The Nature of Space by Milton Santos (review)

Abstract

Milton Santos (1926–2001) writes in his introduction of the long gestation period of The Nature of Space. He tells about the French geographer, Jean Brunhes, an acolyte of Vidal de la Blache (aren’t they all?), who apologized for the ten-year delay in publishing his 1914, 987-page tome, La Géographie Humaine. Santos’s volume—a mere 287 pages and first published in Portuguese in Brazil in 1996—took twenty-five years. He says the lag was “due to care, rather than to negligence” (p. 1). I believe him. In confronting the nature of space, Santos ranges across an inordinately wide array of philosophical, social-scientific, and geographical literatures. It feels like a lifetime’s reading, not a quarter of a century’s. Nearly everyone who is anyone is in there, including, among others, Kant, Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, James, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Schütz, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Braudel, Althusser, Habermas, Baudrillard, Latour, and Giddens. But the result is neither a cacophony nor mere lip-service— long lists of names and years in brackets.