After Variety

Abstract

Abstract The goals of this chapter are primarily epistemological. It begins by re-engaging with some of the motivating themes of the book—the distinctive analytical perspective of geographical political economy, critiques of varieties-of-capitalism orthodoxies and ideal-typical reasoning, the challenge of working substantively, with and through sociospatial difference—in order to build a case for theorizing capitalist diversity through the lens of uneven and combined development. The concept of uneven development has a checkered history all of its own. Often deemed to be a source of unnecessary complications in the “non-spatial” social sciences, even the critical ones, uneven geographical development is a staple concern for economic geographers in general and geographical political economists in particular, yet even here it can sometimes assume taken-for-granted status. This chapter asks what it means to transcend the “background” status to which uneven and combined development is often assigned, engaging it instead in a more methodologically active manner, including the problematization of its often-silent c, combination.