Harvey, David (1935-)

David Harvey is perhaps the most influential contemporary human geographer in the world. Over several decades, he played a role in the quantitative revolution, but in the early 1970s, he was the seminal figure in the introduction of Marxism into the discipline. In a long series of highly influential books, he has steadfastly advocated on behalf of social justice and offered biting critiques of capitalism, neoliberalism, inequality, and oppression in all its forms.

Born in Gillingham, Kent, England, his initial interest in geography, he has said, came from his early desire to run away from home and see the world. He has certainly done that, both in his academic career and at internationally diverse public speaking engagements. His university training was at Cambridge University, where he received his PhD in 1961. It was at Cambridge that he became involved in new theoretical debates in the discipline concerning the scientific status of geography. Harvey's dissertation, while seemingly a traditional historical geography of the regionally unique hop cultivation in Kent in the 19th century, reflects this debate as it tries to come to theoretical terms with the causal processes of change leading to the different forms that that cultivation assumed.

After Cambridge, Harvey took a position as Lecturer at the University of Bristol, where he continued his pursuit of scientific geography. Anglo-American geography at the time was dominated by the belief that the object of study of geography was ultimately unique landscapes not conducive to generalization or causal covering laws. In this view, the study of geography was somewhere between the sciences and the humanities. Harvey's cohort of new faculty set out to overturn this conceptualization of the discipline by attempting to render it closer in focus and methodology to the more established sciences.

This quest led to Harvey's first major book, Explanation in Geography (1969), which broadly surveys the philosophy and methodology of science as it relates to what he considered to be the main objects of study of geography: time, space, and, most important, space-time, that is, the two dimensions sutured into an indivisible whole. The latter notion was particularly important to the overall argument because it rendered the specific object of study of geography—spatial variation—open to intersubjectively repeatable, and therefore objective, causal analysis. This book thus systematized Harvey's concern with the intersection of process and pattern or spatial form that was embedded in his earlier work on hops cultivation in Kent.

Harvey spent nearly a decade coming to terms with how space and place (pattern, form) could be considered in a more positive, truly scientific manner, and Explanation in Geography is indeed considered to be a central manifesto for positivism in geography. Interestingly, however, by the time the book was published, even Harvey himself had moved beyond its main message. This shift was during the late 1960s, and social justice movements literally in the streets rendered the [Page 1405]ultimately ivory tower quest for “scientific rigor” much less important than making a difference in the real world. This was brought home to Harvey dramatically when he moved to the racially and class-polarized city of Baltimore to take a position at Johns Hopkins University in 1969.

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