David Harvey (geographer)

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David Harvey (geographer)
Geography
20th-century philosophy
21st-century philosophy
Full name David Harvey
School/tradition Geography, social theory
Main interests Geography, Urban Development,

David Harvey (born 1935) is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). A leading social theorist of international standing, he graduated from University of Cambridge with a PhD in Geography in 1961. He is the world's most cited academic geographer (according to Andrew Bodman, see Transactions of the IBG, 1991,1992), and the author of many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. His work has contributed greatly to broad social and political debate, most recently he has been credited with helping to bring back social class and Marxist methods as serious methodological tools in the critique of global capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal form.

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[edit] Life

Harvey was born in 1935 in Gillingham, Kent, England. He attended Gillingham Grammar School for Boys and as an undergraduate and graduate student, St John's College, Cambridge. Harvey's early work, beginning with his PhD (on hop production in c.19th Kent), was historical in nature, emerging from a regional-historical tradition of inquiry widely used at Cambridge and in Britain at that time. Historical inquiry runs through his later works (for example on Paris).


Moving from Bristol University to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in the USA, he positioned himself centrally in the newly-emerging field of radical and Marxist geography. Injustice, racism, and exploitation were visible in Baltimore, and activism around these issues was tangible in early 1970s East Coast, perhaps more so than in Britain. The journal Antipode was formed at Clark University, and Harvey was one of the first contributors. The Boston Association of American Geographers meetings in 1971 were a landmark, with Harvey and others disrupting the traditional approach of their peers. In 1972, in a famous essay on ghetto formation, he argued for the creation of “revolutionary theory”, theory “validated through revolutionary practice”.

Social Justice and the City (1973) expressed Harvey's position that geography could not remain 'objective' in the face of urban poverty and associated ills. It has been cited widely (over 1,000 times, by 2005, in a discipline where 50 citations are rare), and it makes a significant contribution to Marxian theory by arguing that capitalism annihilates space to insure its own reproduction. Dialectical materialism has guided his subsequent work, notably the theoretically sophisticated Limits to Capital (1982). LTC furthers the radical geographical analysis of ce Paris Commune in Paris, Capital of Modernity, is undoubtedly his most elaborated historical-geographical work. The onset of US military action since 2001 has provoked a blistering critique - in The New Imperialism (2003) he argues that the war in Iraq allows US neo-conservatives to divert attention from the failures of capitalism 'at home'. His most recent work, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), provides and explores these critiques in detail.

Harvey's books have been widely translated, particularly into Korean, Spanish, Japanese and Italian as well some into Arabic, Turkish, Norwegian, Geographical Societies, The Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and the Vautrin Lud International Prize in Geography (France). In 2007 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.


Professor, Dept. of Anthropology, City University of New York (2001-present)

[edit] References

[edit] Major works

  • Explanation in Geography (1969)
  • Social Justice and the City (1973)
  • The Limits to Capital (1982)
  • The Urbanization of Capital (1985)
  • Consciousness and the Urban Experience (1985)
  • The Condition of Postmodernity (1989)
  • The Urban Experience (1989)
  • Teresa Hayter, David Harvey (eds.) (1994) The Factory and the City: The Story of the Cowley Automobile Workers in Oxford. Thomson Learning
  • Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996)
  • Megacities Lecture 4: Possible Urban Worlds, Twynstra Gudde Management Consultants, Amersfoort, The Netherlands, (2000)
  • Spaces of Hope (2000)
  • Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (2001)
  • The New Imperialism (2003)
  • Paris, Capital of Modernity (2003)
  • A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005)
  • Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (2006)
  • The Limits to Capital New Edition (2006)
  • The Communist Manifesto- New Introduction Pluto Press (2008)
  • An Introduction to Capital (forthcoming 2009)

[edit] Articles, Lectures, Interviews

[edit] Links

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