1st Edition
David Harvey A Critical Introduction to His Thought
David Harvey is among the most influential Marxist thinkers of the last half century. This book offers a lucid and authoritative introduction to his work, with a structure designed to reflect the enduring topics and insights that serve to unify Harvey’s writings over a long period of time.
Harvey’s writings have exerted huge influence within the social sciences and the humanities. In addition, his work now commands a global readership among Left political activists and those interested in current world affairs. Harvey’s central preoccupation is capitalism and the impacts of its growth-obsessed, contradictory dynamics. His name is synonymous with key analytical concepts like ‘the spatial fix’ and ‘accumulation by dispossession’. This critical introduction to his thought is an essential companion for both new and more experienced readers. The critique of capitalism is one of the most important undertakings of our time, and Harvey’s work offers powerful tools to help us see why a ‘softer’ capitalism is insufficient and a post-capitalist future is necessary.
This book is an important resource for scholars and graduate students in geography, politics and many other disciplines across the social sciences and humanities.
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. David Harvey: geographer, Marxist, and public intellectual
Chapter 3. Between philosophy and political practice: the power of critical theory
Chapter 4. Contradiction, perpetual change, and crisis: the DNA of capitalism
Chapter 5. The restless and uneven geographies of capitalism
Chapter 6. Capital unbound: the commodification of everything
Chapter 7. From structure to agency: the tangled human geographies of difference, inequality, solidarity, and protest
Chapter 8. What is to be done? Towards a more just geography for a feasible future
Chapter 9. Marxism within and beyond the academy: communicating critical thought in a ‘post-public’ era
Chapter 10. Conclusion: a Marxist for our time?
Biography
Noel Castree is Professor of Geography at the University of Manchester and Professor of Society and Environment at the University of Technology, Sydney. He has published numerous articles and chapters about Harvey’s Marxism and co-edited David Harvey: A Critical Reader (2006).
Greig Charnock is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Manchester, where he teaches the politics of globalisation and Marxist critical theory. He has published several articles that engage directly with Harvey’s writings about dialectics, crisis and urbanisation. He is the co-author of The Limits to Capital in Spain (2014), which draws upon Harvey’s work to explain the roots and fall-out of crisis in Southern Europe.
Brett Christophers is Professor of Human Geography, Uppsala University. He is the author or co-author of seven books including, most recently, Rentier Capitalism (2020), Economic Geography: A Critical Introduction (2018, with Trevor Barnes) and The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain (2018).
"An indispensable guide to the life and work of one of the greatest Marxist intellectuals of his generation. The authors provide a far-reaching overview of Harvey's intellectual project and the way it has developed over time, which allows the reader to build a much deeper relationship with Harvey's oeuvre than that they might gain by reading a few key texts from within a specific discipline - much in the same way that Harvey's familiarity with Marx has made his Introduction to Capital the most popular accompaniment to Marx's work."
Grace Blakeley, author of Stolen: How to save the world from financialisation
"I arrived at the Johns Hopkins University in 1997. By 1999 I was co-teaching a graduate seminar with David Harvey on Gramsci and Keynes. I went in there as a recovered Marxist. I came out having recovered my Marxism. That’s what Harvey will do to you."
Mark Blyth, Brown University, USA, author of Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea and co-author of Angrynomics
"No living intellectual has done more to reinvigorate Marxism than David Harvey. True to its spirit, he has insisted on the unbreakable link between scientific research and political practice. Here, for the first time, we have a survey of Harvey’s entire oeuvre – but not a mere summary or for-dummies: Castree, Charnock and Christophers engage critically with all the issues swirling through his work, down to the question of how to change the world. In wonderfully accessible prose, they catch a genius in motion, always attuned to the latest developments in capitalism. This will be a book to chew on, for Harvey aficionados and newcomers alike, and for everyone grappling with the unbearable contradictions of this world order."
Andreas Malm, Lund University, Sweden, author of Fossil Capital, The Progress of the Storm, and How to Blow Up a Pipeline
