Harvey, David

Early Works

Before his arrival at Johns Hopkins University in 1973, Harvey embraced the utility of logical empiricism. The centerpiece of this research, Explanation in Geography (1969), emphasized quantitative methods, spatial science, and a posi-tivist philosophy. In this landmark study of the methodology and philosophy of geography, Harvey argued for the logic of a robust empiricism and rigorous testability to advance understanding of a spatialized world. Chapters on systems, models, deductive and inductive reasoning, the role of mathematics and geometry, and the philosophy of science codified a “science of geography,” which had recently ascended in the discipline but which lacked a unifying theoretic exposition. As Anglo-geography moved from a descriptive–regional to a [Page 342]positivist–scientific paradigm, it drew heavily on Harvey's Explanation in Geography.

In the early 1970s, Harvey abruptly broke from positivist science to begin a lifelong expedition into understanding the Western European and U.S. city from a Marxist perspective. Harvey now presented the city as a complex human-made space set in capitalist economic realities. His seminal contribution to this project, Social Justice and the City (1973) argued, first, that geography and urban studies were deeply political enterprises that could never produce value-free understandings. Harvey sought to smash the myth of value-free research to position Marxist analysis as one among many competing analytic perspectives with political designs and content. He proposed that explanations for and policy directives about urban issues and problems (e.g., poverty, deprivation, home-lessness) always contain a bundle of values that reflect existing power relations as well as the need for social change. The book argues, second, for a new focus in urban studies: on the explanatory power embedded in the societal structures of capitalist societies. Set against the power of such structures (e.g., the drive to accumulate, the necessity to reproduce labor power, the impulse to legitimate existing capitalist social relations), Harvey asserts that other kinds of explanation are superficial.

Harvey's subsequent work has laid out a distinctive Marxian frame that has become more nuanced and multitextured over time. The city, a whirlwind of complexity, is a place that both reflects and generates crisis, in his view. Its dynamic is one of a deep and pervasive struggle between competing and opposing classes whose turbulent relations must be managed and controlled. Crisis follows from antagonisms between capital and labor over the extraction and distribution of surplus value, labor-exploitive practices, and repressive political strategies rooted in the social relations of production. The never-ending concentration and centralization of capital and the tendency for the rate of profit to plummet thereby create periodic bouts of overconcentration and less profitable investment. The key crisis, to Harvey, is the tendency for investment to overaccumulate in economic circuits and thus to force a collision of classes from which new economic and political forces emerge. Cities are ultimately instruments for capital accumulation, engines of economic growth whose everyday rhythms depend on capital exploiting labor to create surplus.

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