Reinventing human geography

David Harvey is the most significant contributor ever to the academic field of human geography as well as to how it might be practiced to advance progressive social causes. Among his contemporaries, he is easily the most cited, simply towering other human geographers. Through his exploration of Marxism and what it might mean for geographic understanding, he revolutionized it. He provided frameworks of understanding that have transformed concrete studies across the field, even while to many he has remained a provocation. It has also worked the other way around. Harvey provided a geographic dimension to Marx's totality of relations hitherto lacking. As a result, he has had major impacts on the thinking of Marxists in other fields. Particular attention is paid to his work on the idea of totality, geography as an aspect of it, so that other aspects are impossible not only to conceive without it but also how the totality of capitalist social relations, always in a process of becoming has given capitalist geographies a very particular form. There is then his impact on the field. Despite his recognition, this could have been better. On the one hand, there are those clearly influenced by him in a highly sympathetic way. On the other hand, there are those who are skeptical in a more fundamental way, though without questioning their own basic assumptions. Marx is not easy. David Harvey revolutionized human geography by showing how his arguments could be applied to human geography.