Geopolitics, the State, and Political Science: Contextualizing Rudolf Kjellén, Founder of Geopolitics (Routledge Geopolitics Series)

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