Geopolitics, the State, and Political Science

Contextualizing Rudolf Kjellén, Founder of Geopolitics

Geopolitics, the State, and Political Science investigates the genesis of the social sciences and political science’s path to independence. The book is an intellectual history of theories of political science, the state, and geopolitics, with Professor Rudolf Kjellén as the point of departure.

Geopolitics, the State, and Political Science offers the first comprehensive intellectual history of Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922), the founder of geopolitics who formulated a systematic organic theory of the state. Kjellén played a decisive role in shaping both the institutional emergence of political science and the conceptual evolution of international relations and political theory.

Through extensive archival research and employing the contextualist methodology of the Cambridge school, this book discovers and rethinks the contexts in which Kjellén’s work developed. It situates his theories within early twentieth-century academic debates over political science and its emancipation from law, history, and philosophy. The work demonstrates how the foundations of political science were forged through concrete academic disputes, methodological controversies, and institutional struggles, while reaffirming the enduring value of historical contextualization for understanding both the origins and contested legacies of the modern state.

Much more than a biography, this study is an important contribution to the intellectual history of political theory, international relations, and the social sciences. It is of interest to historians, political scientists, geographers, political philosophers, and international lawyers.

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