Abstract
This paper aims at rethinking the Quantitative Revolution on the basis of the particularistic and contextual perspectives on the history of geography (Johnston, 1983). Focusing on William L. Garrison, the charismatic leader of the Washington group leading the Revolution, it attempts to elucidate the circumstances under which he became a lion of his day and to examine the characteristics of his geography. Rough sketches of features of the Washington group (Johnston, 1987; Sugiura, 1986) and recollections of Garrison himself and his former Ph. D. students (Buttier, 1983; Halvorson and Stave, 1978; Morrill, 1984) have been published recently. But they are rather fragmentary, and not detailed enough to provide a full account of the group as a whole. This is the very motive of writing this paper. In order to solve this problem, the social environment surrounding Garrison and the Department of Geography at the University of Washington in those days are reconstructed as precisely as possible by a survey of the relevant literature.
The Quantitative Revolution was not only a scientific movement to promote the start of nomothetic geography and the end of idiographic geography. In retrospect, it was also a crusade to awaken geographers' sense of the danger of other social sciences invading the field of geography. Through their wartime experience American social scientists had discovered the new field of area studies and after World War II interdisciplinary institutions were established at various universities in the United States, specializing in courses which were centered on a particular area (Sugiura, 1987). With the advent of the urban age, sociologists and economists for example, D. J. Bogue, O. D. Duncan, R. Vining and W. Isard - inaugurated urban studies, a type of area studies. Their research styles were more positivistic and theoretical, as if they were geared to the coming computer age. As the United States rushed into the space race with the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, quantification in the social sciences was greatly intensified.
As symbolized by the elimination of the geography department at Harvard University, the top-ranked institution in the American system of elite higher education, geographers were worried about the status of their field as a science (Sugiura, 1987). Applied geographers such as E. Ackerman and G. F. White were eager to establish scientific geography since they were sensitive to the current of the times through interdisciplinary contacts with other scientists: White later steered HSGP to introduce “New Geography” into the teaching of geography in high schools (McNee, 1973), and Ackerman attempted to innovate the discipline by means of a proposal based on The Science of Geography (1965). G. D. Hudson, in response to the same concerns, made a decision to rebuild a graduate program by making the discipline more practical and scientific when in 1951 he was appointed the new chairman of the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. Garrison was hired to play a role in this reform: he was given opportunities to study quantitative methods while participating in an interdepartmental project sponsored by the U. S. Bureau of Public Roads. These opportunities caused him to approach Isard, and to open his eyes to location theory in the course of event.
This encounter allowed them to identify common interests for their different purposes: Isard was anxious to remake the field of geography in terms of the regional science paradigm; Garrison intended to reform the discipline by emphasizing the products of applied research. The latter was also Hudson's hope. Garrison's concern was explicitly connected with the actual region, however, in that he believed that theory should be modified in the light of the results of practice (Garrison, 1957b, 1962c), which seems to be closely associated with the crucial fact that he had started his professional career as a field worker.
