I Abstract. In the changed intellectual climate since historical geography emerged as a substantial geographical subfield, issues of power and modernity have come much to the fore. For Michel Foucault, power is less a property than a strategy and i s widely distributed in cultural discourses and their settings. For Jurgen Habermas, modernity imposes a distinctive context of communications that undermines the stability of traditional lifeworlds and holds out a largely unfulfilled promise of rationality. For Anthony Ciddens, the agency and settings of power cannot be conceptualized separate-SSUES of power and modernity now preoccupy much of the literature in social theory and, in various ways, penetrate the social sciences, including human geography. There they contribute to an intellectual environment quite unlike that in the 1950sand 1960s when A. H. Clark in the U.S. and Clifford Darby in England established historical geography as a substantial geographical subfield.' Then positivism was much in the air; arguments raged about the extent to which geography could be a law-finding science of spatial relations. Historical geography itself emerged partly in reaction t o the view of geography as a spatial science. Now, human geography increasingly reflects broad, interdisciplinary interests in culture, the political implications of authorship, and elaborate post-Marxian and post-Weberian accounts of the changing dynamics of power as societies become modern. In the process, theory i s being reconceptualized as broad, interrelated sets of ideas t o be worked with suggestively rather than treated as candidates for laws. Geography is becoming sensitive to culture as well as space, to the past, and to the changing spatial configuration of power. Within this intellectual revolution, historical and much of the rest of human geography are converging-by backing into each other.This essay deals with this convergence and its implications by considering the current interdisciplinary interest in power and modernity. It touches on the work of four remarkable scholars-Michel Foucault, a French historian of, he said, systems of thought; Jurgen Habermas, a German critical theorist; and two English sociologists, Anthony Giddens and Michael Mann-all of whom have written tellingly and, for geographers, exceedingly suggestively, on the changing conduct of power as societies become modern. Then I consider the relevance of some of their ideas to the practice of historical geography and to the relationship of the subfield t o human geography as a whole. The essay i s a foray, and a somewhat personal one at that. Yet, although the four certainly do not represent all the current literature on modernity and power, there are good reasons for dealing with them: Foucault, more than anyone, has rekindled an interest in culture, largely by thinking about power as no one quite had before him; Habermas has proceeded from an 672 Harris analysis of t h e act of communication t o a vast, influential theory of the emerging character and predicament of mo...