Professional Documents
Culture Documents
David Harvey is one the premiere academic Marxists writing today. He's a geographer by training,
but his analysis of post-Fordist capitalism and his materialist critique of cultural postmodernism
have earned him a notable place in debates ranging across a number of other disciplines.
Unfortunately for the Harvey neophyte, much of his work is packaged in daunting paving stone sized
volumes. Spaces of Global Capitalism, clocking in at a mere 148 pages, comprises a lecture series
given by Harvey in 2004. It makes for a concise introduction to Harvey and has the added benefit of
drawing a neat, if somewhat artificial, division between three levels of ascending explanatory
abstraction with which Harvey is concerned.
I should comment further on this last point. Much as Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit figures as the
ladder to the greater Encyclopaedic system, but at the same time a concluding gloss on the very
same, Harvey's Spaces of Global Capitalism is structured to reward repeated readings. The first
lecture is the most easily digestable. Having made it to the end of the third lecture, however, one will
have better grasped the theoretical abstractions Harvey employs and be in a better position to start
again.