Élisée Reclus: libertarian thinking and social geography

Abstract

This text presents the preliminary results of an extensive research on the theoretical-methodological contribution proposed by the French anarchist-geographer Jean Jacques Élisée Reclus (1830 - 1905). Here, the thesis defended is that there is a dialectical relationship between his intellectual production, with emphasis on the methodological construction, and his social actions as an aggrieved militant. To this end, and as a didactic resource to facilitate the reader's understanding, the work is divided into three parts: in the first, based on extensive documentary and bibliographic research, we seek to raise and analyze important facts in the life of the anarchist thinker that would be among the outliers theoretical, political and methodological elaboration, fundamental for the understanding of his thought. In a second step, it seeks to understand the premises on which his thinking is based, that is, the assumptions that support his geographical method. In the third and last part, it presents an analysis of Reclus' methodological proposal, Social Geography, based on the evolution-revolution dialectic for the understanding of man-environment relations and their contradictions.