of 'everydayness'. It is, in short, the everyday space of a delimited fraction of the labour force. (Castells, 1977, p. 445)

This definition includes much of the meaning of our notion of the scale of experience, but it unnecessarily restricts our consideration to issues of collective consumption. Production issues, such as redundancies, produce localized unemployment patterns which are part of urban experience. We continue to use a wider concept of urban here.

Overt political conflicts surrounding urban experience can be interpreted in two contra- dictory ways. The rise of the 'local state' (Cockburn, 1977) as a major influence on people's lives can be seen in hindsight to be instrumental in diverting the blame for the reductions in collective consumption from the central state to the local arena. In this way the global crisis is regionalized within states and hence potential protest is fragmented (Dear, 1981). On the other hand Castells (1977) argues that this increasing state intervention has politicized issues to such an extent that it can lead to new class conflict, which he terms urban social movements, based upon community alliances to combat reductions in collective consumption when threatened by the needs of capital accumulation. Which interpretation of urban conflicts proves correct will vary by circumstances (Saunders, 1979). We can equate this variety of urban responses with Miliband's identification of variety of state responses to the needs of capital accumulation. In a similar way we can now identify this 'autonomy' of the urban as being the subject-matter of urban studies with its spatial manifestations being dealt with in urban political geography. It must be emphasized, however, that this autonomy is relative; there are severe constraints on the variety of responses compatible with the development of the world-economy. The best illustration of this basic point remains Ambrose and Colenutt's (1975) study of 'planning' in Brighton and Southwark.

One final comment is necessary before we conclude discussion of the political economy of scale. The scale of experience discussed above obviously reflects the author's personal experiences in Britain and North America. We know, however, that Third World urbanization is occurring within the overall context of a very different process normally termed underdevelopment. Castells (1977) explicitly distinguishes between developed and underdeveloped processes of urbanization, and study of the latter will obviously suggest different topics of study to those reviewed above. From our political geography perspective these should produce different experiences for study at this local scale.

BEFORE THE WORLD-ECONOMY

The political geography framework we have described above is designed to apply to the social system we are currently living through: capitalism. The concepts underlying our framework are very general ones, however, and they are applicable to other social organization. The concepts will stay the same but their relationship with one another will alter. In this short section I will illustrate this feature by applying the three concepts underlying our scale organization to other modes of production.

Wallerstein (1976) identifies three basic modes of production, each of which generates a specific 'entity' for study. We have dealt with the capitalist mode of production and the entity of the world-economy. The other two are the reciprocal-lineage mode leading to small mini- systems and the redistributive-tributary mode leading to world-empires. All three modes and their entities are shown in Figure 2, where they are related to experience, ideology and reality. In each case the reality is defined materialistically in terms of the scope of the overall division of labour, the ideology is specified by the major system of thought and the scale at which it operates, while experience remains the 'everyday' scale of the mass of the population.



32 PETERJ. TAYLOR

Mode of RECIPROCAL- REDISTRIBUTIVE- CAPITALIST Production LINEAGE TRIBUTORY

Entity MINI-SYSTEM WORLD-EMPIRE WORLD-ECONOMY

Experience: Experience: Experience:

Kinship Group Village, Estate Daily Urban System

Political SEPARA TION SEPARA TION

Ideology: Ideology: Ideology: Geography

Animism State Religion Statism, Nationalism

Framework SEPARA TION

Reality: Reality: Reality:

Territory Universal Empire World-Economy

FIGURE 2. Experience, ideology and reality by mode of production

In mini-systems we can see that all three concepts occur at the same scale defined by a kinship-group's territory. The division of labour is based upon age and sex and the egalitarian society only has animism as a religion, revering the local environment which sustains the system.

Godelier (1977) describes how as mini-systems develop into world-empires specialized religious roles appear in the division of labour culminating in a highly inegalitarian structure with the head (e.g. Inca, Roman Emperor) either being a god or having unique powers to contact and interpret celestial wishes. This is very clearly illustrated by the early history of Christianity where it became transformed from an oppositional ideology to the dominant ideology of the Roman Empire, as the orthodox church reflected the secular imperial hierarchy (Gascoine, 1977). In this situation society is much more complicated and ideology occurs at the scale of reality, the universal empire, which is organized as a single division of labour. Experience remains local, however, at estate or village level for slaves and peasants, so that here we have the first separation of our concepts by geographical scale.

Finally with the capitalist mode of production a second separation occurs between ideology and reality reflecting nation-states in the world-economy as previously discussed.

Hence the three concepts apply in different modes of production but have different relations to one another as we have suggested. In summary, these are experience, ideology and reality combined in mini-systems; ideology and reality imposed over experience in world- empires; and ideology separating experience from reality in the world-economy.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

One of the most explicit features of recent attempts to 'reform' political geography (e.g. Cox,



A materialistframework for political geography 33 1979; Johnston, 1980) has been the way in which they have largely dismissed as irrelevant the past heritage of the field (Johnston, 1981, is particularly dismissive). It is ironic that this attempt to revolutionize political geography by putting it on a materialist base should be more in sympathy with traditional approaches in terms of the topics they covered. This is partly because the researches of Cox and Johnston reflect the recent rise of state activities in their choice of subject-matter which enables them to dismiss past studies as 'old-fashioned' (see also Taylor, 1979). In fact this is a very limited perspective emanating out of an ahistorical view of the world. In contrast, by treating the dynamic evolving world-economy as our subject-matter, many of the issues that concerned past political geographers reappear in our historical perspective. Basic reinterpretations are called for to be sure, but Hartshorne's (1954) 'state idea' and raison d'etre of states immediately spring to mind as relevant topics, while the study of frontiers (between 'universal' world-empires) and boundaries (between 'competitive' nation-states) (Jones, 1959) can easily be fitted into the framework presented above. Interestingly the main contrast comes at the global scale itself where the traditional political geography emphasis on East-West conflict (Mackinder, 1904) is replaced by the more fundamental North-South conflict (Taylor, 1981a).

In conclusion this paper has attempted to achieve two major objectives. One has been to utilize geographical scale as an organizing principle in such a way as to emphasize the relations between the scales, while the other has sought to place political geography within a political economy framework, materialistically based on the capitalist world-economy. The result has been the political economy of scale described above.

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