La geografia di Friedrich Ratzel. Suolo, Stato e popolo.

Ratzel’s geography: Soil, State and People. Friedrich Ratzel has strongly influenced the future of the discipline, and his work remains a true epistemological monument which has built the foundations (no matter how acceptable or questionable) of all the schools of geography. The objective of this paper is to provide a reading of his basic works, Anthropogeographie and Politische Geographie, i.e., two mutually complementary works that, along with the paper Die Gesetze, represent the complete expression of his theory. The focus will be on highlighting how geography as he proposed it, though strongly characterized by a totalitarian conception, affected by the Zeitgeist of his time, was still well connected to specific philosophical bases, and how all his discourse alludes to a very strong nomothetic conception, aiming to provide theoretical foundation –with Anthropogeographie– to the studies on peoples and their movements/migrations, and –with his Politische Geographie– to the relationship between the rising State-Nation and the relative soil territory.