Uploaded December 2011 | Updated September 2026, 11 hours ago
David Harvey graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1961 with a PhD in geography. Widely influential, he is among the top 20 most cited authors in the humanities. He is also the world's most cited academic geographer and the author of many books and essays influential in the development of modern geography as a discipline. His work has contributed to broad social and political debate, and he is credited with helping to resurrect social class and Marxist methods as serious methodological tools in the critique of global capitalism, particularly its neoliberal form.
In his early books Social Justice and the City (1973) and The Limits to Capital (1982), Harvey brought geography together with political economy to offer a predominantly Marxist account of historical development. In The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), he refined this account by integrating a far more developed cultural analysis, producing a new and highly influential account of contemporary society. He argued that postmodernism is essentially the cultural expression of a transformation in the dominant form of organization of capitalism: no longer Fordist and state regulated, but highly flexible and mobile; no longer concentrated around the urban centers of industrialized nations, but spatially dispersed to suburban peripheries and underdeveloped countries. This Marxist theory of postmodernism put Harvey at odds with most other theorists, who emphasized its aesthetic and culturally autonomous dimension
Penn Humanities Forum
davidharvey.org
David Harvey graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1961 with a PhD in geography. Widely influential, he is among the top 20 most cited authors in the humanities. He is also the world's most cited academic geographer and the author of many books and essays influential in the development of modern geography as a discipline. His work has contributed to broad social and political debate, and he is credited with helping to resurrect social class and Marxist methods as serious methodological tools in the critique of global capitalism, particularly its neoliberal form.
In his early books Social Justice and the City (1973) and The Limits to Capital (1982), Harvey brought geography together with political economy to offer a predominantly Marxist account of historical development. In The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), he refined this account by integrating a far more developed cultural analysis, producing a new and highly influential account of contemporary society. He argued that postmodernism is essentially the cultural expression of a transformation in the dominant form of organization of capitalism: no longer Fordist and state regulated, but highly flexible and mobile; no longer concentrated around the urban centers of industrialized nations, but spatially dispersed to suburban peripheries and underdeveloped countries. This Marxist theory of postmodernism put Harvey at odds with most other theorists, who emphasized its aesthetic and culturally autonomous dimension
Penn Humanities Forum
davidharvey.org
