Beautiful impossibility: a fifty-year retrospective on Social Justice and the City and David Harvey’s – and geography’s – journey into Marxism

ABSTRACT

This brief paper introduces a double symposium: five authors reflecting on Social Justice and the City after fifty years, and two critically examining the recently published David Harvey: A Critical Introduction to his Thought (together with a response from the authors of that book). It offers a synopsis of the two symposia and focuses on one or two key points arising from each contribution in order to put them into conversation with each other. Along the way it indicates a few of the key reasons why, collectively, the authors in these symposia find Social Justice to be so worthy of continued close scrutiny, even after all these years, and why David Harvey is destined to become a ‘must read’. It reflects on how academic geography’s journey towards the ‘beautiful impossibility’ of a thorough, compelling, geographical analyses of the capitalist totality – the beautiful impossibility David Harvey has been aiming at for these fifty years – is just getting going.

KEYWORDS:

• David Harvey
• Marxism
• social justice
• dialectics
• historical materialism
• totality

A double symposium

2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of David Harvey’s landmark, and geography’s discipline-shifting book, Social Justice and the City. Coinciding with the anniversary, Routledge has published the first comprehensive, critical, book-length consideration of the totality (or something close to it) of David Harvey’s life’s-work: addressing the thorough spatial retheorization of Marxism and its reconceptualization as a lever for prying open and subjecting to forensic examination the totality of the later twentieth- and early twenty-first-century capitalist present. Noel Castree, Greig Charnock and Brett Christophers’s David Harvey: A Critical Introduction to his Thought (2023) is an impressive account of Harvey’s complex and evolving intellectual journey, championing its value to both the discipline of geography and the broader world of Marxist and historical-materialist intellectual endeavor.¹ Anyone possessing even a passing familiarity with Harvey’s work, and certainly anyone who reads David Harvey, will have to admit that these past fifty years have been a remarkable journey, for Harvey, for Marxism, and for the discipline of geography.

To mark this anniversary, the Scottish Geographical Journal commissioned two sets of essays. The first is a symposium reflecting on the enduring value of Social Justice and the City. The second is a set of two extended book review essays, plus a response by the authors, that takes on the dual task of critically evaluating, on the one hand, the value of David Harvey (the book) for both new and seasoned scholars in and beyond geography and, on the other, the role that David Harvey (the scholar) has played in shaping thinking in geography and in the wider world of Marxist social and political-economic theorizing (Figure 1). Together, the essays in these two symposia offer rich and multifaceted perspectives on Harvey’s and geography’s remarkable journey into Marxism, asking what it has meant for the broader radical/critical project of dissecting not just the logics of capital, but the totality of capitalism, and the ways in which this project is still incomplete, missing key components, and open to ongoing intellectual struggle, the kind of wrenching intellectual struggle and transformation that Social Justice and the City stood – and still stands – for.

Figure 1. Portrait of David Harvey in ink and watercolor by artist Tone Bjordam, reproduced by permission of the artist.

Source: generously offered by Noel Castree, confirmed by the artist. The same image appears in David Harvey: A Critical Introduction to his Thought (Castree et al., 2023, p.vii).

Social Justice and the City: first symposium

Social Justice and the City (SJTC) is indeed a landmark book (see Figure 2). Famous for charting David Harvey’s transformation from academic geography’s preeminent philosopher of its mid-twentieth-century liberal positivism to geography’s most prominent Marxist, and equally renowned for its introduction of social justice as a central object of study, the book is a remarkably complex but at the same time highly lucid account of (among other things): the philosophy of social space; the philosophy of scientific knowledge; the limits of analyzing urban space in terms of efficiency and Pareto optimality; and the dividends paid by instead analyzing it dialectically. It is a book still read and struggled with, sometimes only as an artefact in the history of geography, often for its still vital (if in many ways only incipient) insights into the production of urban space and for its early formulation of a theory of the circulation of capital through the built environment.

Figure 2. Front cover of (battered, much-read copy of) Social Justice and the City (Harvey, 1973).

Source: photograph by Chris Philo.

We gave the contributors to this symposium no other instructions than to reflect on the book, its ideas, its meaning to them when they first encountered it or now, or its meaning for the discipline now or then. We sought scholars both at the beginning and later in their careers and some in between. Contributors are based in Scotland, the United States (US), and Sweden (though their personal and professional experiences span a much broader geography). It is perhaps a testament to the ongoing political importance of STJC that more than one potential contributor to the symposium from Asia declined for fear of reprisal from the governments they live under.

Joe Doherty, now Emeritus at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, remembers his first encounter with the book and uses this memory both to describe the incredibly vibrant leftist, mostly Marxist intellectual world that was the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in the 1960s and 1970s and to ponder over why the book made so little of a splash outside of academic geography’s Anglo-American heartland.² A monument in our own (small) field of geography, SJTC could hardly compete with the wealth of Marxist and Marxist-inspired works – on dependency theory, uneven development, imperialism, the so-called ‘agrarian question,’ and Tanzania’s incipient socialism – already being intensely debated among Doherty’s colleagues and comrades. Moreover, Julius Nyerere’s Ujaama strongly promoted the rural rather than the urban, perhaps also undermining the appeal of SJTC to scholars in Dar. Doherty’s essay underlines what could be called the parochialism of SJTC, but his point is not the same as that frequently made these days by scholars calling for ‘theorising from the south.’ Those calls all-too-frequently dismiss theories forged in the north (or west, or metropole) as a priori inappropriate or invalid for assessing developments in places outside their origin. Doherty instead shows how any work, and every intellectual milieu, is historically and geographically conditioned and it is this conditioning – not some essentialist and idealist notion about the incompatibility of ideas forged in one place and then applied in another – that shapes the validity and value of that work.

Historical and geographical conditions change. Rickie Sanders, Emeritus at Temple University, US, recounts her ongoing encounters with and shifting appreciation of SJTC as these conditions have changed. One of only a handful African-Americans in geography at the time, and the first African-American woman to earn a PhD in the field, Sanders recalls how, when she first encountered the book: ‘just the title was intoxicating. I was drunk with the mere possibility that someone else was thinking about social justice and David Harvey no less.’ But over the years, she has come to realize that ‘Harvey fell short’ in his attempts to theorize social justice, in part because of the ‘colorlessness’ of his arguments. Even in his discussion of ghetto-formation, race and considerations of racial justice are absent. But – and this is crucial for Sanders – it is precisely the radically-transformed historical and geographical circumstances in which we now find ourselves that expose the limits of the book. ‘What [once] took the form of pure theory and a revolutionary methodological advance in my mind now comes across as a commentary on white privilege.’ Even so – and this is also crucial for Sanders – this is no reason to consign the book to the trash heap of history, but rather a reason to engage with it more deeply and more critically, that is, a good reason not to see it mainly as an artefact but rather as a work that deserves continued critical assessment.

Kafui Attoh teaches labor and urban studies to returning, mostly working-class and mostly non-white, students at the City University of New York, US. He begins his essay by describing his students’ encounter with a text they hate – a chapter from Edward Glaeser’s The Triumph of the City (2011) – but which contains some arguments they find very hard to disagree with and argue against, particularly ideas pertaining to how a ‘successful’ city is one that succeeds in promoting upward class-mobility. For Attoh, the enduring value of SJTC is how it offers him tools with which to help students see through the ‘common sense’ that Glaeser articulates and advances. These tools are tools of demystification. SJTC’s second half – its ‘socialist formulations’ for analysing urban development and transformations – succeeds, according to Attoh, not only in that project of demystification of the categories of thought that produce common sense (or, as Harvey calls them, status quo theories), but also in ‘revealing the social interests and social relations of domination that such categories reproduce.’

In the first pages of SJTC, Harvey recounts how his move to Baltimore soon after completing Explanation in Geography (1969) thoroughly reoriented his thinking and how his experiences in that city (together with ‘other cities with which I was familiar’) became ‘a backdrop against which to explore questions that arose from projecting social and moral considerations into the traditional matrix of geographical enquiry’ (SJTC, p. 9). There is little doubt that Harvey’s experiences, analyses, and knowledge of Baltimore has deeply affected his entire post-Explanation corpus. It was studying Baltimore’s housing crisis that (in part) led him to Marx. And Marx has continually led him back to Baltimore (see Barnes & Sheppard, 2019). Yet, as Ioanna Korfiati and Hamish Kallin (postdoctoral fellow and lecturer, respectively, at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland) note in their essay, ‘one of the striking qualities of SJTC is the absence of any actually-existing city as its focus.’ Korfiati and Kallin therefore used this as a reason to read the book against an ‘actually-existing city’ – Athens – and in the process ‘got frustrated, returning to ideas that are prompted by the book but not actually in it, as if the text is continuously hinting at thoughts not-yet fully developed.’ This is in fact, quite an insightful comment. One of the thoughts not-yet fully developed in SJTC is actually an ontology – a materialist ontology. Harvey’s budding materialism comes through mostly in his criticism of the idealism of extant theories of scientific knowledge, particularly Thomas Kuhn’s, and to a degree in his turn against efficiency and optimization models as well as in, at the very end of his book, his engagement with Henri Lefebvre. But it is not yet very closely aligned with his (also still only budding) dialectical epistemology. In the Introduction to SJTC, Harvey makes much of the superiority of dialectical ways of knowing, but he is hardly specific in just what that means (beyond, much later in the book, a brief paean to Marx’s ‘dialectical materialism’ on p. 302). He is far more specific a year later when, in the course of a long article adjudicating the ideologies supporting the population theories of Malthus, Ricardo, and Marx (Harvey, 1974), he develops much more fully what he means by dialectical materialism. A decade later, however, Harvey’s position has changed, and fairly radically. It is no longer dialectical materialism that guides his thinking but historical materialism (Harvey, 1984).

The difference is decisive. Dialectical materialism resides primarily at the level of ideas. Historical materialism is rooted much more firmly in the soil of actual places and requires a particular kind of historical thinking. This historical thinking makes its debut not in relation to Baltimore, but rather Paris, in his justly-admired ‘Monument and Myth’ essay on the Basilica Sacre Coeur (Harvey, 1979) and becomes the indispensable foundation for his urban studies of the mid-1980s (Harvey, 1985a, 1985b), and in The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), and is deepened though his subsequent engagement with Raymond Williams’s work (Harvey, 1996, 2000). By then, cities are no longer ‘backdrops’ but from whence theorizing commences (and to which it continually returns).³ In 1973, though, the city in SJTC is remarkably immaterial. When SJTC is – now, in 2023 – read against a real city, Korfiati and Kallin conclude, it becomes a ‘bit of an uninspiring read.’ It’s just too abstract. But it is also because, whatever its abstractions, so much other work has built off its original insights that they hardly feel original anymore. Even more, over fifty years, as Korfiati and Kallin put it, ‘its method has become our method.’

This is a theme I pick up on (if not in so many words) in my own essay in this symposium. The method that has become ‘our method’ – the method of critical and radical geography – is the method of ‘revolutionary theory’, theory that seeks to unravel the status quo and its theories. From my perch in the Department of Human Geography at Uppsala University, Sweden, where (among other things) I have spent the last several years seeking to dismantle and reconstruct geographical theories of justice, what strikes me most about the book now is not its introduction of social justice as a central object of study (as important as that is) nor its turn to Marxism (as pathbreaking as that was), but rather its careful demolition of status quo thinking and its insistence – an insistence that is more integral to than explicit in the arguments of the book – that status quo theories are more politically dangerous than counter-revolutionary ones. Even with the ongoing rightwing assault on the institutions of welfare, education, and justice that the new rightwing Swedish government (officially conservative, in practice right-nationalist-populist) is only deepening, Sweden remains an incredibly complacent place. Even when they are not being actively defunded, scientific funding agencies rarely reward thought that does not reproduce the dominant ideological status quo. For me, rereading SJTC has refueled my determination to fight against just this complacency, just this status quo. I was not expecting that. Having read SJTC more times than I can count, having taught it in seminars, having discussed it with innumerable colleagues and students, having participated in a day-long seminar in New York City a decade ago assessing its ongoing relevance after forty years, I really did not anticipate thinking about the book so differently, thinking not so much about the political-intellectual content of its theories (which had captivated me in the past) and far more about the intellectual-theoretical content of its politics. I did not expect to be surprised in this way.

But perhaps I should not have been surprised (even as I remained pleased to be able to read the book anew). As Joe Doherty, Rickie Sanders, Kafui Attoh, and Ioanna Korfiati and Hamish Kallin all stress, if in different ways, the historical-geographic context of both writing and reading matter immensely. It is to the great credit of SJTC, however, that it still matters – and matters in so many different ways – to the new historical-geographical conditions it finds itself in and still helps to illuminate them in such ways that (maybe, just maybe) those conditions – and our understandings of them – can be radically transformed into ‘a genuinely humanizing urbanism’ (SJTC, p.314) that is equally humanizing of the countryside.

David Harvey: second symposium

And perhaps I should not have been surprised for a bigger, and much more basic, reason. As David Harvey: A Critical Introduction to his Thought (see Figure 3) makes so abundantly clear, and as seconded in the review essays by Neil Gray (researcher at Glasgow University, Scotland) and Kanishka Goonewardena (professor at the University of Toronto, Canada), Harvey’s thinking is enormously generative. Something of a stock phrase in Harvey’s writing is that this or that book, this or that thinker ‘repays careful re-reading.’ This is even more true of Harvey himself, even and especially when we think (as with Rickie Sanders) that he comes up short: his thinking more typically opens up horizons than closes them off.

Figure 3. Front cover of David Harvey: A Critical Introduction to his Thought (Castree et al., 2023).

Source: generously offered by Noel Castree.

In his essay in the review symposium, Gray expertly guides us through the contents – and contentions – of David Harvey so as to reflect on Harvey’s central contributions over the long haul of his career, including some of the ‘lacuna’ he finds in them (arguing, for example, not that Harvey’s theories are too capital-centric, as is often charged, but that they are not capital-centric enough because they focus too heavily on constant capital – dead labor – and do not adequately theorize variable capital – living labor). While deeply appreciative of the authors’ explication of Harvey’s theoretical endeavors, Gray is nonetheless quite critical of their assessment of Harvey’s own politics and political engagements, as well as of the political implications of his work. Or rather, he wonders about what might be interpreted as a political naivety on the part of the authors, thinking they risk misreading both the conditions of possibility for ‘rational’ debate in anything like a public sphere and the real and potential impact that Harvey’s work has achieved in actual social movements. For Gray, there is something remarkable in Harvey’s commitment to ‘teaching Capital (increasingly online and free)’ and the impact it ‘has had on generation of students, activists and academic colleagues.’ Or to put this another way, it is not only in his theorizing that Harvey opens and re-opens horizons but in his teaching, and in how his work seeps into and shapes the consciousnesses of those directly engaged in social, urban, and class struggles.

Goonewardena’s essay is itself a masterclass, a tour-de-force trip along the highways and byways of not just Harvey’s thought, but post-1960s Marxism (and critical theory more broadly) as a whole. He assesses just what it has (and indeed has not) meant that Harvey has so thoroughly and successfully brought Marxism into geography and – eventually, and perhaps in a more limited way – geography into Marxism. Among other conundrums, Goonewardena seeks to understand what specific circumstances, in Harvey’s own biography and in the social conditions of leftwing intellectual production in the postwar era, have led to Harvey’s work seemingly enjoying so little impact outside academic geography until so very recently. His answers are instructive not just for understanding Harvey’s own work, but for the broader history of geography – and for the state of critical debate. And here, appreciative as he clearly is of the intellectual achievements of David Harvey, Goonewardena, like Gray, queries the authors for their political assessments. These assessments are most clear, Goonewardena suggests, in the authors’ mode of critique: they mostly critique Harvey for what he has not done (engage more fully with the bourgeois public sphere, outline a complete alternative to the capitalist – or as the authors have it ‘more-than-capitalist’ – world we live in), and as such the suggestion is that there could perhaps have been a fuller dialectical, ‘immanent’ critique of his work. Of particular importance, for Goonewardena, is the critical evaluation and development of Harvey’s ‘totalising moves’ to understand the (‘more than’?) capitalist totality. For Goonewardena, Harvey’s interest in dissecting the totality is not – as it was for so many theorists of the 1980s and 1990s – a fatal flaw in Harvey’s work, but its singular advantage (a point that I have also recently tried to argue: Mitchell, 2023) and a consistent, if ever-evolving, hallmark of his long career, the value of which social theory is only now just beginning to rediscover.

By way of response, Castree, Charnock, and Christophers defend their critical approach to Harvey’s politics as well as (what Gray and Goonewardena call) their ‘pessimistic’ assessment of Harvey’s broader impact, arguing that it reflects a world where indeed ‘there’s no foreseeable alternative,’ which is ‘the somber political economic lesson of the last forty years’ even though an ‘optimism of the will’ is nonetheless still called for. Whether this is a fair assessment or not readers can decide (Gray, for one, argues a very different case, where it will be the willfulness of organized and concerted struggle that that will provide the grounds for optimism), but what is not at dispute between the authors of David Harvey, the two reviewers in this symposium, and certainly David Harvey himself (since this is his phrase) is that what Harvey and his work has invited us to do, right from the moment he began to make his socialist and then Marxist turn in the pages of SJTC, is to imagine the ‘beautiful impossibility of seeing everything from on high and from below all at once – as a substantive totality comprised of general processes but also particular sites, situations and contexts.’

Fifty years on, the journey – the intellectual and political struggle – towards this beautiful impossibility continues.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There is one precursor to Castree et al. (2023): Paterson’s (1984) David Harvey’s Geography. But it came very early in Harvey’s own development as a scholar – it was written in the immediate wake of the publication of Harvey’s (1982) Limits to Capital – meaning that its value today is unfortunately limited as an assessment of just what its title names. As Goonewardena notes in his essay below, it is rather remarkable that there have been no other book-length assessments since Paterson’s.

2 In his review essay below, Goonewardena examines the similar fate – the book’s near-total neglect outside geography – that befell Harvey’s Limits when it was first published.

3 In their essays, both Gray and Goonewardena examine the role that Harvey’s careful studies of Paris and Baltimore play in his work, arguing, at least in part, that it is precisely his (eventual) grounding of his studies in the real conditions of real places that sets Harvey’s work off from a lot of other Marxist theorizing.