David Harvey: Marxism, capitalism and the geographical imagination

New Political Economy

Volumn 12, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 97-115

  Castree, Noel ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CAPITALISM; MARXISM;

EID: 33947194413     PISSN: 13563467     EISSN: 14699923     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13563460601068859     Document Type: Article

References (76)

1. David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (Edward Arnold, 1973).
2. Many of his books have also been the subject of review symposia in various academic journals.
3. The first two books are published by Oxford University Press in 2003 and 2005 respectively, the third by Columbia University Press in 2007.
4. Aside from being a prodigious publisher, Harvey is a tireless speaker and even now subjects himself to a demanding annual lecture schedule both in the USA (where he resides) and overseas.
5. I am referring to Derek Gregory's fine essay 'Troubling Geographies', in Noel Castree & Derek Gregory (eds), David Harvey: A Critical Reader (Blackwell, 2006), pp. 1-25.
6. This is not at all unusual for Marxists of Harvey's generation. For instance, Terry Eagleton's prodigious output and major contribution to literary and cultural theory has only recently begun to be assessed in the round. Similarly, Fredric Jameson's work is currently the subject of very few synoptic appreciations.
7. 'Reinventing Geography', New Left Review, No. 4 (2000), pp. 75-97,
8. reprinted in David Harvey, Spaces of Capital (Edinburgh University Press, 2001), pp. 3-24 (all citations to the interview come from the latter source; the interview was conducted by Perry Anderson);
9. David Harvey, 'Memories and Desires', in Peter Gould & Forest Pitts (eds), Geographical Voices (Syracuse University Press, 2002), pp. 149-88. An informative webcast interview with Harvey can be found at http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people4/Harvey/harvey-con4.html.
10. A very basic introduction to Harvey's work - and one that covers only a portion of his writing - is Noel Castree, 'David Harvey', in Phil. J. Hubbard, Rob Kitchin & Gill Valentine (eds), Key Thinkers on Space and Place (London, 2004), pp. 181-8. The Critical Reader contains a complete bibliography of Harvey's writings for readers unfamiliar with his corpus of work. Harvey's Wikipedia entry is too cursory to be of much value.
11. Harvey, 'Memories and Desires', p. 155.
12. Gregory, 'Troubling Geographies', p. 4.
13. David Harvey, Explanation in Geography (Arnold, 1969).
14. Harvey, 'Reinventing Geography', p. 4.
15. Ibid., p. 5.
16. Ibid., p. 5.
17. Harvey, Social Justice, p. 17.
18. Harvey, 'Reinventing Geography', p. 10.
19. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Blackwell, 1982).
20. This is Perry Anderson's term: See Harvey, 'Reinventing Geography', p. 11.
21. Harvey, 'Memories and Desires', p. 176.
22. Both books were published by Blackwell.
23. I first encountered Harvey and his Marxism as a second year undergraduate there. The influence has been enduring.
24. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1989).
25. Harvey, 'Reinventing Geography', p. 13.
26. J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester University Press, 1979).
27. David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Blackwell, 1996).
28. Harvey, 'Memories and Desires', p. 186.
29. See, for instance, Terry Eagleton's review 'Spaced Out', London Review of Books, 24 April 1997.
30. The reissues, with a new introduction by Harvey, occurred in 1999 and 2006. Spaces of Capital was published in 2001 by Edinburgh University Press.
31. This observation was offered in the concluding essay of David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Blackwell, 1989), p. 279 - a collection of his best essays on urbanism.
32. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
33. Harvey uses this term in an Afterword to a special issue of the journal Antipode that celebrated The Limits' twentieth anniversary. See David Harvey, 'Retrospect on The Limits to Capital', Antipode, Vol. 36, No. 3 (2004), pp. 544-9.
34. He left Johns Hopkins in 2000, in part because his department was being restructured by the University, in part because of the attractions of New York City.
35. Gregory Elliott, Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 243. Elliott adapts the term from Anderson.
36. Harvey, 'Memories and Desires', p. 151.
37. Harvey, 'Retrospect', p. 544.
38. Harvey, Social Justice and the City, p. 288. Harvey was especially influenced by the first part of Bertell Ollman's superb book Alienation (Cambridge University Press, 1971).
39. Harvey, Explanation in Geography, p. 486.
40. David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Blackwell, 1989), p. 2.
41. Harvey, The Limits to Capital, pp. 450-1.
42. Noel Castree, 'The Detour of Critical Theory', in Castree & Gregory (eds), David Harvey, pp. 247-69.
43. Harvey, Social Justice, p. 298.
44. Harvey, The Urban Experience, p. 16.
45. This is most fully addressed by Harvey in chapter 2 of Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference.
46. Randy Martin, On Your Marx (University of Minnesota Press, 2002) p. xxi.
47. I exemplified this with reference to The Limits a decade ago: Noel Castree, 'Birds, Mice and Geography', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 21, No. 2 (1996), pp. 342-62.
48. Verso, 2006.
49. Harvey, The Urbanisation of Capital, p. xi.
50. This said, there are still some major points of debate about the nature and role of space. I touch upon some of these in relation to Harvey's work in my chapter 'From spaces of antagonism to spaces of engagement', in Andrew Brown, Steve Fleetwood & John Mitchell Roberts (eds), Marxism and Critical Realism (Routledge, 2004), pp. 187-214.
51. See also Ed Soja, Postmodern Geographies (Verso, 1989),
52. Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Blackwell, 1995),
53. and Doreen Massey, For Space (Sage, 2006).
54. Michel Foucault, 'Questions on Geography', in Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (Pantheon, 1980), p. 70.
55. Cindi Katz & Neil Smith, 'Grounding Metaphor: Towards a Spatialized Politics', in Michael Keith & Steve Pile (eds), Place and the Politics of Identity (Routledge, 1993), pp. 67-83.
56. The best known critique was authored by David Ley & James Duncan, 'Structural Marxiam and Human Geography: A Critical Perspective', Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 72, No. 1 (1982), pp. 30-59.
57. Two notable contributions here were Derek Gregory's Regional Transformation and Industrial Revolution (Macmillian, 1982)
58. and Allan Pred's Place, Practice and Structure (Cambirdge University Press, 1987).
59. Rosalyn Deutsche, 'Boy's Town', Society and Space, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1991), pp. 5-30;
60. Meghan Morris, 'The Man in the Mirror', Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1992), pp. 253-79.
61. Melissa Wright, 'Differences that Matter', in Castree & Gregory (eds), David Harvey, pp. 80-101;
62. Cindi Katz, 'Messing with "the Project"', in Castree & Gregory (eds), David Harvey, pp. 234-46.
63. An index of this fact is that Harvey - unlike at least one of his students (Richard Walker) - has never had much time for the philosophy of 'critical realism' in which complex causality, path dependence and uncertainty loom large as problems of theory and method. Likewise, Harvey has made no formal use of the new ideas of chaos, emergence and the like emanating from the life sciences and currently popular with many social scientists, critical and mainstream.
64. See, for instance, Bob Jessop, 'Spatial Fixes, Temporal Fixes and Spatio-temporal Fixes', in Castree & Gregory (eds), David Harvey, pp. 142-66.
65. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus (Routledge, 1997), p. 1.
66. Noel Castree
67. Perry Anderson's Consideration on Western Marxism (New Left Books) was published in 1976 but mostly written three years before. The quote is drawn from p. 95.
68. The other two surveys to which I refer are Arguments Within English Marxism (Verso, 1980), and
69. In The Tracks of Historical Materialism (Verso, 1983). Note that even in the third of these surveys Harvey does not warrant a mention, perhaps because The Limits had only just been published.
70. Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism, p. 28.
71. I have made this argument in relation the idea of 'public intellectuals' in Noel Castree, 'Geography's New Public Intellectuals?', Antipode, Vol. 38, No. 2 (2006), pp. 396-412.
72. I add this qualifier because Harvey, among other forms of local activism, was involved in a successful campaign to institute a living wage in Baltimore during the 1990s. See his chapter on this in Spaces of Hope.
73. Harvey, 'Memories and Desires', p. 162.
74. Most of the chapters in Castree & Gregory (eds), David Harvey constitute critical appreciations rather than hagiographies; they also contain references to previously published critiques of Harvey's work.
75. Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (Verso, 1992), p. 73.
76. See the 'Introduction' in Harvey, The Urban Experience. Reputations: David Harvey