British geographer and Marxist theorist whose work at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York — and the online lectures on Capital that he has given for decades, viewed millions of times — have made him one of the most effective contemporary interpreters of Marx and one of the sharpest critics of Neoliberalism as a historical project. Harvey began as a positivist quantitative geographer in the 1960s; his 1973 Social Justice and the City announced a turn toward Marxist analysis that he has sustained, productively, for more than half a century.
His geographic framing is distinctive. Capital, for Harvey, is not an abstract market force but something that continually remakes physical space — building and abandoning cities, wiring suburbs, digging mines, paving over farmland, financializing housing — in order to stay in motion. The Limits to Capital (1982) is his dense theoretical masterwork; The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) reads the cultural shifts of the late 20th century as symptoms of capital's shift from rigid Fordist production to flexible, post-1973 accumulation. The book made him widely read beyond his own field.
A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) is his most influential general book — a concise historical account of Neoliberalism not as an economic theory but as a political project of class restoration, in which the breaking of organized labor, the capture of the state, financialization, and globalization have transferred income and political power upward for four decades. Harvey's narrative is narrower and sharper than Polanyi's or others', and has been enormously useful to subsequent critics, not all of them Marxist. His Companion to Marx's Capital (2010, 2013) remains the best introduction to the text.