Battling shadows

This short commentary applauds John Agnew (2014) for his interest in the history of geographic concepts but dissents with both his diagnosis of and proposed remedy for the literature in this field. After contesting Agnew’s use of ‘genealogy’ and his assessment of critical geopolitics, the commentary suggests that his treatment of geography’s intellectual histories rests on two untenable separations, that is, of past from present and concepts from ‘real-world phenomena’.