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?

Noel Castree is Professor of Geography at the University of Manchester andProfessor 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).