Beautiful impossibility: a fifty-year retrospective on Social Justice and the City and David Harvey’s – and geography’s – journey into Marxism

Abstract

This brief paper introduces a double symposium: five authors reflecting on Social Justice and the City after fifty years, and two critically examining the recently published David Harvey: A Critical Introduction to his Thought (together with a response from the authors of that book). It offers a synopsis of the two symposia and focuses on one or two key points arising from each contribution in order to put them into conversation with each other. Along the way it indicates a few of the key reasons why, collectively, the authors in these symposia find Social Justice to be so worthy of continued close scrutiny, even after all these years, and why David Harvey is destined to become a ‘must read’. It reflects on how academic geography’s journey towards the ‘beautiful impossibility’ of a thorough, compelling, geographical analyses of the capitalist totality – the beautiful impossibility David Harvey has been aiming at for these fifty years – is just getting going.