Harvey, David (1935—)
British Marxism geographer. One of the most widely respected and cited urban geographers, Harvey has produced a distinguished body of work of more than twenty books characterized by its trenchant critique of the effects of capitalism, and it is perhaps best encapsulated by the Jeffersonian slogan ‘There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals’ that he cites in his discussion of primitive accumulation in A Companion to Marx’s Capital (2010). From the earliest days of his career, in Social Justice and the City (1973), Harvey made it clear that in his view geography could not and should not remain objective in the face of urban poverty and its causes, and he showed that in many cases it is the result of a deliberate strategy on the part of capital. In The Limits of Capital (1982), his most theoretically sophisticated work, Harvey argues that property speculation is essential to capitalism’s dynamic and its Achilles heel (the ‘Global Financial Crisis’ of 2007—9, which Harvey predicted in interviews given a year before the property crash that ignited it, is ample evidence of this). The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) is his most widely known work. Doubtless this is because, in contrast to his previous books, which are somewhat dry and technical offerings, it offers a rich account of the social, cultural, and economic conditions of the period that would become known as postmodernity, but was better known then as either post-industrial society (following the work of Bell, Daniel and Touraine, Alain) or post-Fordism (following the work of Gramsci, Antonio). Characterized by processes that set in motion what is now known as globalization, this era was witness to the disempowering of labour, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the financialization of industry, which Harvey explains as a transition to what he calls flexible accumulation. This entails a separation of profit-making from its underpinnings in production---this is enabled by the stock market, where money can be made trading shares in companies at prices that have no correspondence with the actual viability or profitability of the company. Perhaps the most enduring and most widely appreciated aspect of The Condition of Postmodernity is Harvey’s discussion of what he calls ‘time-space compression’, which he links to his account of flexible accumulation. This new phase of capitalism is predicated on new kinds of organizational thinking, such as ‘just-in-time’ logistics, which obviates the need for stockpiling, which coupled with more niche-oriented marketing, has changed how we experience time in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Similarly, increasingly rapid changes in fashions and fads mean we experience time itself as rushing along at a faster pace than it previously did. Combine this with rapid travel such as today’s air travel (compared to ships) and the knowledge that products (like French cheeses, Harvey’s example, which were once the preserve of a handful of gourmet shops outside France but now are readily available in supermarkets) can be shipped to any part of the world, and our sense of space shifts too. The consequence of this, which we now tend to take for granted, is an amazing cultural heterogeneity---of people, things, tastes, sounds, and so on---unthinkable less than a century ago and now the norm in most major cities. In succeeding years, Harvey has focused his work on certain key effects of globalization and the process he calls accumulation by dispossession, which is his updated version of Marxism’s concept of primitive accumulation. In The New Imperialism (2003) and A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), he argues that since Marx’s time wholly new means of profiting from dispossession have opened up: he mentions intellectual property rights and patenting, which have been applied to medical inventions and discoveries, thus limiting their benefits to those who can afford it; biopiracy, the pillaging of the world’s stockpile of biogenetic resources, without returning benefit to local people; the enclosure of water resources; the pollution of the atmosphere, and so on. In Spaces of Global Capitalism (2006) he argues that property booms are both a theft of the future of young people and a screen for an otherwise poor-performing economy. Perhaps his most widely appreciated project, from a pedagogical perspective, is his lectures on Marx’s Capital. Beginning life as a series of excellent YouTube lectures, but now available as books, Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Capital (2010) and A Companion to Marx’s Capital Volume 2 (2013) offer a marvellously concise and clear introduction to Marx’s famously dense works. Further Reading: N. Castree and D. Gregory David Harvey: A Critical Reader (2006). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770—1831) German philosopher, one of the most influential thinkers of all time. His work casts an extremely long shadow and virtually every thinker in critical theory acknowledges his influence, even when---as in the case of someone like Deleuze, Gilles---they go to great lengths to avoid being or sounding like Hegel. Marx, Karl was an enthusiastic, albeit highly critical, reader of Hegel, and as a consequence in Marxism there is a very important stream of work known as Marxist-Hegelianism, of which the best-known exponents are undoubtedly Jameson, Fredric and Žižek, Slavoj. In France, led by Althusser, Louis, there was an equally powerful movement in Marxism aimed at severing the connection between Marx and Hegel and it largely succeeded, with the effect that post-structuralism tend to neglect Hegel, or worse, caricature him as a figure of evil (Jameson even suggests that in French philosophy Hegel is a codeword for Stalin). Hegel was a similarly potent influence on deconstruction, existentialism, hermeneutics, and pragmatism. Hegel was born in Stuttgart, in south western Germany. His father was a secretary in the Duke of Württemberg’s revenue office. His mother died when he was 13. A precocious talent, Hegel read extensively as a child and excelled at school. At the age of 18, he entered a Protestant seminary attached to the University of Tübingen, where his fellow students included the future poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the future philosopher Friedrich Schelling. The three became firm, lifelong friends. After graduation, from 1793 until 1801, Hegel worked as a private tutor for wealthy families in Berne and Frankfurt. Then, with the assistance of Schelling, he moved to Jena, where he was given an unsalaried position in the philosophy department. It was in Jena that Hegel encountered Napoleon, whose armies devastated the city, whom he famously described as a ‘world-soul’. His finances made precarious by the war, Hegel moved to Bamberg and accepted the job of editor of the local newspaper there in 1807. His first major book, Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807), translated as Phenomenology of Mind (1910), appeared in the same year. Written against tough deadlines, Hegel sent individual chapters to the publisher and never had time to revise the whole text. The result is a text whose very structure has been the subject of considerable debate. One of the most influential philosophical works ever written, the Phenomenology of Mind (also translated as Phenomenology of Spirit) serves as the point of introduction for Hegel’s entire philosophical edifice. Hegel takes the radical step of arguing---contrary to empiricism---that there is nothing prior to the process of producing concepts that can serve as the foundation for philosophy. There is in this sense no immediate given, according to Hegel; all sense data are subject to the prior existence of a conceptual apparatus that enables the mind to make sense of its perceptions. This process of making sense is described by Hegel as dialectic. The dialectic is undoubtedly the concept most closely associated with Hegel’s name (it is the concept that drew Marx’s interest), but it is also relatively poorly understood. The key to the dialectic is the moment of transformation Hegel referred to as the negation of the negation. Understanding is produced when the ‘negative’ sense data are combined with the equally ‘negative’ concepts, each one supplying the latter with what it lacks: sense data are negative because they are insufficient to ground truth, while concepts are negative because they are in and of themselves empty abstractions, but in combination they each negate the other’s negativity. According to Hegel, all knowledge is produced in this fashion: we start with what is known and as more information becomes available we negate that knowledge and obtain newer, more sophisticated knowledge. This process is known as Aufhebung, sometimes translated into English as ‘sublation’, though more often than not left untranslated: it has the complex triple meaning of raising up, preserving, and negating. Ultimately, what interests Hegel is the process by which the self becomes conscious of itself. A year after the publication of the Phenomenology of Mind he moved again, to Nuremberg, this time to take on the job of headmaster of a Gymnasium (high school), where he remained until 1816. During these years he conceived of then composed his enormous three-volume Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1817), translated as Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1970). In 1816 he was given an appointment at Heidelberg University, then in 1818 he accepted the chair in philosophy at the University of Berlin, at that time the most prestigious position in the field in Germany. He continued to write prolifically on art, history, and philosophy, contributing several works to the philosophical canon that continue to be studied in detail today. His magnum opus, according to most of his commentators, Wissenschaft der Logik (1812—16; 2nd edn, 1832), The Science of Logic (1989), lays out in intricate detail Hegel’s metaphysics system. Hegel is often described as either an idealist or a historicist or both because his work is embedded in a model of history that is constantly thrusting forward towards some---perhaps unrealizable---image of the perfection which Hegel calls absolute being. It is this aspect of his work that post-structuralism rejects. The progress of human history, for Hegel, is the march towards self-determination, which is only achieved when full self-consciousness is attained. In his view, self-consciousness is synonymous with freedom and this is the basic story his later work tells. The best known instance of this in Hegel’s work is his account of the master/slave relationship in the Phenomenology of Mind, an essay which is for many readers emblematic of Hegel’s work as a whole. Hegel famously argues that the self-consciousness of both master and slave is in fact the opposite of what they initially think it is: the slave thinks they have no freedom but discovers that because of their servitude they have been relieved of the burden of having to think about their situation, thus they really do have freedom of consciousness; while the master realizes that having to think about the need to enslave the other is in itself a burden that reduces his freedom. Further Reading: S. Houlgate An Introduction to Hegel (2005). R. Pippin Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (1989).