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David Harvey: Marxism, Capitalism and the
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REPUTATIONS
David Harvey: Marxism, Capitalism

and the Geographical Imagination
NOEL CASTREE
David Harvey is arguably the greatest living Marxist geographer. The architectural
sweep and grandeur of his intellectual edifice knows few equivalents within post-
1968 Marxism, and certainly none within his home discipline of geography. Since
the publication of the path-breaking Social Justice and the City in 1973,1 he has
constructed a corpus of work whose consistency, topical range and encompassing
vision is almost unique within the world of Marxian analysis. His oeuvre (dis-
counting several pre-Marxist writings) comprises ten single authored books, two
edited works and over a hundred essays and chapters. Several of his books have
been multiply translated, extending Harvey’s intellectual reach beyond the Anglo-
phone world to other shores.2 That many of these contributions have been agenda-
setting is a testament to his originality as a thinker. Most of us would be pleased to
author one or two germinal texts in a lifetime. Yet in his eighth decade David
Harvey continues to publish major works that command a wide readership (at
least within academia). Among the most recent are The New Imperialism, A
Brief History of Neoliberalism and Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of
Freedom.3 If Harvey were to stop publishing tomorrow, these books would
crown a canon of commanding weight. However, because he shows no sign of
slowing down, they are likely to be succeeded by further works of substance in
the years to come. A full accounting of Harvey’s contribution cannot, therefore,
currently be undertaken: the contribution is, quite simply, still in the making.4
Even so, surprisingly, his geographically inflected Marxism has received only
one synoptic appreciation so far, and a brief one at that.5 The recent publication
of David Harvey: A Critical Reader makes amends for this absence, but only in
part because its constituent essays tend to focus on one or other theme of his
work rather than treating it as unity. Typically, Harvey’s admirers (and, for that
matter, his detractors) have appropriated particular questions, concepts and
neologisms from one or other of his writings and used these in their own work.
Commentators within and beyond the Marxist camp have been far less adept (or
Noel Castree, Geography, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
ISSN 1356-3467 print; ISSN 1469-9923 online=07=010097-19 # 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080=13563460601068859
Noel Castree
simply less willing) to treat Harvey’s publications in the round and subject them to
an over-arching interpretation. The result is a fragmentary and partial grasp of
Harvey’s intellectual and political project this last thirty or more years.6
This brief essay is oriented to two kinds of readers, namely, those who know
little about Harvey and his distinctive brand of Marxism, and those who are
well acquainted with some of his work but not the totality of his writings. It can
profitably be read alongside an interview with the editors of New Left Review, a
recent autobiographical essay and the aforementioned Critical Reader.7 Through-
out the essay’s five main sections, I aim to situate Harvey’s writings firmly in their
several contexts of production and reception. My conclusion is that, for all its bril-
liance, much of Harvey’s work has been out of joint with its time, notwithstanding
its enduring applicability to the capitalist universe past, present and future. This
combination of dissonance and relevance is, I argue, only apparently paradoxical.
David Harvey: a biogeography

Harvey was born in late 1935 in the small town of Gillingham in Kent. He was the
second child of working class parents seeking to make ends meet in the decade of
the Great Depression. Harvey came of age during the second world war. In his own
estimation, he inherited this father’s self-discipline, his mother’s commitment to
education as a means to self-improvement, and his maternal grandmother’s inde-
pendence of mind (as well as her socialist sensibilities).8 State school-educated,
Harvey was offered a place at Cambridge University in the mid 1950s to read
geography. In the 1950s, geography at Cambridge was typical of geography in
British universities more generally. It placed great emphasis on describing
regional and national difference, both biophysical and human – what Derek
Gregory calls ‘unique or singular constellations in space and time’.9 Working
within this ‘exceptionalist’ tradition, Harvey did his undergraduate dissertation
on fruit cultivation in mid Kent (his home terrain) and his PhD on hop cultivation
in the same area.
If these seem unlikely origins for one of today’s leading Marxist theorists, the
1960s saw him apparently move no nearer his eventual intellectual destination.
Having completed his doctorate in 1962, Harvey became a Lecturer in Geography
at Bristol University shortly afterwards. There, he underwent something of a
Damascence conversion. At Cambridge (and Oxford too), geography was taught
as a largely descriptive and synthetic discipline distinct from the ‘nomothetic
sciences’. However, during the 1960s it was Oxbridge graduates like Richard
Chorley, Peter Haggett and Harvey himself who sought – very successfully –
to make geography a ‘spatial science’. For this trio of young Turks, and fellow tra-
vellers elsewhere, the ontological presumption was that the world had a good deal
of spatial order to it; the epistemological and methodological assumption was that
this order could be rationally disclosed following the protocols of ‘science’; and
the disciplinary assumption was that a ‘new Geography’ could describe, explain
and even predict spatial patterns at a variety of scales. Harvey’s signal contribution
to the demise of ‘idiography’ as academic geography’s central preoccupation was
the landmark book Explanation in Geography.10 It was the first attempt to specify
comprehensively the methodogical procedures (broadly positivist) necessary for
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Reputations: David Harvey
human and physical geographers to interrogate spatial order ‘objectively’. As

Harvey puts it in his New Left Review interview,
The established doctrine was that the knowledge yielded by

geographical inquiry was different from any other kind. You can’t
generalise about it, you can’t be systematic about it. There are no
geographical laws . . . [or] principles to which you can appeal.
I wanted to do battle with this conception of geography . . . .11
In this same interview, Perry Anderson rightly asserts that ‘One would never guess
from [Explanation in Geography] . . . that the author might become a committed
radical’.12 Harvey concedes the point, noting that in the 1960s he was a ‘Fabian
progressivist’ much taken with the ideas of planning, efficiency and rationality
as a means to improve the lot of the least fortunate. This was, of course, very
much in keeping with the optimism of the Wilson years, when the Labour Party
promised to modernise Britain and its class system, but the cool rationality of
Explanation in Geography was a far cry from the social commotions coincident
with its publication. As Harvey recalls, ‘I was so absorbed in writing the book
that I didn’t notice how much was collapsing around me. I turned in my
magnum opus to the publishers in May 1968, only to find myself acutely embar-
rassed by the change of political temperature at large.’13
This awareness of a gap between his intellectual project and an increasingly tur-
bulent world was made more acute in 1969 when Harvey moved to Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore. He joined a new geography and environmental engineer-
ing department that brought social and environmental scientists together to tackle
problems like water pollution and urban smog. Baltimore was doubly formative.
Harvey found himself working in an elite private university in a highly impover-
ished, racially divided city whose black populace had rebelled in 1968. In addition,
he encountered graduate students and young faculty from across campus keen to
read Marx. The result was a thrillingly auto-critical book, Social Justice and the
City. An attempt to explain and address urban problems (like inner city
poverty), the text had two halves. The first half (‘Liberal formulations’) contained
essays written in the welfare state traditions of established left-wing thought and
politics. However, the second half (‘Socialist formulations’) broke with these
reformist commitments and adumbrated, in ebullient prose, a Marxist urban
theory at once explanatory and critical.
To be sure, Harvey’s early encounter with Marxism was uncertain. In the intro-
duction to Social Justice he declared himself almost apologetically to be ‘a
Marxist of sorts’,14 but this was soon to change. Awkward attempts to wed
Marxism to the work of Karl Polanyi and Jean Piaget quickly gave way to a
much ‘purer’ encounter not with the Marxian tradition as a whole but Marx’s
work specifically. As Harvey recollects:
What I realized after Social Justice . . . was that I didn’t understand

Marx, and needed to straighten this out, which I tried to do without
too much assistance from elsewhere. My aim was to get to the point
where the theory could help me understand urban issues – and . . .
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Noel Castree
I couldn’t do [that] without addressing questions of fixed capital,

which no one had written much about at the time.15
Through the 1970s Harvey undertook a close reading of Marx’s numerous

writings, focusing mostly on the later works of political economy rather than
the earlier philosophical contributions. The result was a book of abstract theory
that Harvey still considers his best. The Limits to Capital was, and remains, a
magisterial text of great originality.16 Published in 1982, it was both a reconstruc-
tion and extension of Marx’s ‘mature’ work. In it Harvey integrated space into
Marx’s crisis theory as ‘an ineliminable element’,17 so correcting historical mate-
rialism’s over-emphasis on time. The book’s title had a dual meaning: it referred
not just to the analytical limits of Marx’s later work but also the limits of capital-
ism as a way of life. In both cases, Harvey demonstrated the centrality of geogra-
phy. The production of towns and city-regions, the partitioning of space into
national units, the construction of transportation networks: all of these were, in
Harvey’s view, pivotal to the contradictory dynamics of capital accumulation.
The revolutionary qualities of capitalism were thus shown, systematically, to
exist not on the head of a pin but in and though a restless human landscape at
once intensely differentiated and integrated.
Two major disappointments attended the publication of The Limits. First, the
near-revolutionary fervour of the late 1960s – which had been instrumental in
Harvey taking a Marxist turn – had dissipated a decade later. The Limits was
published at a time when the Western left (even in its mainstream forms) was
about to suffer a series of major defeats at the hands of neoconservative and neo-
liberal politicians. Second, Harvey’s status as ‘geographer’ almost certainly
explains why the book ‘was neither widely read nor . . . influential with anyone
. . . part from those specifically interested in geographical and urban questions’.18
As a result of disciplinary prejudice and introversion, Anglophone Marxists (over-
whelmingly concentrated in the academy) paid little or no attention to Harvey’s
book through the 1980s.
Even so, Harvey’s commitment to classical Marxism remained undiminished. If
The Limits was an unplanned detour, it was nonetheless the vital precondition for
Harvey’s return to the urban questions first broached in Social Justice. In 1985
Harvey published two books of essays simultaneously: The Urbanisation of
Capital and Consciousness and the Urban Experience.19 Preparatory work for
these stretched back to the 1970s and a sabbatical in Paris. The former book,
like The Limits, was theoretical and took the perspective of ‘system (dis)inte-
gration’. However, where The Limits had dealt with geographical issues quite
comprehensively, The Urbanisation of Capital adopted a narrower field of
vision. It aimed to understand the role that cities play in the reproduction of capi-
talist societies. By contrast, Consciousness and the Urban Experience took the
perspective of ‘social (dis)integration’: that is, the perspective of those inhabiting
the capitalist city. Less theoretical and muscular than The Limits or The Urbanis-
ation of Capital, this book contained two historical-empirical essays, including a
long one on those urban revolutionaries the Paris Communards. Together, the
two books offered a coherent Marxian framework for making sense of urban
life both from ‘on high’ and at street level. They made the long-overdue argument
100
(presaged by Manuel Castells but few others) that cities are integral to both (i) the
creative destruction endemic to capitalism and (ii) the exercise of class power and
resistance, not just contingent geographical forms via which they find expression.
As Margaret Thatcher presided over a third Conservative administration,
Harvey returned to England in 1987 to a rather traditional geography department
at Oxford University.20 If his previous books had been highly constructive –
attempts to extend the explanatory reach of Marxist political economy – his
major achievement at Oxford was a far more critical text. The Condition of
Postmodernity was a polemic that made Harvey’s name outside geography and
urban studies, the two fields where his reputation was already secure.21 By
the late 1980s, the ‘crisis of Marxism’ in the English-speaking world was well
advanced. It was coupled with the rise of ‘post’ prefixed approaches to signal sup-
posedly ‘new times’ intellectually, culturally, economically and politically.
Drawing upon almost 20 years of expertise as a Marxist, Harvey wrote what
Terry Eagleton (on the book’s back cover) called a ‘total critique’. The Condition
of Postmodernity argued that ‘postmodernism’ was simply the cultural and intel-
lectual outworking of a sustained economic crisis in the West. ‘It was’, Harvey
recalls, ‘one of the easiest books I’ve ever written’.22 Essentially a long essay,
The Condition presented a compelling (if rather too neat) framework that linked
apparently separate issues like economy and culture, literature and architecture,
time and space, the local and the global, the city and telecommunications.
Though the breezy argument certainly lacked rigour, it was highly readable, had
a didactic structure, and suggested the enduring explanatory power of the
Marxism that postmodernism was supposed – pace Lyotard’s The Postmodern
Condition 23 – to have eclipsed. Even though the likes of Alex Callinicos,
Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson published similarly robust critiques of
postmodernism, Harvey’s remains the most widely read and cited analysis of
the topic authored by a Marxist.
Harvey left Oxford in 1993 and returned to Johns Hopkins. Though his previous
work provided intellectual resources for understanding much that was going on in
the world – ongoing recession in the West, US indebtedness, new patterns of
uneven geographical development, speculative investments in urban infrastruc-
tures, the ‘postmodern turn’, ‘flexible accumulation’ and much else besides –
the sort of Marxism he held dear continued to be seen as passé within and
beyond the academy. In addition, the momentous events of the late 1980s in the
former USSR and the Eastern bloc further fuelled the fires of anti-Marxism.
Harvey’s response, possibly ill-judged, was to write a book whose epic ambitions
(for his critics at least) simply confirmed his intolerance for non-Marxist ways of
knowing the world. Though written in measured, non-polemical prose, Justice,
Nature and the Geography of Difference was (and still is) Harvey’s most intel-
lectually and politically exorbitant book.24 Part theory, part philosophy, this
mid 1990s text is an apologia for Marxism that does three things. First, it tries
to persuade leftists in general that both social and geographical ‘difference’
cannot be understood in abstraction from capitalism in general and class politics
in particular. Second, it seeks to bring environmental questions into Marxist analy-
sis as a compliment to Harvey’s previous preoccupation with space in general and
cities in particular. Finally, the book adumbrates a theory of justice that links
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Noel Castree
social and environmental questions, local and global commitments, and questions
of difference and commonality. It remains Harvey’s most ‘totalising’ text that, ‘for
all its lapses . . . is one of my most profound geographical works’.25 Others,
however, disagree.26
Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference was completed during a period
of serious ill-health for David Harvey. He survived a triple heart bypass with
renewed energy and purpose. In recent years, he has authored a series of books
that eschew his grand philosophising of the mid 1990s and offer compelling
analyses of our historical– geographical conjuncture. At the same time, he has
seen Verso re-issue The Limits twice and Edinburgh University Press publish a
‘greatest hits’ collection (Spaces of Capital ).27 Harvey’s continued belief in the
powers of Marxian analysis may seem surprising, given how marginal such analy-
sis has become to left-wing thinking worldwide. However, he has been cautiously
upbeat for several years now. Back in 1989 he declared that ‘while capitalism is
always in a state of pre-socialism, it is scarcely on anyone’s agenda these days
to think about something as daring as a [post-socialist] transition . . .’.28 Yet, as
little as a decade on, things had changed dramatically courtesy of a globalising
wall-to-wall capitalism that was supposed to mark the end of history (and presum-
ably geography too). Major economic crises (like that in Asia in 1997 –98), ‘the
war on terror’, China’s epic industrialisation, myriad forms of protest against
the depradations of the ‘free market’: these and other recent world-historic hap-
penings are, for Harvey, all bound up with the inveterate geotemporal dynamics
of capital accumulation. This is why, in Spaces of Hope, he called for an optimism
of both the intellect and the will to make good on whatever possibilities the present
moment holds for rendering capitalism obsolete.29 It is an optimism he has made
flesh in his writing since then.
The three recent books that I mentioned in the introduction are all attempts to
give readers a framework for understanding seemingly disparate events occurring
worldwide today. In each case the possibilities for social transformation are
explored systematically. The New Imperalism, one of several books by left intel-
lectuals on the topic, connects geoeconomics and geopolitics, class struggle and
the struggle of new social movements, in an elegant and holistic analysis of the
USA’s failing hegemony. A Brief History on Neoliberalism examines the
project of free marketeers since the early 1970s and its current unravelling via
the compound geographies of what Karl Polanyi famously called ‘the double
movement’. Finally, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom is a with-
ering critique of the limited freedoms offered by the market and a charter for the
sort of ‘right to difference’ a truly humane world would seek to foster if only capit-
alism could be cancelled out. In all three cases, Harvey draws directly upon his
most ‘foundational book’30 – The Limits – but in a relatively supple way that
respects historical– geographical contingency while insisting on the enduring
logics that undergird it.
It is too soon to assess the impact of this trio of recent texts, but one thing is
certain. Since The Condition of Postmodernity, Harvey has enjoyed a far wider
and larger readership than during his early career. Today, as a Distinguished
Professor of Anthropology at City University New York, he is among the
world’s most famous living Marxists.31 He pertains to what Gregory Elliott
102
calls ‘the intransigent Left’ and remains absolutely convinced that capitalism is
the biggest threat to human dignity and happiness in the twenty-first century.32
Now, as much as in the past, he wishes to ‘create a much better world in which
we can live, not without conflict, but with reasonably equal life chances
coupled with intense respect for our differences (geographical as well as social)
and a deep understanding of our commonalities’.33
David Harvey’s Marxism: specificity and continuity

This rough survey of Harvey’s career having been undertaken, let me now – rather
telegraphically – try to characterise his Marxism as a whole. What are its distinctive
characteristics? In my view there are eleven, which I discuss in no particular order.
To begin with, Harvey is a classical Marxist above all else. What does this mean?
For some, the classical canon comprises Marx and Engels’ separate and combined
works, plus those of Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky. However, Harvey’s major
reference point has always been one author not several: specifically, the late
Marx. Capital, the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus Value have long been his
guiding texts. ‘I [write] . . .’, Harvey recently observed, ‘very much under the tute-
lage of Marx and with very little reference to the rest of the Marxist tradition.’34 In a
strong sense, then, Harvey’s writing can be seen as a direct transposition of Marx’s
nineteenth-century anatomisation of capitalism into the modern era. He has
studiously avoided the works of major post-classical figures like Lukacs,
Gramsci and Althusser. Second, Harvey’s strong preference for Marx’s ‘mature’
works defines him as a political economist rather than, say, a Marxist philosopher.
Most of his books – with the exception of Justice, Nature and the Geography of
Difference – are centred on economic issues. This is most obviously the case in
The Limits to Capital, but even interventions such as The Condition of Postmoder-
nity – where he explores ‘superstructural’ issues like art and cinema – are grounded
in the ‘basal’ concerns of capitalist accumulation. This said, Harvey’s conception of
‘the economy’ is an expansive one, going back to his first encounter with Marxian
theory in 1970. For him, capital accumulation is a seamless process: a flow that is
realised in and through diverse physical and symbolic things, such as living
labourers, factories, architecture and communication systems. He has been clear
on this point since Social Justice when, drawing upon one of his favourite expositors
of Marx’s thinking, Bertell Ollman, he advocated a ‘conception of reality as a total-
ity of internally related parts’.35
Third, this means that by his own lights Harvey is a holistic thinker rather than
an economic determinist. The second chapter of Justice, Nature and the Geogra-
phy of Difference spells this out forcefully, and is unusual in that Harvey has gen-
erally avoided programmatic statements about his modus operandi. There he
argues that capitalism is more than an ‘economy’ narrowly defined, because it
insinuates itself into every nook and cranny of human (and environmental) exist-
ence if opportunity knocks. This relational sensibility contrasts with a more
analytical mind-set (common in social science) determined to identify parts in
abstraction from their connectivities. His best books exemplify the sensibility well.
The fourth, and most obvious, distinguishing feature of his work is its profound
exploration of geographical questions. Marx, as Harvey showed, pretty much
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Noel Castree
ignored or trivialised the geographical dimensions of existence. Prior to Justice,

Nature and the Geography of Difference his own exploration of the geography–
capitalism relationship focused on space in a very physical sense (the construction
of built environments, the formation of cities and regions, the fabrication of trans-
port and communication networks, the rise and fall of major cities). This said,
Harvey has never ignored the symbolic and expressive dimensions (his long
Paris essay is the best example but there are many others). Since the early
1990s, though, Harvey has gone beyond the problematics of space to explore
environmental transformations at the hands of capitalism. For him the two are
but sides of the same coin. This means that the ‘geography’ in Harvey’s ‘histori-
cal– geographical materialism’ has two dimensions, even if he is best known
for his analysis of the former. In each case he has sought to link explanatory–
diagnostic questions to normative questions (like justice) and questions of social
agency (class struggle and its links to other struggles).
Fifth, Harvey’s favoured vehicle for making visible the temporal, spatial and
environmental gyrations of capitalism has always been theory. On the final page
of Explanation in Geography (in his pre-Marxist days), his clarion call was ‘by
our theories you shall know us’.36 He has made good on this injunction ever
since, even if he has rarely explained what ‘theory’ means and why it is so import-
ant to him. In the introduction to The Urban Experience – a collection of his
already-published essays on the capitalist city – he favoured a cartographic meta-
phor. ‘Theories’, he argued, ‘provide cognitive maps for finding our way in a
complex and changeable . . .[world]’.37 Likewise, in the Afterword to The
Limits he maintained that ‘the aim is . . . to create frameworks of understanding,
an elaborated conceptual apparatus, with which to grasp the most significant
relationships at work within the intricate dynamics of social transformation’.38
We can specify Harvey’s sense of theory further. As I have argued elsewhere,
theory performs three key functions for Harvey if one analyses his work
closely.39 First, and most obviously, it allows him to see the woods for the trees
or, if you prefer, the signals in the noise. Second, it allows him to make the
virtual visible, the unseen apparent. Like Marx, Harvey has long been determined
to explore ‘underlying realities’ rather than simply ‘surface appearances’. Finally,
Harvey values theory for its capacity to identify the commonalities that masquer-
ade in and as differences (social and geographical).
This brings me to a sixth defining feature of Harvey’s Marxism. No-one can
accuse Harvey of being theoreticist: that is, engaged in pure conceptualisation
divorced from real world evidence. Though not an empirical researcher (his two
Paris essays being the exceptions that prove the role), he has long had the
knack of leavening his theoretical treatises with present-day facts (usually from
secondary sources) and vignettes. This gives his books prior to The New Imperi-
alism a grounded feel (again, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference is
the exception). Those published since 2003 are even more grounded in evidence
and anecdote, precisely because they are intended to be theoretically informed
analyses of our current conjuncture.
In the seventh place, and relatedly, it is clear that Harvey places great emphasis
on the capacity of knowledge to change the world rather than simply represent it.
In Social Justice he insisted that ‘It is irrelevant to ask whether concepts [and]
104
categories . . . are “true” or “false”. We have to ask, rather, what it is that produces
them and what they serve to produce.’40 Since then he has been insistent that all
forms of knowledge – especially those that are hegemonic – enter fully into the
constitution of the world they describe, explain or evaluate. Indeed, if he believed
otherwise he would hardly have spent the last thirty or more years consciously pro-
mulgating Marxism, a body of knowledge that gained purchase in the Anglophone
academy precisely through the efforts of Harvey and his older and younger fellow
travellers (such as E. P. Thomson or Bob Jessop).
This connects, in the eighth place, to a conviction that runs like a red thread
through pretty much all of Harvey’s writings as a Marxist. In arguably the most
exubrant essay in Social Justice – ‘Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary
theory and the problem of ghetto formation’ – Harvey argued that Marx’s critique
of political economy is a revolutionary one. This assertion was closely linked to
his recognition that Marx’s was a crisis theory, and indeed the notion of crisis
later animated the pages of The Limits, with its apocalyptic conclusion about
the fine line between civilisation and barbarism. Over two decades on, Harvey
holds fast to the idea that capitalism’s internal contradictions always offer the
possibility of revolutionary change, given the right conditions. This much is
evident in the closing pages of both The New Imperialism and A Brief History
of Neoliberalism, where he explores different global scenarios for the future. It
may seem foolhardy to remain committed to revolutionary theory when the objec-
tive historical and geographical circumstances have, for so long, been inauspi-
cious. However, since the late 1990s, the global opposition to neoliberalism has
emboldened Harvey to believe that fundamental societal change may be more
than a pipedream (which is not to say it is likely). The challenge, as he has long
recognised, is to identity and fashion a transnational oppositional constituency
that can make the change progressive rather than repressive.
My ninth point about Harvey’s Marxism has been implicit in the previous eight.
Harvey has been an enormously consistent thinker over time. Unlike others of his
generation, he has not morphed into a post- or anti-Marxist. As already noted, he
has remained close to the spirit and letter of Marx’s later works. Occasional use of
the works of Henri Lefebvre, Bertell Ollman, the French regulation school and
Giovanni Arrighi are about as far as he has gone in drawing formally on other
readings of Marx. This does not, of course, mean that his work has remained
static. Instead, his characteristic manoeuvre has been to proceed from his author-
itative grasp of Marx’s largely ageographical account of expanded capital repro-
duction and from there ‘deepen and sharpen [Marxian] theory so that it can reach
into realms that have hitherto remained opaque’.41
Harvey’s conceptual innovations to Marx’s political economy have been made
organically: they are, as it were, the missing limbs of historical materialism, not
mere prosthetics. His characteristic vehicle for extending the reach of Marx’s
later work is dialectics. Harvey is, to his core, a dialectical thinker (this is my
penultimate point). Ontologically, he sees capitalism as a contradictory system
that entrains others’ domains of life (environment, family, community) in its
antagonistic logics.42 Epistemologically, he has been insistent (since The Limits,
if not before) that Marxian analysis must ‘suffuse reflection itself with the
social kinesthetics of the world’.43 This means that Harvey’s work must be read
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Noel Castree
in a non-linear fashion. Only at the end of his books and the essays does the full
meaning of the beginning and middle of the analysis fully make sense.44
The final hallmark of Harvey’s Marxism is that it is notably academic. Since
1945, there has scarcely been an Anglophone Marxist of note who has not
worked in a university. Harvey has used the academic freedom afforded him by
a professorship to construct a significant body of work, but it is a distinctively
high-level corpus, not intended for the general reader nor for your typical activist.
Harvey is what is sometimes disparagingly known as a ‘tenured radical’. During
his career his largest audience has been (and almost certainly remains) other aca-
demics and university students. I will consider the consequences of towards the
end of the fourth section as part of a wider evaluation of Harvey’s contribution.
David Harvey’s achievements: an inventory

It is not difficult to enumerate David Harvey’s intellectual achievements. A super-
ficial index of these is the plethora of now common terms of intellectual discourse
that Harvey has bequeathed us: for instance, ‘the spatial fix’, ‘the production of
space’, ‘the urban process’, ‘time– space compression’ and, most recently,
‘accumulation by dispossession’. But let me be more precise. Social Justice and
his two mid-1980s books on the city effectively pioneered Marxist urban political
economy for an English-speaking readership. The Limits to Capital remains unsur-
passed as a demonstration of why the creative destruction of built environments in
general (‘space’) is a necessary rather than incidental feature of capitalism. Con-
sciousness and the Urban Experience (preceding Mike Davis’s Planet of the Slums
by 20 years45) showed well why urbanisation profoundly modifies the terms and
conditions of class struggle. The Condition remains the definitive political econ-
omic critique of postmodernism, and a novel take on base-superstructure relations
to boot. More generally, Harvey’s pre-1990s writings emphasised the idea of a
‘local– global dialectic’, at the levels of both structure and agency, long before
this term became a fashionable addendum to the discourse of ‘globalisation’.
This idea then received a thorough treatment in the pages of Justice, Nature
and the Geography of Difference, where the notion of a right to geographical
(not just social) difference is advocated by a Marxist for the first time. This
book, ramshackle though it is, also remains the most ambitious intellectual state-
ment by a Marxist of any stripe for many years. In some ways it was a bravely
unfashionable book because it was avowedly ‘meta-theoretical’ – almost ‘a
book about everything’. As such, it is hard to ignore, even in opposition.
Finally, Spaces of Hope and The New Imperialism offer powerful tools for think-
ing through the geography of class struggle today, when new social movements
appear to have eclipsed the labour movement as (potentially at least) world histori-
cal actors. The ideas of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and ‘territorial’ versus
‘molecular’ forms of power are very likely to shape leftist debates on globalisation
and resistance in the immediate future.
This inventory hardly does Harvey’s achievements justice. Nor does it convey
effectively the organic unity of his work – a unity that, in his view, reflects the
totalising behaviour of capitalism not any cognitive over-reach on his part.
Additionally, I have missed some things out because of the relatively brief
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treatment they are given by Harvey when compared to other themes – for instance,
his explication of capitalism– nature relationships, his remarks on geographical
scale and his writing (in Spaces of Hope) on utopias. By way of a summary, I
would argue that Harvey’s greatest intellectual achievements as a Marxist and a
geographer are ultimately three-fold. First, he has shown how and why questions
of geography – fixed capital, territorial divisions of production and consumption,
urban agglomeration and so on – are theoretical questions, not simply the preserve
of empirical gazeteers. This is the same as saying that geographical phenomena
have a constitutive role to play in the fundamental processes that give rise to
them in the first place. Here, then, there is no distinction between ‘process’
(capital accumulation) and ‘outcome’ (spatial form) because the latter makes
the former flesh and, once it exists, may affect the subsequent operations of the
process in question. The tangible form that processes assume or through which
they are realised are thus, for Harvey, elements of a unified reality. This is a
truly profound insight because, as Harvey has repeatedly observed, ‘the insertion
of concepts of space . . . place, locale, and milieu into any of the supposedly
powerful but spaceless social . . . theoretic formulations [currently existing] has
the awkward habit of paralysing the theory’s central propositions’.46 Harvey has
shown how the paralysis can be avoided, in the process rescuing the discipline
of geography from the stereotype that it is about the empirical mapping of aspatial
economic, social or political processes.47
Second, and related, he has shown that space is not (to cite Foucault’s famous
observation) ‘the [domain of] the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the
immobile’.48 His work demonstrates clearly why space is a process, not a petrified
thing, while avoiding what human geographers call ‘spatial fetishism’ (treating
space as a thing-in-itself with intrinsic powers). This is very much in keeping
with his relational worldview: ‘parts’ makes little sense in abstraction from deter-
minate ‘wholes’. Harvey’s work in not unique in this regard – other key contribu-
tors include Henri Lefebvre and (outside the Marxist camp) Edward Soja, but
where Lefebvre and Soja often wax philosophical, Harvey’s writings generally
have a more grounded feel and a more tangible sense of what the ‘space’ in ques-
tion is. This important contribution should be seen in the context of a so-called
‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and social sciences this last decade or so. As
geographers Neil Smith and Cindi Katz argued long ago, far too often non-
geographers have deployed terms like ‘space’, ‘territory’, ‘landscape’ and
‘locality’ in highly metaphorical ways that leave the concrete referent supposedly
signified rather opaque.49 By contrast, Harvey’s work contains a much sharper
sense of what space is and why it matters.
Finally, whether at the level of human agency or capital reproduction, Harvey
has provided a language for getting beyond the local– global, specific – general,
particular– universal dichotomies. Going back to his doctoral thesis on the Kent
hop industry, Harvey has long been fascinated with geographical difference:
with the rich specificities of people and place. However, as he shows in all of
his work as a Marxist, we can make some general observations about these other-
wise unique topographies. More specifically, Harvey argues that there are some
‘signature geographies’ – or characteristic patterns – associated with capitalism
past, present and (so long as it exists) future. These include the growth and
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decline of city-regions housed within nation states and the construction of

elaborate transportation networks as a means to ‘annihilate space by time’.
These signature geographies unite both ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ because they
are simultaneously the medium and outcome of situated class actors, states and
firms. They are very much geographies of fixity and motion: the material arteries
through which capital flows in its fixed and variable incarnations, making and
breaking places and people.
Other commentators would doubtless identify different achievements to those
I have just listed. This is partly because Harvey’s work touches on so many
topics that different authors have, unsurprisingly, taken different things from it.
Many of these authors are (to a greater or lesser extent) admirers, others steadfast
detractors and dissenters. I will deal with Harvey’s critics in the next section,
before moving on to assess his impact in those arenas where his work has
sought to register centrally.
David Harvey’s work: debates and criticisms

Harvey’s work has attracted a good deal of censure over the years, mostly from non-
political economists. I suspect this is because Harvey has only become a ‘name’
outside academic geography during a period when political economy has been
challenged as the academic left’s central preoccupation. Questions of ‘culture’,
‘identity’ and ‘difference’ have been de rigeur at precisely the moment when
Harvey has broadcast his message about the connective imperative between politi-
cal economy and geography beyond his home discipline. His critics, in the main, are
not other Marxists nor even political economists more generally.
Harvey’s early detractors were so-called ‘humanistic geographers’ strongly influ-
enced by phenomenology, existentialism and more grounded approaches to
human agency like symbolic interactionism. These late-1970s critics accused
Harvey of being a structuralist who was obsessed with the ‘logics of accumulation’
and relatively unconcerned with those things that make us thinking, feeling and
acting human beings. There was nothing original about this criticism: Anglophone
critics of structural Marxism in sociology, history and anthropology were saying the
same things at about the same time. What was novel, however, was the insistence
that to understand the ‘human’ in human geography required a careful appreciation
of place, locality and region. For humanistic geographers, the latter were constitu-
tive of our subjectivity and agency not mere stages upon which the action
unfolded.50 Harvey’s work up to The Limits to Capital, by his own admission, pro-
vided few if any tools with which to understand questions of human experience,
affect and agency ‘on the ground’. The Urbanisation of Consciousness altered
this state of affairs, as did several of the essays in Spaces of Hope, but the question
remains of whether these two books do enough to address the earlier criticisms that
were levelled. My own view is that they do not. Whatever their other virtues, both
texts provide few tools for making sense of how people make geography, albeit
never under conditions of their own choosing. Curiously, Harvey chose to ignore
the fertile debates about Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory during the 1980s,
as well as those relating to Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the ‘logic of practice’.
Equally curiously, and closer to home, Harvey also studiously avoided engaging
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geographers’ often fine work on the structure–agency problematic where the rich
textures of place-based existence were connected with space-making and space-
spanning structural forces.51 Ultimately, Harvey’s work remains conceptually and
empirically thin when it comes to comprehending the manifold of objective–
subjective determinations. He remains far more comfortable writing about abstract
forces than their concrete negotiation by a diversity of place-based human actors.
A second and third set of criticisms accompanied the post-prefixed ‘turns’ of the
early 1990s in the Western social sciences and humanities. These criticisms relate
to Harvey’s presumption that the world is ordered, albeit complex, and a con-
nected epistemic certainty and immodesty on Harvey’s part. Both charges were
levelled forcefully after the appearance of The Condition of Postmodernity, a
book that diagnosed a new preoccupation with diversity, difference, disorder
and fragmentation as the ideological outworking of a crisis of capital accumu-
lation. Although Harvey did not wholly dismiss the phenomena he assembled
under the umbrella term ‘postmodernism’, he ultimately diagnosed their appear-
ance as an illness or, to be more precise, a counter-revolutionary medicine
designed to address the maladies of Western capital. Left-wing advocates of
certain kinds of postmodern thought and practice were quick to reprimand
Harvey. In particular, the feminist cultural critics Rosalyn Deutsche and
Meegan Morris suggested that Harvey was guilty of a specifically masculine
desire to offer the ‘total analysis’ of any situation and a blindness to politically pro-
gressive forms of difference irreducible to class identities and politics.52 For both
critics, Harvey repeated precisely those ‘meta-theoretical’ sins that for too long
had allowed Marxism to squeeze out other forms of left-wing thought and politics
in the Western academy. In an apologia published in the journal Antipode, Harvey
addressed these criticisms to some extent, and did so more fully in Justice, Nature
and the Geography of Difference. However, as Melissa Wright and Cindi Katz
have recently pointed out, Harvey remains very much a Marxist rather than,
say, a Marxist – feminist or a post-Marxist.53 In other words, his work is not terri-
bly good at grasping ‘over-determination’, except at the level of rhetoric.54
A final criticism of Harvey’s work relates to his intolerance of ‘reformism’ and
his unwillingness to see much that is positive in a capitalist world. One of the hall-
marks of Harvey’s Marxism is its consistent radicalism. As I noted earlier, unlike
other Marxists of his generation Harvey has neither bent nor wavered over time.
He was written virtually nothing of substance about progressive change within
the capitalist system and appears to regard all the ‘moments’ of capital circulation
(production, distribution, sale, consumption) and its various ‘circuits’ pejoratively.
This contrasts with those political economists (like Alec Nove) who have made
serious efforts to identify routes to social justice within a capitalist framework,
those cultural theorists who see consumption as more than an act of commodity
fetishism, and those analysts of ‘alternative economies’ who see progressive pos-
sibilities in non-market forms of exchange. It may seem unkind to criticise Harvey
for what he has not done rather than focusing on what he has, but these gaps in his
oeuvre have ultimately been problematic in my view, for they render capitalism
and its geographies simply as problems to be overcome. This is a black-and-
white view of things indeed, and probably a consequence of Harvey’s reluctance
to learn from post-classical Marxism and, for that matter, post-Marxism.
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As I suggested earlier, and as this list of objections indicates, one of the

peculiarities of Harvey’s work is that it has received little substantive criticism
from other Marxists or radical political economists at large. One reason is that
there are simply fewer of them about than twenty or thirty years ago. Another,
as I explain in the penultimate section of this essay, is that they have largely
ignored him (until very recently at least) because he is a ‘geographer’, or else
have chosen to cite some of his ideas and neologisms (like a ‘spatial fix’) uncriti-
cally as useful props in their arguments.
David Harvey’s impact: a geographer, a Marxist, a socialist

It is one thing to list Harvey’s intellectual achievements and to spell-out his critics’
objections, as I have done in the previous two sections, but it is quite another to
register the positive impact of Harvey’s work. We can consider this impact in
relation to the two communities Harvey has sought to influence, as well as the
wider world his writing is a critical commentary on. If one uses the crude
measure of citation impact, Harvey has had a colossal influence upon his
‘home’ discipline of geography (as well as urban studies more generally). He
created a space for Marxist geography through the 1970s on the basis of his
past reputation as a ‘spatial scientist’ and the sheer originality of his post-1969
writings. To be sure, he did not proceed alone – for instance, his first students
at Johns Hopkins, like Richard Walker and Neil Smith, were also pioneers who
have subsequently enjoyed very successful academic careers – but even by the
mid 1980s the scale of Harvey’s own achievements meant that other geographers
could take a ‘Marxist turn’ without fear of professional prejudice from their peers.
The result was a major programme of research involving numerous geographers
in Britain and the USA especially. Of course, twenty years on things are very
different. Academic human geography, like so many other disciplines in the
Anglophone world, is today decidedly post- or non-Marxist in complexion.
The various ‘posts’ that were ascendant through the 1990s and the ‘cultural
turn’ displaced political economic research in geography, Marxist or otherwise.
As Harvey laments in the introduction to Spaces of Hope, there is thus a good
deal of cognitive dissonance in much present day social science. At a time
when neoliberalism writ large makes Marxist theory more relevant than ever,
Marxism is decidedly unfashionable among the present generation of academics
and graduate students. Harvey thus finds himself in the strange position of so
many academic Marxists of repute: he is a ‘big name’ yet seems to have fewer
and fewer acolytes as time goes by.
If Harvey is a Marxist geographer he is also, equally, a geographical Marxist.
However, his influence upon the world of Marxist scholarship in general is difficult
to guage. As noted earlier, Harvey believes that in the past (if not necessarily
today) his impact was minimal. ‘The Limits and the urbanization books’, he
recalls of his move to Oxford, ‘. . . were dead and gone . . . The texts, although
respected . . . were hardly howling successes, and their general message seemed
to be falling on stony ground.’ However, even if Harvey is right, it is almost
certainly true that his influence within the Marxist camp has grown since The
Condition of Postmodernity broadened his message by virtue of that book’s
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topicality and originality. This said, there are definite limits to that influence.
Within academia, Anglophone Marxism has become increasingly diverse and
fragmented during the period when Harvey has remained steadfastly classical in
his commitments. For instance, through the 1980s analytical (or rational choice)
Marxism flourished, as did the ‘overdeterminist’ Marxism advocated by
Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff in Amherst, Massachussetts. At the same
time, the group of researchers influenced by Immanuel Wallerstein’s world
systems theory grew in size, as did the number of those who located their
Marxism in Roy Bhaskar and Rom Harre’s philosophy of critical realism. In
this light, Harvey has kept fairly select company. Within Anglophone Marxism
his work is most readily grouped with that of Robert Brenner, Giovanni
Arrighi, Moishe Postone, James O’Connor and Bob Jessop – even if not all of
these authors emphasise geographical issues as strongly as Harvey does. In
other words, notwithstanding Harvey’s expert advocacy of classical Marxism,
this particular member of the family of Marxisms is not today large, nor does it
attract a significant fan base from the current generation of left-wing scholars.
As with the community of geographers, it could well be the case (sadly for
him) that Harvey’s audience within the Marxist camp at large is growing
smaller over time. What is more, in its current small state, few in the classical
Marxist camp itself have directly engaged with Harvey’s work, even if several
cite it in their own. Bob Jessop is the signal exception.55 One suspects that disci-
plinary prejudice might account for this: after all, what could a ‘geographer’ have
to say about momentous questions of global political economy?
Third, and finally, let me say something about Harvey’s relation to socialism
and the wider world he seeks to comprehend and improve. Since the late 1980s
we have lived in what Nancy Fraser calls a ‘post-socialist’ period in which, as
she puts it, there are ‘genuine opacities concerning the historical possibilities
for progressive change’.56 This contrasts starkly with the period when Harvey
first turned to Marxism. As Perry Anderson noted in the first of his inimitable
surveys of post-classical Marxism, ‘the advent of a new period in the workers’
movement, bringing to an end the long class pause that divided theory from prac-
tice, is now . . . visible’.57 Anderson then confidently predicted that ‘the chance of
a revolutionary loop reopening between Marxist theory and mass practice . . . has
become steadily greater’. He further prophesied a return, within Marxist thought,
to the classical themes of economy and politics, and he argued this return would go
beyond the analysis of actually existing capitalism to consider concretely the
journey and destination implied by Marxist critique – that is, the road to a defen-
sible version of socialist democracy.
Anderson can hardly be criticised for reading the runes incorrectly. The second
half of Social Justice shows clearly, in both tone and substance, that Harvey was
similarly optimistic about the prospects for far-reaching societal change in the
heady years following the ‘events’ of 1968. However, the successive defeats of
labour movements and left-wing political parties worldwide from the mid
1970s, when a generalised economic crisis ensued, necessarily drove a wedge
between theory and practice. Through no fault of his own, Harvey’s determination
to create a ‘revolutionary theory’ that paid proper attention to geographical
matters meant that his work lacked a mass base – a fact that applies to the
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entire generation of Anglophone Marxists to which Harvey belongs. Even suppos-

ing that Harvey had not been an academic – even supposing, in other words, that
he had written in a more populist vein in direct contact with an oppositional con-
stituency – the capitalist system he was anatomising was showing a remarkable
capacity to ward off serious opposition.
As I have said, he is cautiously optimistic in Spaces of Hope and elsewhere that
this might now be changing. If indeed it is, then Marxist intellectuals will have
their work cut out to tackle what Anderson called ‘the poverty of strategy’: that
is, the lack of insightful and relevant ideas about how and to what ends to do
away with capitalist democracy.58 Harvey’s own work is symptomatic of this.
Longer on diagnosis than prognosis, most of its normative ruminations are
rather abstract and speculative. They offer, at best, rough-hewn tools for thinking
about the end of, and sequel to, capitalism. Even if this were not the case, Harvey’s
immersion in the university world makes him ill-equipped to be an agitator and
organiser in the way that the likes of Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky were.
Again, this is not to pick on Harvey. His generation of Anglophone Marxists
have lived at one remove from political practice by virtue of their professionalisa-
tion as scholars.59 This is the price they have paid: in order to understand the world
they have barely ever occupied positions where they can change it, unless we are
talking about localised, reformist sorts of change.60
Conclusion: a life out of joint

When an undergraduate at Cambridge, David Harvey, the working-class boy from
Gillingham, ‘fought [a] class war there with the only weapon [he] . . . had: intelli-
gence . . .’.61 More than fifty years on, he still wields that weapon with verve and
vigour. Decades of mental labour on his part have created an enviable body of
work that is, in my view, as good as the best Marxist scholarship published
since the time of Marx himself. This is not to say that Harvey’s work is beyond
reproach. He has many critics, and a far larger number of left-wing scholars
who regard him as they do all other Marxists – namely, as yesterday’s man.62
If I have limited my own criticisms of Harvey in this essay it is for the simple
reason that I am ultimately an admirer. His work has been foundational for my
own and this (happily) puts me at odds with many human geographers educated,
as I was, when the ‘crisis of Marxism’ was unfolding in the English-speaking
academy.
This said, we must recognise that there is an elegiac quality to Harvey’s life-
work. I alluded to this in the previous section. One of the great strengths of
Harvey’s political economy is its timeless quality. His fondness for theory
(abstraction) means that his writing is devoted to showing how space, time and
environment are all centrally implicated in the ‘laws of motion’ of capitalism yes-
terday, today and tomorrow. Notwithstanding his empirical work on Paris, and his
more recent books on twenty-first century geoeconomics and geopolitics, Harvey
is ultimately what Anderson (commenting on Goethe) terms a ‘serene Olym-
pian’.63 Stationed on-high (he once compared the theorist’s view to that gained
of New York atop the now destroyed World Trade Centre)64, his work will
remain relevant as long as capitalism exists. However, it is precisely Harvey’s
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distance from the world – his dedication to the big picture rather than the eddies
and tides of historical-geography – that defines the limits to his Marxism. In the
extended period during which he has fashioned his work, he has chosen not to
create the precision tools needed to explain why capitalism has proven so endur-
ing, why opposition to it is constantly foiled, and why Marxism has been confined
to universities as a body of oppositional thought. Stationed in the watch tower,
Harvey must leave it to others to revive Marxism as a strategic, ground-level
discourse capable of effecting revolutionary change.
Notes
I thank the editors of New Political Economy for asking me to assess Harvey’s contribution, and both them and
Derek Gregory for some very helpful observations on the first draft. As ever, I take full credit for all the remaining
errors, over-simplifications and omissions.
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, 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); 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. 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.
8. Harvey, ‘Memories and Desires’, p. 155.
9. Gregory, ‘Troubling Geographies’, p. 4.
10. David Harvey, Explanation in Geography (Arnold, 1969).
11. Harvey, ‘Reinventing Geography’, p. 4.
12. Ibid., p. 5.
13. Ibid., p. 5.
14. Harvey, Social Justice, p. 17.
16. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Blackwell, 1982).
17. This is Perry Anderson’s term: see Harvey, ‘Reinventing Geography’, p. 11.
19. Both books were published by Blackwell.
20. I first encountered Harvey and his Marxism as a second year undergraduate there. The influence has been
enduring.
21. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1989).
23. J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester University Press, 1979).
24. David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Blackwell, 1996).
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26. See, for instance, Terry Eagleton’s review ‘Spaced Out’, London Review of Books, 24 April 1997.
27. The reissues, with a new introduction by Harvey, occurred in 1999 and 2006. Spaces of Capital was
published in 2001 by Edinburgh University Press.
28. 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.
29. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
30. 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.
31. 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.
32. Gregory Elliott, Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History (University of Minnesota Press,
1998), p. 243. Elliott adapts the term from Anderson.
34. Harvey, ‘Retrospect’, p. 544.
35. 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).
36. Harvey, Explanation in Geography, p. 486.
37. David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Blackwell, 1989), p. 2.
38. Harvey, The Limits to Capital, pp. 450–1.
39. Noel Castree, ‘The Detour of Critical Theory’, in Castree & Gregory (eds), David Harvey, pp. 247–69.
40. Harvey, Social Justice, p. 298.
41. Harvey, The Urban Experience, p. 16.
42. This is most fully addressed by Harvey in chapter 2 of Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference.
43. Randy Martin, On Your Marx (University of Minnesota Press, 2002) p. xxi.
44. 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.
45. Verso, 2006.
46. Harvey, The Urbanisation of Capital, p. xi.
47. 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. See also Ed Soja, Postmodern Geographies (Verso, 1989), Derek Gregory, Geographi-
cal Imaginations (Blackwell, 1995), and Doreen Massey, For Space (Sage, 2006).
48. Michel Foucault, ‘Questions on Geography’, in Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews
and Other Writings (Pantheon, 1980), p. 70.
49. 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.
50. 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.
51. Two notable contributions here were Derek Gregory’s Regional Transformation and Industrial
Revolution (Macmillian, 1982) and Allan Pred’s Place, Practice and Structure (Cambirdge University
Press, 1987).
52. Rosalyn Deutsche, ‘Boy’s Town’, Society and Space, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1991), pp. 5 –30; Meghan Morris,
‘The Man in the Mirror’, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1992), pp. 253–79.
53. Melissa Wright, ‘Differences that Matter’, in Castree & Gregory (eds), David Harvey, pp. 80 –101; Cindi
Katz, ‘Messing with “the Project”’, in Castree & Gregory (eds), David Harvey, pp. 234–46.
54. 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 uncer-
tainty 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.
55. See, for instance, Bob Jessop, ‘Spatial Fixes, Temporal Fixes and Spatio-temporal Fixes’, in Castree &
Gregory (eds), David Harvey, pp. 142 –66.
56. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus (Routledge, 1997), p. 1.
114
57. 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. The other two surveys to which I refer are
Arguments Within English Marxism (Verso, 1980), and 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.
58. Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism, p. 28.
59. 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.
60. 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.
62. 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.
63. Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (Verso, 1992), p. 73.
64. See the ‘Introduction’ in Harvey, The Urban Experience.
115

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David Harvey: Marxism, Capitalism

David Harvey: a biogeography

human and physical geographers to interrogate spatial order ‘objectively’. As

The established doctrine was that the knowledge yielded by

What I realized after Social Justice . . . was that I didn’t understand

I couldn’t do [that] without addressing questions of fixed capital,

Through the 1970s Harvey undertook a close reading of Marx’s numerous

David Harvey’s Marxism: specificity and continuity

ignored or trivialised the geographical dimensions of existence. Prior to Justice,

David Harvey’s achievements: an inventory

decline of city-regions housed within nation states and the construction of

David Harvey’s work: debates and criticisms

As I suggested earlier, and as this list of objections indicates, one of the

David Harvey’s impact: a geographer, a Marxist, a socialist

entire generation of Anglophone Marxists to which Harvey belongs. Even suppos-

Conclusion: a life out of joint

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