El centenario de Ratzel

Friedrich Ratzel, a geographer of the late nineteenth century, is very well known for his contributions to the development of college geography in Germany. His most important work, Anthropogeography, is considered as the founding masterpiece of human geography. But he was also a contributor to the growth of political geography, a field in which he advanced theory on the organic structure of the state. His idea of Lebensraum was as controversial as those concerned with the man-land relationships, which were further developed by American geographers of the early twentieth century as geographic determinism. In this note, the relevance of Ratzel to the establishment of geography as a modern social science is also stressed, on the occasion of the centennial of his death on August, 1904