Historical materialism, conjunctural theory, and Harvey's work on Paris
Katharyne MitchellIn this essay, I offer a brief discussion of a materialist conception of history and how this framework is used and developed by David Harvey in his work on Paris. I argue that Consciousness and the Urban Experience, his important monograph published in 1985, exemplifies historical materialist research that engages a general or 'authentic' history, relational theories of scale, and attention to the particularities of place. Moreover, it is attuned to the intersecting political, cultural, economic, and ideological forces of a specific city in a moment of crisis, and tacks back and forth between the particular and the general, as well as the empirical and the theoretical. For these reasons, I believe the work should be considered part of the genealogy of conjunctural geographies.