Ritter, Carl (1779–1859)

One of the great intellectual giants of 19th-century geography, Carl Ritter was an influential professor in Frankfurt and Berlin. He is often described as one of the two principal founders of [Page 2471]modern geography, compared with his contemporary, Alexander von Humboldt.

Son of a doctor, Ritter became from 1798 to 1814 a tutor for the children of Bethmann Hollweg, a wealthy local banker who financed his university education. In school, he studied botany, art, theology, philosophy, and history, and he taught himself Greek and Latin. His first geographical publication appeared in 1804, and by 1816, he had acquired a reputation as a geographer. After a year as professor of history in Frankfurt, he moved to the University of Berlin as a professor of geography, occupying the first German university chair in that discipline. He became deeply interested in Africa and was a militant abolitionist and opponent of racism. He became a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and in 1828, he founded the Berlin Geographical Society. His early works included textbooks about the geography of Europe.

Ritter, who did not travel much and never outside Europe, is most well-known for his massive 19-volume magnum opus, Die Erdkunde im Ver-hältniss zur Natur und zur Geschichte des Men-schen [The Science of the Earth in Relation to Nature and the History of Humanity], consisting of more than 20,000 pages, which he wrote between 1817 and 1859 (and never completed). It concerns only Africa and Asia and dwells on the relations between humans and the biophysical environment. The work became enormously successful and helped move geography beyond the study of maps to include the various ways in which people responded to the world's varying climates and ecologies.

Ritter viewed the world's regions through the conceptual lens of religious teleology, seeing in the world's geography evidence of divine purpose. The Earth, he held consistently, was designed by God for people and could only meaningfully be viewed in this way. In this respect, he differed greatly from the more secular and scientific Humboldt. Ritter's focus lay primarily on human geography rather than the natural environment. He attempted an ambitious comparison and synthesis of enormous amounts of data through a regional approach at a continental level, contrasting the Northern and Southern Hemispheres as well as the New World and the Old World. Geography's purpose, he held, was to detect the whole character of places—to identify unity within diversity. Disdaining simple lists of facts, Ritter advocated comparative local studies through which broader generalizations could be made. However, his approach was purely inductive, and he distrusted deduction as a matter of principle; in this respect, his ideas resembled the chorology of Richard Hartshorne, who, not surprisingly, admired Ritter greatly. His view tended toward an organic theory of the state, which was becoming popular in emerging geopolitical conceptions of the world.

Ritter was a highly popular teacher. His students included Élisée Reclus and Arnold Guyot, and he heavily influenced Friedrich Ratzel and Alfred Hettner. He died in 1859, the same year as von Humboldt.

...