Zagadnienie geograficzne Polski: z powodu „Atlasu Polski” prof. Romera

Summary

This article is a methodological critique of Professor Romer's "Atlas of Poland", which gained wide popularity during the First World War. The author, Brzeski, argues that the Atlas has a dual character: as a public act, it successfully gave graphic expression to the idea of Polish national unity and raised the territorial, national, and socio-economic dimensions of the Polish question. However, as a scientific act, it is fundamentally flawed. The article's central thesis is that Professor Romer's view of history is an extreme form of geographical determinism, a "natural materialism" that attempts to explain historical and social phenomena as necessary consequences of the natural conditions of a territory. Brzeski contends that this methodological stance is an anachronism, ignoring historical contingency, institutional defects, and human agency. The article then delves into the statistical and cartographic methods used in the Atlas, pointing out methodological errors, such as using inappropriate bases of comparison (e.g., area of grain fields or total population) for representing crop cultivation and livestock numbers, which led to misleading conclusions. These errors, the author argues, stem from a preconceived interpretive framework that distorts the objective presentation of data. In conclusion, Brzeski states that the Atlas fails to provide an accurate and objective geographical-statistical picture of the Polish lands, with the root cause being the author's erroneous understanding of the relationship between geography and history. He advocates that geography, especially anthropogeography, should primarily focus on a scrupulous and comprehensive description of physiographic and human facts, refraining from causal explanations, which should be left to historical and social sciences. The article emphasizes that a proper understanding of the goals and cognitive limits of geographical research is the fundamental condition for resolving the geographical question of Poland.