IMPERFECT INFORMATION,UNCERTAINTY AND OPTIMAL SAMPLING IN LOCATION THEORY: AN INITIAL REEXAMINATION OF HOTELLING,WEBER, AND VON THÜNEN*

ABSTRACT Sophisticated locational analysis should no longer proceed without examining (1) the feasibility of reducing uncertainty about the size and spatial spread of the market, prices and other elements and (2) the practicality of information generation through sampling. The present paper points out the methodology for Hotelling-, Weberian- and von Thünen- type location problems by examining simplified situations.     

VON THUNEN AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HIS WORK FOR THE GEOGRAPHY OF AGRICULTURE

Von Thünen's classical model of agricultural location was published in the Soviet Union in Russian translation in 1926, a hundred years after its original publication in Germany, but was soon denounced as a bourgeois theory seeking to optimize location from the point of view of minimizing production costs or maximizing the profit of the entrepreneur. The view that the von Thünen model was not applicable to Soviet conditions was stated as late as 1966 in Vol. V of the Kratkaya geograficheskaya entsiklopediya [Short Geographical Encyclopedia], pp. 196, 525. A Moscow University agricultural geographer, in reassessing the von Thünen model, now points out that its objective of determining optimal production systems for a given set of physical (land quality) and economic (market) conditions is shared by anyone who seeks the most highly cost-effective form of agriculture in a particular setting.     

INTERVIEW WITH THEODORE H. VON LAUE

Born in 1916, reared and educated in Germany until 2937, Von hue has been writing and teaching global history for almost three decades. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University and wm certified by the Russian Institute at Columbia University. Von hue published well-received books on German historiography, late Imperial Russia, and the Soviet Union before his lesser-known global histories. From 1943 to 1983, he taught at Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College, Bryn Mawr College, the University of California at Riverside, Washington University at St. Louis, and Clark University. As Jacob and Frances Hiatt Professor of European History, Emeritus, at Clark, he has taught in China and held offices in the World History Association. Von hue has two daughters from his first marriage. He and his wife Angela live in Worcester, Massachusetts, where this interview was conducted in August 2995, by Roger Adelson.     

HISTORIOMETRICS,HISTORICAL AND CARTOGRAPHIC INFORMATION,AND COMPUTERS

Abstract

Accessibility is frequently used in transportation planning to measure the efficiency of new infrastructure in terms of travel time and population served. In this article, the authors apply accessibility concepts based on the geo-historical angle. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationships between population dynamics and the railway expansion from 1830 to 1930. Their approach considers a local scale composed of some 36,000 French communes for the demographic data and more than 28,000 kilometers for the railway network. The methodological framework of this database is based on historical geographic information systems completed by anamorphosis analysis. In this way, they are able to map the changing contours of accessibility from the local to the regional and national scales for historical time.     

LEVIATHAN AND KRAKEN: STATES,CORPORATIONS, AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

In our politico-philosophical bestiary, no monster has historically been more prominent than the Leviathan, the whale of the Book of Job, transformed by Hobbes, which has long been ubiquitous as a metaphor or as a signifier in all intellectual traditions touching upon the political. Like the state itself, we argue, the Leviathan has played an outsized role in the way we theorize and imagine relations of sovereignty in the world. This essay seeks to add a new hermeneutical creature to the bestiary: the Kraken. Said to be huge and to lurk in Norway's icy waters, the Kraken first emerged in the accounts of natural philosophers in the eighteenth century, at the very moment when political economy was becoming the premier science of governance in Europe. Leviathan is an emblem of a kind of state that no longer exists and has never existed, and it remains our most potent emblem of the state's reification, a relentlessly compelling figure that has long blinded historians to alternate sovereignties within, across, and outside the physical territories of states. From stateless financial capital to multinational corporations acting like states on the world stage, such forms of sovereignty are an essential feature of the global politics we are now living. These forms are not new, nor is their emblem: the Kraken.     

BIOREGIONALISM AND REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY: PLACE, PEOPLE, AND NETWORKS

'Bioregionalism' is a term referring to an action-oriented movement based on ecological principles. It has not been strong in academic geography, though it clearly has space and place as its concerns. From a merging of classical regional geography and general systems one might have expected a bioregional synthesis to emerge. The bio-regional ideal can be given rigorous expression in a regional system comprising three sub-systems - a biophysical sub-system, an inhabiting sub-system, and a network sub-system.
Le mot 'biorégionalisme' s'attache à un mouvement ďaction et de pensée écologiste. Peu representé au sein de la géographie 'officielle, ii a néanmoins des rapports avec le problématique de ľespace et des lieux. On aurait du attendre que la convergence de la géographie régionale classique et ľétude des systèmes nous ameneraient à un synthèse 'biorégional.'Ľesprit biorégional peut s'exprimer ďune façon rigoureuse sous forme ďun système régional, comprenant trois sous-systèmes - sous-système biophysique, sous-système ďhabitat, et sous-système des liaisons et des réseaux.     

EXPLICATION,EXPLANATION, AND HISTORY

To date, no satisfactory account of the connection between natural‐scientific and historical explanation has been given, and philosophers seem to have largely given up on the problem. This paper is an attempt to resolve this old issue and to sort out and clarify some areas of historical explanation by developing and applying a method that will be called “pragmatic explication” involving the construction of definitions that are justified on pragmatic grounds. Explanations in general can be divided into “dynamic” and “static” explanations, which are those that essentially require relations across time and those that do not, respectively. The problem of assimilating historical explanations concerns dynamic explanation, so a general analysis of dynamic explanation that captures both the structure of natural‐scientific and historical explanation is offered. This is done in three stages: In the first stage, pragmatic explication is introduced and compared to other philosophical methods of explication. In the second stage pragmatic explication is used to tie together a series of definitions that are introduced in order to establish an account of explanation. This involves an investigation of the conditions that play the role in historiography that laws and statistical regularities play in the natural sciences. The essay argues that in the natural sciences, as well as in history, the model of explanation presented represents the aims and overarching structure of actual causal explanations offered in those disciplines. In the third stage the system arrived at in the preceding stage is filled in with conditions available to and relevant for historical inquiry. Further, the nature and treatment of causes in history and everyday life are explored and related to the system being proposed. This in turn makes room for a view connecting aspects of historical explanation and what we generally take to be causal relations.     

ENTREPRENEURSHIP,INFORMATION, AND GROWTH

We examine the contribution to economic growth of entrepreneurial marketplace information within a regional endogenous growth framework. Entrepreneurs are posited to provide an input to economic growth through the information revealed by their successes and failures. We empirically identify this information source with the regional variation in establishment births and deaths. To account for the potential endogeneity caused by forward‐looking entrepreneurs, we utilize instruments based on historic mining activity. We find that the information spillover component of local establishment birth and death rates have significant positive effects on subsequent entrepreneurship and employment growth for U.S. counties and metropolitan areas.     

APHASIA,HISTORY, AND DURESS

This essay celebrates the publication of Duress, explores its concepts and themes, focuses on the way Ann Stoler rejects the notion of historical forgetting and develops a heuristic of “colonial aphasia” in an ethnographic chapter on the emergence of France's Far Right near Marseille in the 1990s. The essay also tracks how postcolonial scholars are using the notion of aphasia, drawing on Stoler's colonial usages in contexts like the Netherlands and Britain as well as using the notion to periodize. Those who came to aphasia before and without Stoler are also present here, and their contributions suggest a range of ways to think through radical, countercultural, and philosophical thought. That Gilles Deleuze and Paolo Virno use aphasia in contrary ways suggests that once aphasia departs from clinical settings, its poetics are rather up for grabs even if contained within activist gestures; both rethink matters of politics, dissent, and language. The example of Kurt Goldstein is also imported to show that clinical aphasia may go with the “detours” of patients, those stricken by war, catastrophe, and these peculiar speech disorders. That “detour” is also a Deleuzian word opens wide a “minor” register to history, speech, and forms of oppression. The semantic spectrum for aphasia in histories of politics and language is wide, from Stoler's colonial version that applies most to the privileged, to Deleuze's poetic transpositions that propose aphasia as an accomplishment, a rebellious refusal of communication. Aphasia has much promise as a historical category in and outside of colonial forms of duress.     

DISCIPLINE,PHILOSOPHY, AND HISTORY

Gorman proposes to investigate historical practice under the rubric of a philosophy of disciplines. Such philosophy must first “recover historically” the self‐constitution of the discipline in order then to appraise its procedures for warranting claims. Gorman's concept of discipline would have profited from consulting the substantial body of empirical research and theory regarding disciplinarity, and his “historical recovery” of the discipline of history leaves a lot to be desired. These insufficiencies vitiate the interesting arguments he has to offer concerning the question of the truth‐claims of whole historical accounts. A better reconstruction of disciplinarity might also have provided him with stronger rejoinders to the postmodern challenge to historical practice that he sees himself called to rebut.