the work of Leonard Guelke, who drew on
historian R.G. Collingwood’s ‘historical ideal-
ism’, which insisted that ‘all history is the his-
tory of human thought’. Idealism in geography
regarded its aim as being one of ‘rethinking the
thoughts behind the actions(the ‘‘insides’’ be-
neath the ‘‘outsides’’) of ‘‘human events’’
with tangible environmental–landscape im-
pacts’ (Cloke, Philo and Sadler, 1991, p. 70;
emphasis in original). In a challenge to what he
considered to be over-theorization of contem-
porary human geography, Guelke’s idealism
required a move from concern with the theories
that geographers held about the world and its
workings to a primary focus upon the theories
used by human beings acting in the world. For
Guelke, a geographer’s role is to understand
the theories lying behind action that essentially
make uphuman agency. As he put it, the
‘intention behind an action can be regarded as
the source of its power and theory in it can be
considered to be the guidance system’ (Guelke,
1974, p. 197).
Any insistence of thetheory-neutrality of
academic research is problematic. Moreover,
Guelke’s vision of geography suggests a world
in which humans act ‘rationally’ on the basis
of how they conceptualize their worlds. Thus,
in many respects Guelke’s idealism is an
extension ofbehavioural geography, rather
than having a close association with the philo-
sophically charged recovery of agency in (most)
humanistic geography(which focused upon
notions of feeling, emotion and meaning).
Guelke viewed human agency as being based
upon intentional decisions, ignoring both the
constraining and enabling effects of economic
structures and culturaldiscourse. Geograph-
ies influenced by psychoanalytic theory
have challenged the possibility of individual
agents knowing their motivations and have
turned to the effects of the unconscious.
The concern of new cultural geographers
with discourse and representation, al-
though very different conceptually from
Guelke’s idealism, have nevertheless gener-
ated new debate around idealism, with both
marxist and social geographyexpressing
concern about the lack of attention given to
issues of the material (see Mitchell, 1995;
Duncan and Duncan, 1996; Philo, 2000a).
Theorizations of thebodyas an inscriptive
surface where the material and discursive ar-
ticulate have sought to transcend the idealism–
materialism debate (Nast and Pile, 1998).jsh
Suggested reading
Cloke, Philo and Sadler (1991); Guelke (1974).
identity The origins of a term that is
increasingly used throughout the social sciences
are somewhat obscure, but its shifts reflect
changing conceptions of the human subject
in the discourses of modern and late-modern
thought. With its inheritance of Renaissance
humanism, which posited Man (sic) as the
‘measure of all things’, and the dramatic
changes inaugurated by the Protestant
Reformation, theenlightenmentis usually
identified as the context within which the
identity of the modern subject definitively
emerges. Based on a conception of a self-
sustaining entity, possessed of the capacity of
conscious reason and whose internal ‘centre’
was seen as essentially fixed – continuous or
‘identical’ with itself across time – the
Enlightenment aligns identity to a decisive
form of individualism. Prioritized in the seven-
teenth century by Rene ́Descartes (‘Ithink,
therefore I am’), John Locke (who equated
individual identity with the ‘sameness of a
rational being’; see Locke, 1967 [1690]) and
attenuated through the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries, the individual is positioned
as the author of historical development, his
identity seen as the sovereign source from
which all social laws and categories of know-
ledge are derived.
The changing formations of modernsoci-
ety, and the development of sociology that
sought to understand them, provided the first
critique of thismodel. Locating individual
identity within group processes and submit-
ting it to the dynamics of collective and con-
tractual norms, sociologists such as G.H.
Mead (seesymbolic interactionism) argued
the ways in which identities are positioned
within wider social relations and, conversely,
function to sustain wider social structures.
While such theories of socialization clearly
break with the autonomy of the humanist
self, they nonetheless continue to uphold the
principle of a stable identity; the relation be-
tween the individual andsociety being an
interaction between two reciprocal, but none-
theless distinct, entities.
A key revision that resolutely displaced the
Cartesian and sociological subject was the re-
construction of Marxist social theory in the
late 1960s. For the Marxist structuralist
Louis Althusser (1970), the privileging of so-
cial formations did not just invert the relations
between the individual and society, but jetti-
soned subjective agency from the processes of
history, the concerns ofethicsand the terms
ofphilosophyitself (seemarxism;structur-
alism). From this perspective, identity is notGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_I Final Proof page 364 31.3.2009 7:05pmIDENTITY