Messing with 'the Project' (original) (raw)

David Harvey: A Critical Introduction to His Thought

Routledge , 2023

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.

Explaining the capitalist city: an idea of progress in Harvey’s Marxism

Theory and Society, 2018

What allows theories to evolve, to progress? A contentious notion, progress still haunts a number of contemporary theories. However, little research invites us to rethink progress in a comprehensive way. In this article, I contribute to this issue by considering the paradigmatic case of David Harvey's Marxism. A pathbreaking thinker in geography, sociology, and urban studies, Harvey claims his theory intrinsically surpasses its inherent contradictions. However, numerous authors suggest otherwise, as it fails to engage with essential urban processes such as those based on state, gendered, racial, or environmental dynamics. These aspects of social life challenge his dialectical ambition. I argue that Harvey's attachment to an orthodox Marxism ultimately limits his claim to theoretical progress. Reviewing Harvey's overall body of work, I focus on his metatheory regarding space and his examination of the Paris Commune. I argue that his ideas on the progress of theory follow from his dialectical assumptions, which in turn inhibit his portrayal of practical realities and a continuous dialogue with concrete cases. Keywords Geographical Marxism. Paris Commune. Political economy. Social theory. Theoretical progress. Urban studies David Harvey's (1973) neo-Marxist political economy of the city is one of the prominent general theories sociologists draw from. But, can a theory be general if it focuses primarily on the economic dimensions of cities? As many argue, the state, the environment, colonialism, race, or gender implicate equally critical processes that affect contemporary cities (Fraser 2014). Today, with neoliberalization at new heights, rising authoritarianism, populist movements, military tensions, and the unprecedented dangers of climate change, the weaknesses of a primarily economic theory are even more striking than ever before. Interestingly, Harvey has tried to make his work Theory and Society

David Harvey: Marxism, Capitalism and the Geographical Imagination

New Political Economy, 2007

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 (discounting 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 Anglophone world to other shores. 2 That many of these contributions have been agendasetting 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. 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.

Theorizing the “City” as a political concept: Reading David Harvey

Course Paper-Draft

This research paper shall focus on reading David Harvey’s work on the concept of the city, more precisely the books: Social Justice and the city and Rebel Cities and his articles: Right to the City and City as Body politic, to explore if his contributions on the city can be considered as theorizing the city as a political concept.