PublishedBlackwell S P, January 2006 |
ISBN9780631235101 |
FormatSoftcover, 338 pages |
Dimensions22.7cm × 16.5cm × 1.8cm |
David Harvey is among the most distinguished and influential Marxist theorists of his generation. For over three decades he has published works of major insight and originality that have challenged and altered dominant intellectual-political frameworks of understanding in urban studies, geography, sociology and beyond.
His writings cover an astonishing range of issues, from the nature of urbanism and the role of space in capitalist accumulation to environmental issues and post-modernism. A Marxist at a time when Marxism has fallen out of fashion in the Western academy and the wider world, he remains one of the most trenchant contemporary critics of global capitalism and its effects on bodies, ecologies, spaces and places. The work of David Harvey is now sufficiently well-known and influential to warrant a critical reader. First, the majority of his books have had a trans-disciplinary impact. In urban studies, for example, both Social Justice and the City and the two-volume Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanisation arguably had a paradigm-shifting effect.
Likewise, The Limits to Capital - now in its second edition - has been widely read by political economists, urban theorists and international relations scholars. More recently, The Condition of Postmodernity and Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference have had an international impact on cultural and environmental theorists respectively. Second, what makes Harvey's work distinctive is that it advocates a very particular, 'classical' kind of Marxism. This commitment to the ongoing relevance of a relatively 'unreconstructed' Marxism marks Harvey out as an almost unique figure on the wider intellectual landscape. Despite the hegemony of 'post-' or 'after-Marxist' modes of thought on the academic Left, Harvey has succeeded in showing the continued explanatory power of an undiluted version of historical materialism. Third, with the exception of Henri Lefebvre, Harvey is probably the most famous theorist of the role that space plays in the reproduction of socio-economic life. Now that space is 'on the agenda' for a whole array of critical theorists, Harvey's work - though hardly reducible to the question of space - stands-out as a major intervention on the question.
Finally, in human geography - Harvey's disciplinary 'home' - he is arguably the most influential and well-known figure of the last 3 decades. For these four reasons a David Harvey Critical Reader is timely and will be of major appeal to academics, post-graduates and upper-level undergraduates both in geography and across the social sciences. This critical reader brings together blue-chip contributors and, moreover, contributors from across the human sciences, emphasising the wider relevance of Harvey's.
