convection against the force of gravity. Interestingly, the troposphere—the lowest
portion of Earth’s fluid atmosphere—is completely opposite, maintaining well-
mixed major gases because of convection resulting from the heating of the atmos-
phere from Earth’s surface.Organic Theory
In general, the term “organic” implies a relation to a living organism. In social sci-
ence theory, this usually means a philosophical attempt to conceptualize some pro-
cess as analogous to the life cycle of a living creature. It is often associated with
the philosophy of Social Darwinism, a theory popularized in the 19th century that
applied the precepts proposed by Charles Darwin regarding “natural selection”
and “evolution” to human social, cultural, and political systems. But in fact,
organic theories date to a much earlier era, and suggestions of the application of
“organic” qualities to human institutions and behavior may be found as far back
in history as the writings of Aristotle and Plato, and continue well into the Middle
Ages in the work of Niccolo Machiavelli and Ibn Khaldun. Organic theory has
been frequently directed at the origin and nature of the state as a means of organ-
izing political space and regulating activity. The concept reappeared in the phi-
losophy of Friedrich Hegel at the beginning of the 19th century, who clearly had
a significant influence on a wide group of scholars and writers. Hegel proclaimed
the state as an “ideal” means of organizing political authority and made clear that
he regarded the state as a living thing, when he stated directly that the “state is
an organism.” To Hegel, the state could be examined and understood only in this
context. In the discipline of geography, this concept was adopted in the positions
of many early theoreticians in political geography in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries.
Friedrich Ratzel, a prominent thinker in political geography in the 19th century,
produced a detailed organic theory of the state and international relations. Ratzel
developed the Hegelian concept of the state as an organism to a much greater degree,
declaring that states experience a kind of “life cycle” with stages representing
“youth, maturity and old age.” His claim that states, like living organisms, require
lebensraum(“living space”) would have enormous ramifications in the 20th century,
when the notion was incorporated into thegeopoliticsof Adolf Hitler and the
National Socialist Party (Nazi) in Germany. Ratzel identified what he termed “laws”
that governed the dynamics of state growth and expansion, including the idea that
states must grow by absorbing smaller, weaker neighbors (a view seemingly derived
from Darwin’s observations on natural selection), and that “youthful” states are250 Organic Theory