The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Paperback)

by David Harvey (Author) "Jonathan Raban's Soft city, a highly personalized account of London life in the early 1970s, was published in 1974..." (more)
Key Phrases: overaccumulation problem, fictitious capital formation, cultural mass, United States, New York, Los Angeles (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
The Condition of Postmodernity is David Harvey's seminal history of our most equivocal of eras. What does postmodernism mean? Where did it come from? Harvey, a professor of geography and a key mover behind extending the scope and influence of the discipline of geography itself, does a thorough job here delineating the passage through to postmodernity and the economic, social, and political changes that underscored and accompanied it. As he clearly states, the rise in postmodernist cultural forms is related to a new intensity in what Harvey terms "time-space compression," but this new intensity is a qualitative rather than quantitative change in social organization, and it does not point to an era beyond capitalism as "the basic rules of capitalistic accumulation" remain unchanged. Unlike Fredric Jameson (whose equally rewarding Postmodernism stands as the twin pillar to Harvey's critique), who explicitly relies on Ernest Mandel's periodization of late capitalism, Harvey eschews a narrowly economic focus, the limits and contradictions of production that have led to the rise in the service sector, and takes a more multidisciplinary approach to his history. As comfortable discussing Manet as he is labor markets, Harvey is an excellent writer, and The Condition of Postmodernity is an exceptionally informative and enjoyable read. --Mark Thwaite, Amazon.co.uk

From Library Journal
Harvey presents an illuminating and powerful critique of postmodernism, arguing that it represents the cultural manifestation of late capitalism and specifically that it emerges from a transformation of time and space to accommodate a shift from a political economy based on Fordism to one based on flexible accumulation. Harvey moves with ease and authority over a wide range of cultural forms from architecture and urban planning to painting and literature. He is well versed in currents of postmodernist theory but avoids the pitfalls of jargon and obscurity. The book is both penetrating and accessible, an important contribution to the postmodernist debate. See also Postmodern Genres , reviewed below.--Ed.
- T.L. Cooksey, Armstrong State Coll., Savannah, Ga.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 392 pages
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; Reprint edition (October 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0631162941
• ISBN-13: 978-0631162940
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #33,991 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

55 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent survey of culture and how it is shaped., July 26, 1999

By	Mark Bourne "RedSpringer" (Somerville, MA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Recent history, economics, architecture, business, sociology, marxist critique, and urban *design* are presented as a unified, interdisciplinary study of culture and the state of knowledge today. The density of the text is excused by his convincing overview of knowledge and appropriate references to other 19th and 20th century thinkers. Harvey maps our culture and how we think about ourselves and our world from the enlightenment to the 90's. He is careful and backs his arguments very well, which, I imagine, takes incredible discipline considering the mish-mash of post-modernity.

If you have some time, are looking for a challenge, and want a comprehensive and convincing crash course on the state of everything, read this book. It is essential for anyone who has studied several social disciplines and wants to understand them collectively. It will certainly affect any thinking person's perception of the late 20th century and the events that led to it.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best overview of modern/postmodern condition I have found, August 21, 2002

By	"pzmolek" (Cape Girardeau, MO United States) - See all my reviews

This is a great overview of concepts that are, by definition, very fractured. Harvey clarifies and pulls together a number of seemingly disparate elements in a masterful manner. Though this book could work as a good introduction to these concepts, I think readers with some background in the major writers of modernism and postmodernism will get more out of it. Dogmatic postmodernists may be put off that Harvey has the "temerity" to suggest that postmodernism might be an extension of modernism or that he finds some good in modernism and some excesses in postmodern approaches but, they should get over themselves and realize that their insistence that "all meta-narratives are bad" is their own meta-narrative. Overall, Harvey manages to convincingly express his ideas while maintaining a remarkably evenhanded approach. I especially enjoy the fact that he avoids the postmodernist tendency to ignore the complexities of modernism and, thus create a postmodern meta-narrative about the modernist project.

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Po-Mo Schmomo?, March 4, 2003

By	C. Gardner (Washington D.C., D.C. United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Ask ten academics about what to call our present fin-de-siecle epoch and you'll get ten different labels, but "postmodernism" seems always the default term. Although it's twelve years old, Harvey's book is the best I've read about the pluralistic fabric we daily inhabit. It's edifyingly reader-friendly (especially compared to some of the Franco-drunk rhetoricians out there trying to get a handle on our current world). In precise prose Harvey outlines the shift to our information-as-capital paradigm since the mid-sixties, and the causes of the growth of the temp sector and "just-in-time" production capabilities. Harvey traces the arrival of "flexible accumulation" to the collapse of Fordist production practices in the 1966-73 waves of recession, but covers far more than just economic factors--architecture, art, literature, cinema--without any self-conscious Neo-Marxist whistling-in-the-dark. In his project to articulate a new (meta?)narrative, Harvey's book will probably give post-structuralists a new constellation of ideas to obfuscate with hip terminology and dense prose...
Manuel Castell's "The Rise of the Network Society" is another good book along these lines.