David Harvey: Marxism, Capitalism and the Geographical Imagination

David Harvey is arguably the greatest living Marxist geographer. Distinctive characteristics to Harvey's Marxism include: 1. Harvey is a classical Marxist. 2. Harvey's strong preference for Marx's mature works defines him as a political economist rather than, say, a Marxist philosopher. 3. By his own lights Harvey is a holistic thinker rather than an economic determinist. 4. His work comprises profound exploration of geographical questions. 5. Harvey's favored vehicle for making visible the temporal spatial and environmental gyrations of capitalism has always been theory. 6. No one can accuse Harvey of being a theoreticist. Harvey's greatest intellectual achievements as a Marxist and a geographer are ultimately three-fold. First, he has shown how and why questions of geography are theoretical questions. Second, he has shown that space is not the domain of the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Third, Harvey has provided a language for getting beyond the local-global, specific-general, particular-universal dichotomies.