In this chapter, I outline the swaying back and forth between scientific geographies forged out of strong wartime and post-war commitments to building new democratic spaces and societies, and critiques that evoked the necessity of holding on to values, ethics, and morality of what it means to be human, to live a full life and to be a social being in what appeared increasingly was emerging as a technocratic, abstract society. The chapter gestures to the complexity of relations within and between them and to parallels in social thought and practice outside of the discipline which shaped ideas and self-understanding within it. The chapter then turns to a wider conception of science and humanism that came to dominate the intellectual life of the discipline in the 1980s, before concluding with some reflections on the demographic causes of intellectual churn and its legacies.