Millennium

Power is also not merely economic assets, but has many tangible and
intangible aspects to it. While these insights may be true, they are not
much of a revelation.
MICHAEL P. GERACE

Michael P. Gerace is Professor of Political Science and Economics at the

Umbra Institute, Perugia, Italy

David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 2001, 429 pp., £47.50 hbk., £16.99 pbk.).
David Harvey’s new book, Spaces of Capital, is a collection of essays, almost
all of which have been published before, marking his 30 years of writing
on the geography of capital accumulation in general and processes of
urbanisation in particular. Harvey’s project has centred, as he puts it
himself, on the consideration of ‘the role of geographical knowledges in
the perpetua tion of political-economic power stru ctures and in
transforming by opposition the political-economic order’ (p. x). The
advantage of this essay collection spanning three decades is that it gives
an interesting overview of the development of Harvey’s arguments, from
his earliest preoccupations with the role of geography in Marxism, to his
more recent writings on postmodern capitalism and the transformation of
urban development. The disadvantage of such a collection is that some of
its material now seems outdated to students of politics in general and
international political economy (IPE) in particular. For example, Harvey’s
material on the end of the Bretton Woods period and the restructuring of
the global economy in the 1980s in a chapter entitled ‘The Geopolitics of
Capitalism,’ should be overly familiar to students of IPE, who can draw
on a large literature concerning these developments which is both more
detailed and more recent than Harvey’s treatment of the perceived
beginnings of globalisation.
Outside the discipline of geography, Harvey is perhaps best known
for his 1989 book The Condition of Postmodernity. In that book, as in his
chapter here on ‘Capitalism: the Factory of Fragmentation,’ Harvey argues
that postmodernism , characterised by ‘separation, fragmentation,
ephemerality and difference,’ is ‘itself . . . a product of capital accumulation’
(p. 122). In other words, postmodernism’s emphasis on the ‘seemingly
endless and intricate webs of representations,’ according to Harvey,
‘divert[s] our gaze, our politics, our sensitivities away from the material
world of experience’ (p. 126). What really characterises the postmodern
condition, in Harvey’s view, is the ‘unprecedented autonomy of money

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capital from the circuits of material production’ (p. 15). Since Harvey’s
1989 formulation of this argument, it has also found its way into debates
within international politics. Unfortunately, Harvey’s argument assumes
the materiality of money, and thus fails to enquire into the ways in which
money and capital themselves are made possible through discourses of
value and valuation, embodied in, for example, (ac)counting practices and
stock market analysis. Rather than distracting from an understanding of
money, studying the politics of representation can provide insight into
the ways in which financial entitlements are constructed and entrenched
in late-modern capitalism , at the expense of possible alternative
understandings of value.
Indeed, Harvey’s condemnation of postmodernism is surprising
given his own insistence on the impossibility of a neutral and objective
geographical science. In an essay first published as far back as 1974, Harvey
argues against the objectivity claims of modern science and points out
that ‘any claim to be ideology free is of necessity an ideological claim’ (p.
39, emphasis in original). More recently, and in one of the most interesting
essays of the book (called ‘Cartographic Identities’), Harvey points to the
situatedness of geographical knowledges, arguing that different
institutions (for instance the World Bank, Greenpeace, the military, etc.)
generate different maps of the world, and that political struggle is fought
on the level of generating these different knowledges. This is an argument
sympathetic to postmodern theory, and within the study of politics it has
been m ade in a body of literature tha t may broa dly be called
poststructuralist International Relations (see for instance Jim George and
David Campbell, ‘Patterns of Dissent and the Celebration of Difference:
Critical Social Theory and International Relations’, International Studies
Quarterly 34, no. 3 (1990): 269-293).
The function of critical geography, according to Harvey, is to
‘understand how geographical knowledges are constituted and put to use
in political action’ in order to open up possibilities ‘for the creation of
alternative forms of geographical practice, tied to principles of mutual
respect and advantage rather than the politics of exploitation’ (p. 233). But
however appealing Harvey’s call for a reconstituted geography which
fosters universal ‘justice, fairness and reason’ (p. 212) may be, it fails to
consider what happens in the event justice, fairness and reason prove to
be geographically variable and even contradictory. Indeed, Harvey’s
appeals to universal understandings and universal politics throughout
the book sit uneasily alongside his call for the production of knowledge
with ‘geographical specificity’ (p. 211). It is perhaps not surprising, then,
that Harvey himself offers little empirical geographical knowledge in this
book (with the exception of a fascinating chapter on the urban regeneration

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of Baltimore, which reminds of Mike Davis’ study of Los Angeles, City of

Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, London: Vintage, 1990).
Still, in spite of the problematics of the politics of universal justice
and emancipation, one has to admire Harvey’s own involvement in local
resistances. Harvey recounts in the interview opening the book how when
working at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore in the 1970s and 1980s, ‘we bought
up an old library, and turned it into a community action centre, took part
in campaigns for rent control, and generally tried to spark radical initiatives’
(p. 16). Whether local action should always be understood as geared
towards global resistance can be debated. But what seems clear is that
Harvey’s focus on resistance seeks to offer ‘spaces of hope’ in contemporary
globalisation. While global capitalists attempt to bank on ‘values of
authenticity, locality, history, culture,’ Harvey concludes, ‘they open a space
for political thought and action within which alternatives can be devised
and pursued. That space . . . is one of the key spaces of hope for the
construction of an alternative kind of globalisation’ (p. 411).
MARIEKE DE GOEDE

Marieke de Goede is ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of

Politics at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Bj örn Hettne, András Inotai and Osvaldo S unkel (eds.), Comparing

Regionalisms: Implications for Global Development (Houndmills: Palgrave,
2001, £52.50 hbk.).
This book is the fifth and last in a series on ‘the new regionalism’. Whether
you have followed it faithfully through the first four volumes or are new
to the series, this latest and last collection of essays will disappoint the
reader in several different ways. Let me open with a few words about the
project. Co-funded by the World Institute for Development Economics
Research (WIDER) and the United Nations University (UNU), and co-
ordinated by Björn Hettne, a well-known and respected Swedish scholar
of international development, the new regionalism series brought together
a number of scholars from around the world to examine a very big idea
roughly outlined as: (i) economic globalisation is giving rise to political
regionalisation in something of a Polanyian double movement at the global
level; (ii) in the context of the post-Cold War world, this ‘new’ regionalism
is qualitatively different from the ‘old’ (read neo-functionalist) regionalism
of the past; (iii) can this new type of regionalism make a positive
contribution to world order, values of peace, economic development and
environmental sustainability? The first four volumes dealt with these
issues, forces and factors in great detail. In my estimation, those volumes
make a novel contribution to the literature on post-Cold War international

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