Most Popular Books by DAVID HARVEY

A major rereading of Marx’s critique of political economy Now a classic of Marxian economics, The Limits to Capital provides one of the best theoretical guides to the history and geography of capitalist development. In this edition, Harvey updates his seminal text with a substantial discussion of the turmoil in world markets today. Delving into concepts such as “fictitious capital” and “uneven geographical development,” Harvey takes the reader step by step through layers of crisis formation, beginning with Marx’s controversial argument concerning the falling rate of profit and closing with a timely foray into the geopolitical and geographical implications of Marx’s work.

Fiscal crises have cascaded across much of the developing world with devastating results, from Mexico to Indonesia, Russia and Argentina. The extreme volatility in contemporary political economic fortunes seems to mock our best efforts to understand the forces that drive development in the world economy. David Harvey is the single most important geographer writing today and a leading social theorist of our age, offering a comprehensive critique of contemporary capitalism. In this fascinating book, he shows the way forward for just such an understanding, enlarging upon the key themes in his recent work: the development of neoliberalism, the spread of inequalities across the globe, and ‘space’ as a key theoretical concept. Both a major declaration of a new research programme and a concise introduction to David Harvey’s central concerns, this book will be essential reading for scholars and students across the humanities and social sciences.

David Harvey is the most influential geographer of our era, possessing a reputation that extends across the social sciences and humanities. Spaces of Capital, a collection of seminal articles and new essays spanning three decades, demonstrates why his work has had-and continues to have-such a major impact. The book gathers together some of Harvey''s

Throughout his distinguished and influential career, David Harvey has defined and redefined the relationship between politics, capitalism, and the social aspects of geographical theory. Laying out Harvey''s position that geography could not remain objective in the face of urban poverty and associated ills, Social Justice and the City is perhaps the most widely cited work in the field. Harvey analyzes core issues in city planning and policy—employment and housing location, zoning, transport costs, concentrations of poverty—asking in each case about the relationship between social justice and space. How, for example, do built-in assumptions about planning reinforce existing distributions of income? Rather than leading him to liberal, technocratic solutions, Harvey''s line of inquiry pushes him in the direction of a “revolutionary geography,” one that transcends the structural limitations of existing approaches to space. Harvey''s emphasis on rigorous thought and theoretical innovation gives the volume an enduring appeal. This is a book that raises big questions, and for that reason geographers and other social scientists regularly return to it.

"There is no question that David Harvey''s work has been one of the most important, influential, and imaginative contributions to the development of human geography since the Second World War. . . . His readings of Marx are arresting and original--a remarkably fresh return to the foundational texts of historical materialism."--Derek Gregory, author of Geographical Imaginations

The radical geographer guides us through the classic text of political economy In recent years, we have witnessed a surge of interest in Marx’s work in an effort to understand the origins of our current political and economic crisis. For nearly forty years, David Harvey has written and lectured on Capital, becoming one of the world’s foremost Marx scholars. Based on his recent lectures, this current volume—finally bringing together his guides to volumes I, II and much of III—presents this depth of learning to a broader audience, guiding first-time readers through a fascinating and deeply rewarding text. A Companion to Marx’s Capital offers fresh, original, and sometimes critical interpretations of a book that changed the course of history and, as Harvey intimates, may do so again.

David Harvey is one of most famous Marxist intellectuals in the past half century, as well as one of the world''s most cited social scientists. Beginning in the early 1970s with his trenchant and still-relevant book Social Justice and the City and through this day, Harvey has written numerous books and dozens of influential essays and articles on topics across issues in politics, culture, economics, and social justice. In The Ways of the World, Harvey has gathered his most important essays from the past four decades. They form a career-spanning collection that tracks not only the development of Harvey over time as an intellectual, but also a dialectical vision that gradually expanded its reach from the slums of Baltimore to global environmental degradation to the American imperium. While Harvey''s coverage is wide-ranging, all of the pieces tackle the core concerns that have always animated his work: capitalism past and present, social change, freedom, class, imperialism, the city, nature, social justice, postmodernity, globalization, and the crises that inhere in capitalism. A career-defining volume, The Ways of the World will stand as a comprehensive work that presents the trajectory of Harvey''s lifelong project in full.

"What I am seeking here is a better understanding of the contradictions of capital, not of capitalism. I want to know how the economic engine of capitalism works the way it does, and why it might stutter and stall and sometimes appear to be on the verge of collapse. I also want to show why this economic engine should be replaced, and with what." --from the Introduction To modern Western society, capitalism is the air we breathe, and most people rarely think to question it, for good or for ill. But knowing what makes capitalism work--and what makes it fail--is crucial to understanding its long-term health, and the vast implications for the global economy that go along with it. In Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, the eminent scholar David Harvey, author of A Brief History of Neoliberalism, examines the internal contradictions within the flow of capital that have precipitated recent crises. He contends that while the contradictions have made capitalism flexible and resilient, they also contain the seeds of systemic catastrophe. Many of the contradictions are manageable, but some are fatal: the stress on endless compound growth, the necessity to exploit nature to its limits, and tendency toward universal alienation. Capitalism has always managed to extend the outer limits through "spatial fixes," expanding the geography of the system to cover nations and people formerly outside of its range. Whether it can continue to expand is an open question, but Harvey thinks it unlikely in the medium term future: the limits cannot extend much further, and the recent financial crisis is a harbinger of this. David Harvey has long been recognized as one of the world''s most acute critical analysts of the global capitalist system and the injustices that flow from it. In this book, he returns to the foundations of all of his work, dissecting and interrogating the fundamental illogic of our economic system, as well as giving us a look at how human societies are likely to evolve in a post-capitalist world.

Collecting David Harvey''s finest writings on 19th century Paris, this title offers insights ranging from the birth of consumerist spectacle on the Parisian boulevards, the creative visions of Balzac, Baudelaire and Zola, and the reactionary cultural politics of the bombastic Sacre Coeur.

People around the world are confused and concerned. Is it a sign of strength of or of weakness that the US has suddenly shifted from a politics of consensus to one of coercion on the world stage? What was really at stake in the war on Iraq? Was it all about oil and, if not, what else was involved? What role has a sagging economy played in pushing the US into foreign adventurism and what difference does it make that neo-conservatives rather than neo-liberals are now in power? What exactly is the relationship between US militarism abroad and domestic politics? These are the questions taken up in this compelling and original book. Closely argued but clearly written, David Harvey, a leading social theorist of his generation, builds a conceputal framework to expose the underlying forces at work behind these momentous shifts in US policies and politics. The compulsions behind the projection of US power on the world as a ''new imperialism'' are here, for the first time, laid bare for all to see. ''David Harvey has written a profound, and profoundly disturbing, book. For thirty years his writings have taken aim at the complacent conviction that what exists works. Harvey is a scholarly radical.

Prologue -- The visualisation of capital as value in motion -- Capital, the book -- Money as the representation of value -- Anti-value: the theory of devaluation -- Prices without values -- The question of technology -- The space and time of value -- The production of value regimes -- The madness of economic reason -- Coda

For over forty years, David Harvey has been one of the world''s most trenchant and critical analysts of capitalist development. In The Enigma of Capital, he delivers an impassioned account of how unchecked neoliberalism produced the system-wide crisis that now engulfs the world. Beginning in the 1970s, profitability pressures led the capitalist class in advanced countries to shift away from investment in industrial production at home toward the higher returns that financial products promised. Accompanying this was a shift towards privatization, an absolute decline in the bargaining power of labor, and the dispersion of production throughout the developing world. The decades-long and ongoing decline in wages that accompanied this turn produced a dilemma: how can goods--especially real estate--sell at the same rate as before if workers are making less in relative terms? The answer was a huge expansion of credit that fueled the explosive growth of both the financial industry and the real estate market. When one key market collapsed--real estate--the other one did as well, and social devastation resulted. Harvey places today''s crisis in the broadest possible context: the historical development of global capitalism itself from the industrial era onward. Moving deftly between this history and the unfolding of the current crisis, he concentrates on how such crises both devastate workers and create openings for challenging the system''s legitimacy. The battle now will be between the still-powerful forces that want to reconstitute the system of yesterday and those that want to replace it with one that prizes social justice and economic equality. The new afterword focuses on the continuing impact of the crisis and the response to it in 2010. One of Huffington Post''s Best Social and Political Awareness Books of 2010 Winner of the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize for 2010 Praise for the Hardcover: "A lucid and penetrating account of how the power of capital shapes our world." --Andrew Gamble, Independent "Elegant... entertainingly swashbuckling... Harvey''s analysis is interesting not only for the breadth of his scholarship but his recognition of the system''s strengths." --John Gapper, Financial Times

Neoliberalism - the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action - has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Its spread has depended upon a reconstitution of state powers such that privatization, finance, and market processes are emphasized. State interventions in the economy are minimized, while the obligations of the state to provide for the welfare of its citizens are diminished. David Harvey, author of ''The New Imperialism'' and ''The Condition of Postmodernity'', here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. While Thatcher and Reagan are often cited as primary authors of this neoliberal turn, Harvey shows how a complex of forces, from Chile to China and from New York City to Mexico City, have also played their part. In addition he explores the continuities and contrasts between neoliberalism of the Clinton sort and the recent turn towards neoconservative imperialism of George W. Bush. Finally, through critical engagement with this history, Harvey constructs a framework not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.

In these essays, David Harvey searches for adequate conceptualizations of space and of uneven geographical development that will help to understand the new historical geography of global capitalism. The theory of uneven geographical development needs further examination: The extreme volatility in contemporary political economic fortunes across and between spaces of the world economy cries out for better historical-geographical analysis and theoretical interpretation. The political necessity is just as urgent since social inequalities have increased in recent decades. Fiscal crises have cascaded across much of the developing world with devastating results from Mexico to Indonesia, Russia and Argentina. Simultaneously, the different oppositional movements to neoliberalism create both opportunities and barriers in the search for alternatives. Harvey shows that this search needs to be supported by a deeper theoretical understanding of the roles of space and uneven geographical development in shaping the world around us. .

"David Harvey...has inspired a generation of radical intellectuals." —Naomi Klein A "forensic and ferocious" manifesto on the city as a center for anti-capitalist resistance from an acclaimed theorist (The Guardian) Long before the Occupy movement, modern cities had already become the central sites of revolutionary politics, where the deeper currents of social and political change rise to the surface. Consequently, cities have been the subject of much utopian thinking. But at the same time they are also the centers of capital accumulation and the frontline for struggles over who controls access to urban resources and who dictates the quality and organization of daily life. Is it the financiers and developers, or the people? Rebel Cities places the city at the heart of both capital and class struggles, looking at locations ranging from Johannesburg to Mumbai, and from New York City to São Paulo. Drawing on the Paris Commune as well as Occupy Wall Street and the London Riots, Harvey asks how cities might be reorganized in more socially just and ecologically sane ways—and how they can become the focus for anti-capitalist resistance.

In this new book, David Harvey seeks to determine what is meant by the term in its different contexts and to identify how accurate and useful it is as a description of contemporary experience.

The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression shows no sign of ending, and Marx''s work remains key to any attempt to understand the ebb and flow of capitalist economies. For nearly forty years, David Harvey has written and lectured on Capital, becoming one of the world''s foremost Marx scholars. Based on his recent lectures, and following the success of his companion to the first volume of Capital, Harvey turns his attention to Volume 2, aiming to bring his depth of learning to a broader audience, guiding first-time readers through a fascinating and often-neglected text. Whereas Volume 1 focuses on production, Volume 2 looks at how value comes into being through the buying and selling of goods. Harvey also introduces elements from Volume 3 on credit and finance to help illustrate aspects of the contemporary crisis.

David Harvey tackles Marx''s notebooks that have spawned wide-ranging and raging controversies When leading scholar of Marx, Roman Rosdolsky, first encountered the virtually unknown text of Marx’s Grundrisse - his preparatory work for his masterpiece Das Capital - in the 1950s in New York Public Library, he recognized it as “a work of fundamental importance,” but declared “its unusual form” and “obscure manner of expression, made it far from suitable for reaching a wide circle of readers.” David Harvey’s Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse builds upon his widely acclaimed companions to the first and second volumes of Capital in a way that will reach as wide an audience as possible. Marx’s stated ambition for this text - where he was thinking aloud about some of possible metamorphoses of capitalism - is to reveal “the exact development of the concept of capital as the fundamental concept of modern economics, just as capital itself is the foundation of bourgeois society.” While respecting Marx’s desire to “bring out all the contradictions of bourgeois production, as well as the boundary where it drives beyond itself,” David Harvey also pithily illustrates the relevance of Marx’s text to understanding the troubled state of contemporary capitalism.

Laying bare the follies of the international financial system, eminent academic David Harvey looks at the nature of capitalism, how it works and why it sometimes doesn''t.

A new book from one of the most cited authors in the humanities and social sciences

Available for the first time in paperback, this is the pre-eminent critical study, and exploration, of how myth and legend played such a significant role in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Liberty and freedom are frequently invoked to justify political action. Presidents as diverse as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush have built their policies on some version of these noble values. Yet in practice, idealist agendas often turn sour as they confront specific circumstances on the ground. Demonstrated by incidents at Abu Ghraib and Guantu0087namo Bay, the pursuit of liberty and freedom can lead to violence and repression, undermining our trust in universal theories of liberalism, neoliberalism, and cosmopolitanism. Combining his passions for politics and geography, David Harvey charts a cosmopolitan order more appropriate to an emancipatory form of global governance. Political agendas tend to fail, he argues, because they ignore the complexities of geography. Incorporating geographical knowledge into the formation of social and political policy is therefore a necessary condition for genuine democracy. Harvey begins with an insightful critique of the political uses of freedom and liberty, especially during the George W. Bush administration. Then, through an ontological investigation into geography''s foundational concepts& mdash;space, place, and environment& mdash;he radically reframes geographical knowledge as a basis for social theory and political action. As Harvey makes clear, the cosmopolitanism that emerges is rooted in human experience rather than illusory ideals and brings us closer to achieving the liberation we seek.

"O Partido de Wall Street teve seu tempo e falhou miseravelmente. Como construir uma alternativa a partir de sua ruína é tanto uma oportunidade imperdível quanto uma obrigação que nenhum de nós pode ou deveria jamais procurar evitar." É com essa máxima que o geógrafo acadêmico mais citado do mundo, David Harvey, inicia seu novo livro, O enigma do capital: e as crises do capitalismo, o primeiro de sua autoria a ser lançado pela Boitempo Editorial. Harvey parte da análise da crise do subprime imobiliário de 2008 para demonstrar que, apesar de seu alcance e tamanho, ela não difere das crises passadas. Para tanto, o autor estuda as condições necessárias para a acumulação do capital e utiliza rigoroso arsenal teórico ao expor o papel fundamental que as crises têm na reprodução do capitalismo e os riscos sistêmicos de longo prazo que o capital representa para a vida no planeta. Riscos sistêmicos estes, inerentes ao capitalismo de livre mercado, que os economistas não foram capazes de compreender quando a crise estourou e até hoje parecem não ter ideia do que são ou do que fazer com eles. "Quando os políticos e economistas especializados parecem tão inconscientes e indiferentes à propensão do capitalismo a crises, quando tão alegremente ignoram os sinais de alerta a seu redor e chamam os anos de volatilidade e turbulência iniciados nos anos 1990 de ''a grande moderação'', então o cidadão comum pode ser perdoado por ter tão pouca compreensão em relação ao que o atinge quando eclode uma crise e tão pouca confiança nas explicações dos especialistas que lhe são oferecidas", afirma o autor. Nem sempre, porém, houve essa cegueira generalizada entre os economistas.

Largely concerned with 19th century Paris.

This book engages with the politics of social and environmental justice, and seek new ways to think about the future of urbanization in the twenty-first century. It establishes foundational concepts for understanding how space, time, place and nature - the material frames of daily life - are constituted and represented through social practices, not as separate elements but in relation to each other. It describes how geographical differences are produced, and shows how they then become fundamental to the exploration of political, economic and ecological alternatives to contemporary life. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference speaks to a wide readership of students of social, cultural and spatial theory and of the dynamics of contemporary life. It is a convincing demonstration that it is both possible and necessary to value difference and to seek a just social order.