Notes on a brief encounter

Abstract

In human geography today little is heard any more about critical realism. A quarter of a century ago, it attracted attention because it seemed to offer a method for radical geographers and was accepted by some at least as such. Yet, despite the claim that Marx could be regarded as a critical realist before his time, there were always very significant differences from the methods of historical geographical materialism. These include different approaches to abstraction, to the distinction between internal and external relations, to causation and determination, to the question of change and to the relative merits of totalizing rather than pluralizing understandings of the world. These differences were poorly understood at the time and have never been critically examined. With a critical scrutiny as background, contrasting geographical practices can be re-evaluated. Although the author’s conclusion is that historical geographical materialism provides more convincing purchase on the world, the critical realist notion of structure provides an important means of understanding the accumulation process and its contradictory character. This is because it is through the elaboration of new structures of social relations or the transformation of old ones that capital seeks to suspend its contradictions. This insight also helps shed light on the very different concepts of space underpinning critical realist and Marxist understandings of human geography.