Society, Action and Space. Alternative human geography

Abstract

The fragment of the Russian version  of the “Society, Action and Space” by well-known  Swiss social geographer  Benno Verlaine includes a preface to the English edition by the author, Anthony Giddens’ foreword to the publication of this edition, and the first chapter of the book. The author states, first of all,  the differences and features of the new edition (in comparison with the German one) --  the aim was to revive the cultural debate among social scientists and geographers of the German and the Anglo-Saxon tradition. A.Giddens sees this work as having great value especially for social scientists because Verlaine’s arguments sound a death sentence for the idea of the geography as a “science of space”, but at the same time opening up new and vast field of study. In the first chapter the author deals with the problem of causality in correlation with the space and action.