Search results for ""Author David Harvey""

This fascinating collection of 200 archive photographs takes the reader on a nostalgic bus and tram ride through the north-west of Birmingham, from the city centre along the A41 to Hockley, taking in the famous Jewellery Quarter and the many Victorian housing developments around Handsworth. Travelling through numerous shopping centres and the important town centre of West Bromwich with its ‘golden mile’, the route splits at Carter’s green. Taking in the well-known steel and tube manufacturing centre Wednesbury, as well as Black Country capital Dudley, this entertaining book is full of detail sure to delight local residents and transport enthusiasts alike.

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This fascinating collection of photographs, including many rare and old images (some from as early as 1865) explores Hockley over the past century and a half, and details the social, architectural and functional changes in the area. With sections on industry, transport, leisure and religion, all aspects of everyday life are covered. This volume provides a unique insight into life in the town as it used to be. This book will be a nostalgic journey for older residents and a revelation to newcomers to the area.

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David Harvey is unquestionably the most influential, as well as the most cited, geographer of his generation. His reputation extends well beyond geography to sociology, planning, architecture, anthropology, literary studies and political science. This book brings together for the first time seminal articles published over three decades on the tensions between geographical knowledges and political power and on the capitalist production of space. Classic essays reprinted here include 'On the history and present condition of geography', 'The geography of capitalist accumulation' and 'The spatial fix: Hegel, von Thunen, and Marx'. Two new chapters represent the author's most recent thinking on cartographic identities and social movements. David Harvey's persistent challenge to the claims of ethical neutrality on behalf of science and geography runs like a thread throughout the book. He seeks to explain the geopolitics of capitalism and to ground spatial theory in social justice. In the process he engages with overlooked or misrepresented figures in the history of geography, placing them in the context of intellectual history. The presence here of Kant, Von Thunen, Humboldt, Lattimore, Leopold alongside Marx, Hegel, Heidegger, Darwin, Malthus, Foucault and many others shows the deep roots and significance of geographical thought. At the same time David Harvey's telling observations of current social, environmental, and political trends show just how vital that thought is to the understanding of the world as it is and as it might be.

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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 classic text with a substantial discussion of the turmoil in world markets today.In his analyses of '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, moving through crises of credit and finance, and closing with a timely analysis geopolitical and geographical considerations.

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Marx's Capital is one of the most important texts of the modern era. The three volumes, published between 1867 and 1883, changed the destiny of countries, politics and people across the world - and continue to resonate today. In this book, David Harvey lays out their key arguments. In clear and concise language, Harvey describes the architecture of capital according to Marx, placing his observations in the context of capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. He considers the degree to which technological, economic and industrial change during the last 150 years means Marx's analysis and its application may need to be modified. Marx's trilogy concerns the circulation of capital: volume I, how labour increases the value of capital, which he called valorisation; volume II, on the realisation of this value, by selling it and turning it into money or credit; volume III, on what happens to the value next in processes of distribution. The three volumes contain the core of Marx's thinking on the workings and history of capital and capitalism. David Harvey explains and illustrates the profound insights and enormous analytical power they continue to offer in terms that, without compromising their depth and complexity, will appeal to a wide range of readers, including those coming to the work for the first time.

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You thought capitalism was permanent? Think again. David Harvey unravels the contradictions at the heart of capitalism-its drive, for example, to accumulate capital beyond the means of investing it, it's imperative to use the cheapest methods of production that leads to consumers with no means of consumption, and its compulsion to exploit nature to the point of extinction. These are the tensions which underpin the persistence of mass unemployment, the downward spirals of Europe and Japan, and the unstable lurches forward of China and India. Not that the contradictions of capital are all bad: they can lead to the innovations that make capitalism resilient and, it seems, permanent. Yet appearances can deceive: while many of capital's contradictions can be managed, others will be fatal to our society. This new book is both an incisive guide to the world around us and a manifesto for change.

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Amidst waves of economic crises, health crises, class struggle and neo-fascist reaction, few possess the clarity and foresight of world-renowned theorist, David Harvey. Since the publication of his bestselling A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Harvey has been tracking the evolution of the capitalist system as well as tides of radical opposition rising against it. In The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles, Harvey introduces new ways of understanding the crisis of global capitalism and the struggles for a better world. While accounting for violence and disaster, Harvey also chronicles hope and possibility. By way of conversations about neoliberalism, capitalism, globalization, the environment, technology, social movements and crises like COVID-19, he outlines, with characteristic brilliance, how socialist alternatives are being imagined under very difficult circumstances. In understanding the economic, political and social dimensions of the crisis, Harvey’s analysis in The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles will be of strategic importance to anyone wanting to both understand and change the world.

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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 Guantanamo 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--space, place, and environment--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.

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Amidst waves of economic crises, health crises, class struggle and neo-fascist reaction, few possess the clarity and foresight of world-renowned theorist, David Harvey. Since the publication of his bestselling A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Harvey has been tracking the evolution of the capitalist system as well as tides of radical opposition rising against it. In The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles, Harvey introduces new ways of understanding the crisis of global capitalism and the struggles for a better world. While accounting for violence and disaster, Harvey also chronicles hope and possibility. By way of conversations about neoliberalism, capitalism, globalization, the environment, technology, social movements and crises like COVID-19, he outlines, with characteristic brilliance, how socialist alternatives are being imagined under very difficult circumstances. In understanding the economic, political and social dimensions of the crisis, Harvey’s analysis in The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles will be of strategic importance to anyone wanting to both understand and change the world.

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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 economic fortunes seems to mock our best efforts to understand the forces that drive development in the world economy.David Harvey, the single most important geographer writing today and a leading social theorist of our age, offers 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.

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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. The Song of Middle-earth takes a fresh look at The Lord of the Rings, digging deep into the foundations of Tolkien’s world to reveal the complex tapestry of history and mythology that lies behind his stories. The charge that Tolkien's work was merely derivative – that he extracted elements from other mythologies and incorporated them into his own fiction – is dismissed in favour of a fascinating examination of the rich historical background to Middle-earth. From the mythic tradition of the Tales told in The Book of Lost Tales: I to the significance of oral storytelling throughout the history of Middle-earth, this book examines the common themes of mythology found within Tolkien’s work. In doing so, The Song of Middle-earth demonstrates how Tolkien’s desire to create a new mythology for England is not only apparent in his writing, but also realised.

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As the twentieth century drew to a close, the rich were getting richer; power was concentrated within huge corporations; vast tracts of the earth were being laid waste: three-quarters of the world's population had no control of its destiny and no claim to basic rights. There was nothing new in this. What was new was the virtual absence of any political will to do anything about it. Spaces of Hope takes issue with this. David Harvey brings an exciting perspective to two of the principal themes of contemporary social discourse; globalization and the body. Exploring the uneven geographical development of late twentieth-century capitalism , and the working body in relation to this new geography of production and consumption, he finds in Marx's writings a wealth of relevant analysis and theoretical insight. In order to make much needed changes, he maintains, we need to become the architects of a different living and working environment and learn to bridge the micro-scale of the body and the personal and the macro-scale of global political economy. Utopian movements have for centuries tried to construct a just society. David Harvey looks at their history to ask why they failed and what the ideas behind them might still have to offer. His devastating description of the existing urban environment (Baltimore is his case study) fuels his argument that we can and must use the force of utopian imagining against all who say 'there is no alternative'. He outlines a new kind of utopian thought, which he calls 'dialectical utopianism' and refocuses our attention on possible designs for a more equitable world of work and living with nature. If any political ideology or plan is to work, he argues, it must take account of our human qualities, the capacities and powers inherent in nature, and the dynamics of change. Finally, Harvey dares to sketch a very personal utopian vision in an appendix, one that leaves no doubt about his own geography of hope.

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In recent years, we have witnessed a surge of interest in Marx's work in the effort to understand the origins of our current predicament. For nearly forty years, David Harvey has written and lectured on Capital, becoming one of the world's most foremost Marx scholars. Based on his recent lectures, this current volume - finally bringing together his guides to Volumes I, II and much of III of Das Kapital - aims to bring 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's video lecture course can be found here: davidharvey.org/reading-capital/

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The essential anthology of writings by the world's leading Marxist thinker: this book presents a sequence of landmark works in David Harvey's intellectual journey over five decades. It shows how experiencing the riots, despair and injustice of 1970s Baltimore led him to seek an explanation of capitalist inequalities via Marx and to a sustained intellectual engagement that has made him the world's leading exponent of Marx's work. The book takes the reader through the development of his unique synthesis of Marxist method and geographical understanding that has allowed him to develop a series of powerful insights into the ways of the world, from the new mechanics of imperialism, crises in financial markets and the effectiveness of car strikers in Oxford, to the links between nature and change, why Sacré Coeur was built in Paris, and the meaning of the postmodern condition. David Harvey is renowned for originality, acumen and the transformative value of his insights. This book shows why.

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For three centuries the capitalist system has shaped western society, informed its rulers, and conditioned the lives of its people. Has the time come to move beyond it? Using his unrivalled knowledge of the subject, Harvey lays bare the follies of the international financial system, looking at the nature of capitalism, how it works and why sometimes it doesn't. He examines the vast flows of money that surge round the world in daily volumes well in excess of the sum of all its economies. He looks at the cycles of boom and bust in the world's housing and stock markets and shows that periodic episodes of meltdown are not only inevitable in the capitalist system but essential to its survival. The Enigma of Capital is a timely call-to-arms for the end of the capitalism, and makes a compelling case for a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that could be responsible, just and humane

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The city—site of high human accomplishment and of squalid human failure—embodies the inner contradictions of capitalism. In this pioneering study David Harvey offers a definitive Marxist interpretation of the urban process under capitalism.Originally published in two volumes as Consciousness and the Urban Experience and The Urbanization of Capital, Harvey's work is now available in an abridged one-volume paperback edition. Sppaning geography, sociology, economics, and politics, it offers a solid theoretical basis for understanding—and participating in—social change. The Urban Experience, write's Harvey, "is about ways of seeing the city, of reading its text and finding an interpretive frame in which to locate the million and one surprises that confront us on the street."

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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.

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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.

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This book engages with the politics of social and environmental justice, and seeks 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. The book is divided into four parts. Part I describes the problematic nature of action and analysis at different scales of time and space, and introduces the reader to the modes of dialectical thinking and discourse which are used throughout the remainder of the work. Part II examines how "nature" and "environment" have been understood and valued in relation to processes of social change and seeks, from this basis, to make sense of contemporary environmental issues. Part III, is a wide-ranging discussion of history, geography and culture, explores the meaning of the social "production" of space and time, and clarifies problems related to "otherness" and "difference". The final part of the book deploys the foundational arguments the author has established to consider contemporary problems of social justice that have resulted from recent changes in geographical divisions of labor, in the environment, and in the pace and quality of urbanization. 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.

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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.

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From 1914 until 1969, when it was absorbed into WMPTE, Birmingham City Transport had various periods when they hired buses for evaluation. These demonstrators were tried out for a variety of reasons such as tramway feeder route development, expansion of the bus fleet to meet increasing passenger numbers, abandonment of tramcar services and expansion into the newly built municipal housing estates in the interwar and post-war periods. It tried out a wide variety of vehicles provided by both chassis and body manufacturers. This was to compare different manufacturers products, with a view to purchasing a substantial number of buses. BCT was the largest municipal operator in the UK, so this was a potentially lucrative opportunity for manufacturers. There were years when Birmingham had a large number of buses on hire in order to assess their performance, fuel economy and durability. 1923/4, 1929–1934, 1937, 1946/7,1955–1958 and 1960–1967 were the peak years for vehicle trials, of which very few were successful due to BCT's exacting requirements as well as their wish, where possible, to support local industry. A fascinating selection of buses were tested over the years.

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As Birmingham grew in the late Victorian and Edwardian period, the city slowly consumed farmland and small villages on its outskirts. With this growth came a need to transport workers to their jobs or for leisure. Firstly trams, and then buses would transport the worker or day tripper around the city. In Birmingham by the Bus David Harvey takes us on a nostalgic journey back in time, when it was possible to travel the city's roads without the congestion we see today. From open top trams and buses to roads any resident will be familiar with, David Harvey presents a collection of 200 fascinating images of the city, its workers and the public transport from the city centre to the Lickey Hills.

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Throughout their existence from 1904 until 1981, the Birmingham & Midland Motor Omnibus Company were an idiosyncratic operator whose area of operations ranged from the Welsh Marches and Shropshire in the West to Northamptonshire and Rutland in the East and from Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire in the South to Staffordshire and Derbyshire in the North. Much of their area was distinctly rural but in Birmingham and the Black Country, Worcester and Hereford, Stafford and Leicester, intense urban services were operated mainly by double-decker buses and it is these buses that this volume examines. Looking at the coaches that formed a part of this iconic fleet, David Harvey utilises his collection of rare and unpublished images to explore the fascinating world of Midland Red coaches.

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The first edition of this book, published in 1991 with the title The Common Agricultural Policy and the World Economy, was well received as a timely analysis of this fast-moving but important subject. However, several major developments, such as general CAP reform, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), expansion of the European Union, and relationships with eastern Europe, have justified the need for a new edition. As a result, the book has been thoroughly updated, with some completely new chapters added and others replaced. It has also be rewritten with a greater emphasis on the needs of students for a well-integrated, comprehensive textbook.

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This superb new collection of over 200 archive images, while guaranteed to fascinate bus enthusiasts, will also have huge appeal to the many thousands who have travelled the inner circle route or who simply have an interest in the history of Birmingham.Known in its time as the ‘Workmen’s Special’ the number 8 route served the workers for some of Birmingham’s best known employers, such as Lucas, Ansells Brewery, HP Sauce, B.S.A. and Bulpitts. Many will remember the Victorian back-to-backs on the route, demolished years ago, where many of those same workers lived before moving away to newly built estates.Not only do the scenes and the buses show just how much times have changed, the informative captions that accompany each picture remind us of a different era. Instead of radios and CCTV the standard equipment on the first buses included rope, spark plug, whistle, matches and a candle! This was a time when conductors would actually escort younger passengers from the bus right to their front door. Recalling the history of Birmingham through this novel perspective makes for a truly enthralling read.

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Here is one of the first books to assert that mass protest movements in disparate places such as Greece, Argentina, and the United States share an agenda-to raise the question of what democracy should mean. These horizontalist movements, including Occupy, exercise and claim participatory democracy as the ground of revolutionary social change today.Written by two international activist intellectuals and based on extensive interviews with movement participants in Spain, Venezuela, Japan, across the United States, and elsewhere, this book is both one of the most expansive portraits of the assemblies, direct democracy forums, and organizational forms championed by the new movements, and an analytical history of direct and participatory democracy from ancient Athens to Athens today. The new movements put forward the idea that liberal democracy is not democratic, nor was it ever.

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This is the first substantial study of Greek tragedies known to us only from small fragmentary remnants that have survived. The book discusses a variety of Greek tragic fragments from all three of the famous Athenian tragedians: Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. The recent publication of translations of some of these fragments (Sophocles in the Loeb series, and Euripides in the Aris and Phillips series) means that the fragments are now more readily available than ever for study. The large number of extant fragments of ancient Greek tragedy can tell us enormous amounts about that genre and about the society which produced it. Papyrus finds over the last hundred years have drastically altered and supplemented our knowledge of ancient Greek tragedy; the book is at the cutting-edge of research in this field.

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