David Harvey

The 2016 prize winner is Professor David Harvey (New York City University) based on his book

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism, Oxford University Press, 2010.

Professor David Harvey’s main research area is economic geography, urban sociology, and Marxian economics. He has published more than 20 books, which have been translated into more than fifteen languages. Professor Harvey is one of the most influential Marxian political economists in the world.

In his earlier works Professor Harvey analyzed contemporary capitalism and developed the theoretical basis for a social movement that could establish an alternative system to capitalism (A Brief History of Neo-liberalism, OUP, 2005). He also rejuvenated global interest in Marx’s theory by publishing books such as A Companion to Marx’s Capital, Verso, 2013, and by giving lectures on Marx’s Capital on YouTube which attracted many audiences around the world.

The awarded book was published in 2010, and was awarded the Deutscher Prize. In 2011, a paperback version was selected as one of the Best 5 Books in Economics by the Guardian.

In the first half of the awarded book, Professor Harvey adopts the “multiple-causes theory” of crisis. He argues that “The profit-squeeze theory (the rising wage theory)”, “the theory of falling rate of profit”, and “the under-consumption theory” are not mutually exclusive theories; rather, they complement one another in explaining different causes of crisis. In the second half, he develops a co-evolutionary theory of capitalist development as well as a theory of geographical uneven development. The basic principle of capitalism is composed of two social DNA: “never-ending accumulation” and “compound growth”. Seven activity spheres - namely, production process, technology, the reproduction of daily life, social relations, relations to nature, mental conceptions of the world, and institutional and administrative arrangements – are relatively autonomous, but interact and co-evolve on the basis of the basic principle of capitalism. When the continuous flows of capital is impeded or stopped, a crisis and devaluation occurs. Even if some causes of crisis are avoided temporarily, crisis will never disappear, because of the emergence of other limits. He concludes that from the perspective of a “co-evolutionary” process, alternative social thoughts and anti-capitalism social movements can start anywhere in the world.

In sum, the book is the synthetic monograph of all his studies of Marxian economics. His intellectual achievement richly merits the 2016 JSPE Routledge Book Prize; it is our pleasure to award the 2016 Prize to Professor David Harvey.