Explaining with David

David’s first book, Explanation in Geography, was a revolutionary tract. I came across it after enrolling in Geography at Bristol in 1969. Whereas Geography had largely practiced naive empiricism Bristol was propagating a new (scientific) geography and saw the old geography as a hindrance, making it the only department that would take someone who had almost failed their Geography A-level! We had to arrive a week early to be trained in statistics—something none of us had never come across. David had just left Bristol for Baltimore, leaving Explanation behind as a parting gift. It was required reading.

This was a time when the anglophone social sciences were doing their best to become more scientific. Bolstered by the success of operations research in managing military logistics during WWII, it became the anglophone norm to imagine that, by imitating the natural sciences, the social sciences could deploy logical empiricism to not only explain society but also improve it through planning. For geographers seeking to don the hat of science Bristol set itself up as the training ground for the UK priesthood (alongside the Universities of Iowa and Washington in the US, and Lund in Sweden). Following David and Peter Haggett, we saw ourselves as the space cadets—outriders for the quantitative revolution.

Divided into six sections, self-effacingly presented as David’s own attempt to understand a scientific approach, Explanation seemed to provide everything that a young revolutionary needed to take over the discipline (much like Samuelson’s Economics, by then in its seventh edition, did for neoclassical economics). In turn, the reader is introduced to philosophy, methodology and explanation; explanation in the social sciences and Geography; theories, laws and models; mathematics, geometry and probability theory; observation, classification and data collection; and causality, temporality, functionalism and systems analysis. Coming in at five hundred pages, it was a challenging read. We had to familiarize ourselves with the empiricist philosophy of science and causality (foregrounding his next book, David was careful to avoid positivist claims to objectivity by noting that personal values and disciplinary norms inevitably shape scientific practice); with what it means to theorize, build simplified models of those theories and evaluate them through formulating and testing empirical hypotheses; with mathematics as a theory language, geometry and the philosophy of space and statistical inference; with how to measure and classify our observations of the world and build databases; and with how to deploy all of this to build causal explanations for what we were observing about the world. While Explanation was part of our lifeblood as undergraduates at Bristol, there was a brief look behind the curtain when the quantitative (and subsequent radical) geographer Keith Bassett brought a stack of Antipode issues to a lecture in 1971.

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The book itself reads at first blush like a relic of “the young Harvey”. Yet, as with Marx, it would be a mistake to draw a line separating the old from the new. Explanation displayed features that carried beyond David’s intellectual shift to his subsequent spatial Marxism. It is written with a clarity that makes it possible for the uninitiated to grasp complex arguments. There is a seemingly irrefutable confidence in how he advances his claims that comes through the tone of the writing, enhancing its persuasiveness. It is rooted in a deep philosophical engagement—in this case with logical empiricism and rationalism (Russell, Popper, Nagel, Hempel, etc.). There is an impatience with anyone not joining the program, notably such pre-quantitative geographers as Richard Hartshorne and Carl Sauer, whose thinking needed to be dismantled to advance the cause. (In his second book, Social Justice and the City, the bête noir becomes Brian Berry who had become the leading light in US quantitative geography.)

Last but far from least is David’s commitment to showing how thinking geographically (spatially, in Explanation) transforms our understanding and explanatory frameworks, which he later brings to Marx’ Capital in his path-breaking third book, Limits to Capital. Already in Explanation, David develops spatial concepts that he never abandons. Deploying philosophers of space like Cassirer, he distinguishes between absolute, relative and relational space. This last—space as a system of relations—becoming central to his framework for spatializing Marxist theory. Almost three decades later in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996; his ‘most geographical book’, personal communication) David makes relational space central to thinking space dialectically, returning to two philosophers he read for and cited in Explanation: Gottried Wilhelm Leibnitz and Alfred North Whitehead.

David’s infatuation with logical empiricism faded quickly. Three years later he simply abandoned this approach, moving steadily towards Marx’ dialectical/relational explanatory framework. To understand this seemingly remarkable intellectual shift, consider the spacetimes in which Harvey found himself. In the 1960s Cambridge and Bristol Universities were havens in a Britain committed to social democracy and state planning under the influence of a progressive Labour government. This was a time of post-WWII growth and redistribution, with Cambridge and Bristol situated within the particularly favored region of southern England, institutions that themselves were elite (largely white, masculine) and protected spaces—far from the working communities where David grew up in Kent. To left liberal scholars seeking to improve the societies that they lived in, planning based on (natural) scientific principles and quantitative methods simply made sense—with Geography late to jump on this bandwagon. Yet his move to Baltimore pushed him to question such taken-for-granted beliefs; the conjunctural space-time of 1970s Baltimore turned out to be a completely different kettle of fish.

Johns Hopkins provided the same kind of protected elite intellectual space as Bristol and Cambridge, but it was situated in a 1970s USA riven by anti-Vietnam War and Black Power movements and urban race riots, and located in a city that—the year prior to David’s arrival—had experienced the US National Guard, the XVIII Airborne Corps and the 197^th Infantry Brigade being called in to tamp down extensive riots after the Martin Luther King assassination. Instead of biking around Bristol, David found himself sleeping on the street to protect Baltimore’s Black Panther office after the execution of Fred Hampton. Instead of the council housing built for working class families in the UK, David’s early research into Baltimore’s housing market revealed Black populations living in impoverished conditions worsened by slumlords and a disinterested municipal government. He and his students started reading Marx and it made sense here, providing him with new insights into how Baltimore’s housing market worked. Indeed, it did not just make sense to David. As he has recalled, at a meeting where he reported on findings from the housing research in Baltimore a Vice President of the Chase Manhattan Bank “said one of the biggest problems we have in New York is that once we improve the neighborhood, the people we are trying to help leave. He said to me that my account was such a good idea. ‘Where did I get it from?’ I said, ‘I got it from Engels.’ ‘Is he at Harvard?’ he said. ‘No, Friedrich Engels.’ He was a little bit shocked.”

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I did not meet David until the mid 1970s, by which time he was the leading theorist of radical Marxist geography and I had made my own geographical and intellectual transformation. Like David—and several other first generation radical geographers who abandoned logical empiricism for Marx—I had moved to North America, where I experienced full-blooded American capitalism and its endless wars and watched European social democracy in decline. Having completed a quantitative PhD thesis in Toronto, by then I was teaching in Minnesota and active in the Union of Socialist Geographers. While 1968 seemed over, explaining the status quo of a deeply problematic world felt like a cop-out. I was searching around new theoretical and methodological frameworks that question the status quo rather than taking it for granted, and that imagine more emancipatory alternatives; Marx had been beckoning since my graduate school days. David has been a fellow-traveler along this path ever since. Limits to Capital inspired forays with Trevor Barnes into a spatialized Marxism (The Capitalist Space Economy), followed over subsequent decades by many other inspirations. David also became a friend; while we have not always agreed, my intellectual trajectory is inseparable from his.

While Explanation may seem like an anomaly when placed alongside his subsequent 20+ books, it can also be seen as an exception that proved the rule. Explanation’s relentless commitment to explanatory theorizing (“by our theories you will know us”, p. 486) undermined his home discipline’s naïve empiricism in ways that not only advanced quantitative geography but also helped create conditions of possibility for a critical geographic theory—which now ranges well beyond Marx and geographical political economy. Further, even as David himself moved into Marxism Explanation’s spectre lives on: According to Google Scholar, its citation counts only peaked in 2013 and it remains regularly cited by contemporary geographic information scientists, in ongoing philosophical debates about geographic explanation and causality and even by critical geographers!

Happy Birthday, David, and wishing you many more!

Filed under: Harvey-at-90