Customer Reviews

Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference

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This is a big, sprawling book; I put off buying it for years b/c of the price but could never get very far in a library copy b/c it seemed like such an undertaking. It's not a book one could assign in a typical book-a-week grad school course. As academic reviewers have pointed out, Harvey is pulling together LOTS of different strands and theorists here--Leibniz, Haraway, Bourdieu, Whitehead, & many others. If you've read a lot of these folks before, Harvey has a lot to say, but if you haven't, this should definitely not be your introduction to Harvey's thought (I'd recommend Condition of Postmodernity, or maybe The New Imperialism). Some sections are fantastic - part I ch. 2 on Dialectics for example is a fantastically clear, lucid explanation of a dialectical approach. But it just keeps going, with a lot of material that might have been better published as separate critical articles on particular theorists, or relegated to footnotes, so that the overall argument gets diluted. All that said, it's a book that anyone working on space and place in the social sciences should read eventually, and one that offers lots of ideas for thinking about how to integrate or form alliances between various types of identity and locally-grounded politics on one hand, and a larger critique of neoliberal capitalism on the other. But I think Harvey's more recent books -- shorter, tighter and more topically focused -- while still theoretically and analytically brilliant -- probably reflect a welcome response to critics of this book (and if you're serious about the book, it's well worth reading the special issue of Antipode in 1998 devoted to it -- it's a work of such complexity that most readers will probably want some other opinions and a bit of guidance in making sense of it all).

Harvey presents an excellent review of the concept of justice (both social and environmental) and its survival in postmodern context. Also a nice treatment of dialectical reasoning.

The author seems to jump around subjects and I don't think his aim was clarity of explanation at all. I think his goal was to fit as many extra words and unrelated babbling as he could. The book was just way too much of everything and not at all focused. I don't know how else to explain this. It was a required read for a class and I would say that it was excruciatingly painful, hard to follow, and I got absolutely nothing for my time. I can't tell you a single thing that I got out of it.

This book is a spectacular down-to-earth attempt to trasnscend positivism as well as Marxism. The very logic of the erudite author's argument alights in a blind alley, where the Heideggerian ambivalence remains the only saviour. This daring milestone in the history of thought would always be an inspiring read.