A Brief History of Neoliberalism - Rebel Studies …（新自由主义u2014u2014叛军研究简史u2026）.pdfVIP

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey, Oxford University Press, 2005, 256. pp. Michael J. Thompson David Harvey has established himself as one of the most insightful and politically relevant social scientists on the left. By extending Marxian political economy into new spheres of social reality – such as the urban environment and space – he has been able to make significant contributions to our understanding of the ways that capitalism shapes everyday life. His seminal work, Social Justice and the City, published over thirty years ago, in 1973, provoked a profound reorientation in urban studies and in the study of capitalism. Harvey proposed the important thesis that urbanism, the city, and all related phenomena, were epiphenomena to the processes of capital. Against the most important urban theorists of the time, such as Henri Lefebvre, whose influential book, The Urban Revolution, argued that the urban was a sphere into itself, separate and, indeed, capable of being a way of life which was anti-capitalist, Harvey reasserted the notion that capital structured space, the city, and the political and cultural life associated with it. Our attention, Harvey suggested, ought never to leave the processes of capital since it was capital that was the dominant force in modern social, and of course, urban, life. Social Justice and the City was a text that opened new avenues for urbanists to think about urbanisation, rent, culture and space. But it was also a book that charted a new intellectual path and project since Harvey saw that it was through the reading of Marx that we were able to grasp the dilemmas of urban space, and overcome the methodological problems of social science. Marx, after all, according to Harvey, had shown that – unlike the liberal paradigm that was, and