David Harvey's Geography (RLE Social & Cultural Geography)

John Paterson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317906520
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The emphasis of this book is to explore two major philosophical influences in contemporary human geography, namely logical positivism and Marxism, and to explore the relationships between philosophy, methodology and geographical research. Rather than being a biography of David Harvey, the book contributes to the understanding of one of the most innovative and iconoclastic scholars in contemporary Anglo-American human geography.

1	INTRODUCTION

David Harvey’s Geography, 1961-1981

‘I am at a disadvantage in discussing, with Stephen Gale, Explanation in Geography, because I have never read it’ (Harvey, 1972f, p. 323).

‘The important question for me is where I am going, not where I have been’ (Harvey, personal communication, October, 1981).

Given the present state of philosophical and methodological pluralism in geography (Bird, 1979) it is important that human geography becomes a more self-critical and reflective discipline. Thus, while Harvey presses forward in his scholarship, it is necessary to begin an assessment of the past and present work of this influential scholar. This book is an analysis of the thought of David Harvey as it is expressed in his geographical publications over the period from 1961 to 1981. The philosophical and methodological aspects of Harvey’s work will be emphasised, one of the main concerns of the study being the relationship between philosophy, methodology and geography as apparent in Harvey’s writings.

Harvey was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in geography at the University of Cambridge, England, in 1957.¹ In the following years, he wrote a doctoral thesis entitled ‘Aspects of Agricultural and Rural Change in Kent, 1800-1900’, which was completed in October 1960, and ‘approved by the Board of Research Studies’ in January 1961 (Harvey, 1961). Harvey then took up an assistant lectureship in geography at the University of Bristol, later a full lectureship, and remained at Bristol until 1969 (Peel, 1975, p. 415, fig. 20.1), when he moved to Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States of America. There he took up a professorship in the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering. At the time of writing, Harvey is still at Johns Hopkins University.

In 1963, Harvey published an article based on his doctoral research, and then, between 1966 and 1969, published eight articles, all dealing with methodological and theoretical questions in geography. In 1969, Harvey’s first book was published. Entitled Explanation in Geography, it was partly based upon about five years of teaching an undergraduate course on methodology in geography at the University of Bristol (Harvey, 1969a, pp. v-vi). Johnston, in his book on recent Anglo-American human geography, described Explanation in Geography as ‘the first major work on the philosophy of the “new geography” …, a book which received wide acclaim’ (Johnston, 1979, p. 62). A physical geographer, in a contemporary review in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, hailed Harvey’s book as ‘the most authoritative and helpful statement of “The Nature of Geography” since the publication of Richard Hartshorne’s classic of that title in 1939’ (Kennedy, 1970, p. 401). Later, in an article presenting a Marxist interpretation of the 1960s and 1970s in geography, Peet (1977b, p. 249) called it ‘the bible of new (theoretical) geography’.

After moving to Baltimore, Harvey became involved in research on that city and published four articles on conceptual problems in geography, centring on the relationship between social processes and spatial form, and exploring how notions like ‘social justice’ might be incorporated into geographical research. He gathered together these articles, added two previously unpublished papers, and in 1973 had them published under the title of Social Justice and the City. Here, Harvey presented the ‘convergence’ of his thought with that of Karl Marx (Harvey, 1973a, pp. 287, 301). Once again, contemporary reviewers saw the book as of central importance to the discipline. Hall, a British urban geographer, stated that ‘this without doubt is one of the most significant contributions to geographical thought to emerge in the last two decades’ (Hall, 1973, p. 409). Cox, who had moved to the United States after studying at the University of Cambridge, and who had written an undergraduate text on human geography (Cox, 1972), called Social Justice and the City ‘a provocative and multifaceted book likely to have an enduring impact upon human geography in general and urban studies in particular’ (Cox, 1976, p. 333). A French Marxist urban sociologist has referred to Harvey’s book and his subsequent work as ‘exemplary Marxist work …, still an exception [in the United States]’ (Castells, 1977, p. 470).

Over 1973 and 1974, Harvey published three papers on Marx’s method and then concentrated upon utilising that method in the study of urbanisation in advanced capitalist countries. He has published eleven articles on this subject and, since 1975, has made reference to a forthcoming book on ‘urbanization under capitalism’ (Harvey, 1975d, p. 9, note), a book ‘that seems to take an interminable time to finish’ (Harvey, 1976b, p. 80) but ‘which may see the light of day shortly’ (Harvey, 1978b, p. 130). In fact, Harvey’s third book, The Limits to Capital, was eventually published in 1982. The most recent of Harvey’s published articles, ‘Monument and Myth’, was based on research in Paris in 1976-1977 and dealt with the symbolical and mythical meanings of the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur (Harvey, 1979). He has also written a number of short newspaper and magazine articles. A comprehensive bibliography of Harvey’s writings is contained in an appendix to this book.

David Harvey has been a prominent international contributor to the philosophical and methodological debates within Anglo-American geography over the last two decades. In the summer of 1964, for instance, Harvey attended a conference on spatial statistics at Northwestern University, Illinois, while he spent 1965-1966 at the Pennsylvania State University and made a short visit to the Australian National University, Canberra, in 1968 (Harvey, 1969a, p. ix; Brookfield, 1973, p. 8, note). Harvey has presented papers regularly at the annual conferences of the Institute for British Geographers, for instance in 1973, 1974 and 1977, as well as at those of the Association of American Geographers, for instance in 1980 and 1981.

Harvey’s methodological work in the 1960s, especially his Explanation in Geography, has been characterised as ‘logical positivist’, although to varying degrees. Guelke (1978, p. 35) saw Explanation in Geography as ‘a thorough logical positivist analysis of geographic explanation’; Mercer and Powell (1972, p. 38) commented that Harvey demonstrated a ‘preference’ for logical positivism; and both Chisholm (1975, pp. 124-5) and Gregory (1978, pp. 33-4) noted Harvey’s endorsement of Hempel’s explanatory model, which is central to the logical positivist view of science.

In Chapter 1 of Explanation in Geography, Harvey discussed ‘Philosophy and methodology in geography’ and made the following observations:

There are some philosophers, logical positivists of the extreme variety, who have held that all knowledge and understanding can be developed independently of philosophical presuppositions. Such a view is not now generally held, for logical positivism in such an extreme form has turned out to be barren. Methodology without philosophy is thus meaningless. Our ultimate view of geography must therefore take both methodology and philosophy into account. Such an ambitious synthesis will not be attempted here, for before we can hope to achieve it, we need a much better understanding of methodological problems alone. But although the emphasis in this book is primarily upon methodological problems, we will have cause on several occasions to refer to important philosophical issues concerning the nature of geography (Harvey, 1969a, p. 8).

It is not clear from Harvey’s remarks as to the philosophical position from which he was writing. Was he rejecting only the extreme form of logical positivism or logical positivism itself? What was Harvey’s philosophical stance in Explanation in Geography, or did he succeed in excluding philosophy from the main considerations of the book? These questions will be addressed particularly in Chapter 2 of this study.

After writing Explanation in Geography, Harvey ‘began to explore certain philosophical issues which had deliberately been neglected in that book’ (Harvey, 1973a, p. 9). He examined how ideas in social and moral philosophy might be related to such topics as urbanism and urban planning. The six papers brought together in Social Justice and the City represent the evolution of Harvey’s thought as he conducted this exploration. Along the way, he became increasingly aware of the inadequacies of the ‘positivist basis of the 1960s’ in geography and he began to consider seriously Marxist theory ‘in which certain aspects of positivism, materialism and phenomenology overlap’ (Harvey, 1973a, p. 129). Harvey pointed out that Marx had developed a phenomenological basis in his early writings and that both Marxism and positivism had a ‘materialist base’ and ‘analytic method’.

The essential difference, of course, is that positivism simply seeks to understand the world whereas Marxism seeks to change it. Put another way, positivism draws its categories and concepts from an existing reality with all its defects while Marxist categories and concepts are formulated through the application of the dialectical method to history as it unfolds, here and now, through events and actions. The positivist method involves, for example, the application of traditional bi-valued Aristotelian logic to test hypotheses … Hypotheses are either true or false and once categorized remain ever so. The dialectic, on the other hand, proposes a process of understanding which allows the interpenetration of opposites, incorporates contradictions and paradoxes, and points to the processes of resolution … Truth lies in the dialectical process rather than in the statements derived from the process. These statements can be designated as “true” only at a given point in time and, in any case, can be contradicted by other “true” statements. The dialectical method allows us to invert analyses if necessary, to regard solutions as problems, to regard questions as solutions (Harvey, 1973a, pp. 129-30).

A question posed by Harvey’s statements is: in rejecting the ‘positivist method’ based on ‘traditional bi-valued Aristotelian logic’, was Harvey rejecting Hempel’s model of scientific explanation, which was central to his earlier writings (Harvey, 1967c, 1969a, pp. 36-41)? If Harvey had rejected Hempel’s model, what then was the common ‘analytic method’ and ‘materialist base’ of positivism and Marxism to which he referred? What exactly was Harvey’s view of Marx’s method? And in his application of this method in his study of urbanisation, did Harvey modify it in any way? Duncan and Ley (1982) have argued that some of Harvey’s Marxist writings take a ‘structuralist’ stance and are characterised by a holistic mode of explanation, in which reified entities such as ‘capital’ are treated as the formal cause whereas people are effectively regarded as mere carriers of a structural logic. On the other hand, other parts of Harvey’s Marxist writings were seen by Duncan and Ley to be empirical studies that made few essential links with the theoretical framework of structural Marxism. Harvey was thus presented by them as an example of a fundamental dichotomy in Marxist thought between scientific Marxism, a structuralist tradition focusing on the theoretical treatment of political economy, and critical Marxism, a humanist tradition focusing on concrete historiographic study. Harvey (1973a, p. 288) regarded Marx’s view of society as based upon ‘operational structuralism’ but he vigorously denied that it was deterministic and emphasised that ‘Marx was a humanist’ (Harvey, 1973b, pp. 32, 17). This constellation of issues will be addressed particularly in Chapters 3 and 4 of this study.

The analysis of Harvey’s writings in Chapters 2, 3 and 4 attempts to clarify Harvey’s philosophical positions, in relation to both his so-called ‘logical positivist’ works (Chapter 2) and his so-called ‘Marxist’ works (Chapters 3 and 4). When focusing upon the transition from one to the other (Chapter 3), an attempt will be made to isolate Harvey’s dissatisfactions with his ‘logical positivist’ works, and to outline what he saw to be the strengths of a ‘Marxist’ approach.

This study centres on the philosophical and methodological aspects of Harvey’s work during the last two decades. It thus falls within the fields of the philosophy and history of geography. Following a review of recent writings in the philosophy of geography, the literature in the history of science and of geography relevant to a study of philosophical and methodological change is reviewed. In the final section of this introductory chapter, consideration is given to the principles of historical philosophical study in geography.

Philosophy, Method and Geographical Research

The following account of philosophical discussion in Anglo-American, mainly human, geography since the 1930s is only introductory and will be expanded upon at the beginnings of Chapters 2, 3 and 4.

Between about 1930 and 1960, philosophical discussion within geography largely involved consideration of the nature, scope and objects of geographical study and the relationship between geography and other disciplines (for example, Roxby, 1930; Darby, 1953; Philbrick, 1957). Hartshorne’s (1939) The Nature of Geography: A Critical Survey of Current Thought in the Light of the Past both gave expression to and further shaped the intellectual milieu of Anglo-American geography during this period. Emphasising ‘areal differentiation’ and the regional character of geographical study, Hartshorne’s work was seen as advocating an ‘idiographic’ method that eschewed the development of laws in geography (Gregory, 1978, pp. 30-1). During the 1950s, a ‘spatial science’ approach was developed, which came into prominence in the 1960s. Debate continued on the nature, scope and objects of geography in the light of the then new approach (for example, Ackerman, 1963; Berry, 1964a; Brookfield, 1964; Ackerman et al., 1965), but there was a noticeable tendency for ‘geographical philosophizing’, as Harrison and Livingstone have put it, to become restricted to ‘the internal structure of explanation’ (Harrison and Livingstone, 1980, p. 25). As already noted, it has been argued that Harvey’s (1969a) Explanation in Geography stood in relation to the philosophical and methodological discussion of spatial science geography as Hartshorne’s (1939) work stood in relation to that of the earlier regional geography (Kennedy, 1970, p. 401; Johnston, 1979, p. 62).

The first published criticism of spatial science geography came from those geographers who were dissatisfied with what they considered to be its often implicit neo-classical economic assumptions. Throughout the late 1960s, such geographers advocated a behavioural approach, emphasising aggregative spatial behaviour and decision-making. The early 1970s witnessed a growing concern within geography for ‘relevant’ research and teaching. For instance, between 1971 and 1975, there was a debate published in Area, a journal of the Institute of British Geographers, over the contribution of the discipline to the solution of urgent social problems. Debates over the ‘internal structure of explanation’, the behavioural approach and the question of relevance in geography were proceeding at the same time as a radical political and philosophical perspective was being developed in North American human geography (Smith, 1971). Indicative of this trend was the founding of Antipode, subtitled ‘A Radical Journal of Geography’, by a group of staff and students at Clark University, Massachusetts, in 1969. Peet later saw Harvey’s (1972d) article, ‘Revolutionary and Counter-revolutionary Theory in Geography and the Problem of Ghetto Formation’, as finally leading ‘the breakthrough from liberal to Marxist geography’ (Peet, 1977b, pp. 249-50).

In 1970, criticism of spatial science geography was introduced from another philosophical quarter, that of phenomenology (Relph, 1970). Philosophical debate in geography thus began to take account of different philosophical systems instead of dealing mainly with methodology. The range of perspectives considered in the geographic literature since the early 1970s has grown to include a broader ‘humanistic’ approach (Tuan, 1976; Ley and Samuels, 1978), which incorporates phenomenology, existentialism (Samuels, 1978) and a neo-Kantian perspective (Berdoulay, 1976; Entrikin, 1977). In 1974, Guelke proposed the alternative of idealism, and Olsson (1974, 1975, 1980), in exploring the ‘utopian optimism’ of Marx and the ‘realistic pessimism’ of Wittgenstein, has developed what might well be called a ‘dialectical idealism’ (see also Marchand, 1974, 1978). Thus, in the 1970s, Anglo-American human geography moved into a period of philosophical and methodological pluralism which remains the intellectual climate of the discipline today.

The last decade of philosophical debate in geography might be characterised as, to use a phrase from another context, ‘a pursuit of truth as distinct from the pursuit of technically reliable knowledge’ (Kolakowski, 1975, p. 7). Whereas the 1960s were largely concerned with one particular methodology, the debates of the 1970s have incorporated other methodologies as well as a wide range of different philosophical issues, centring on the meaning of science, its relation to political, economic and social life, the role...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Logical Empiricist Geography: Scientific Explanation and Theory
• 3. Embracing Marxist Method: From Social Justice to Operational Structuralism
• 4. Applying Marxist Method: Urbanism under Capitalism and the Marxist Analytical Framework
• 5. Conclusion
• Appendix: David Harvey’s Writings, 1961-1981
• Select Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index