David Harvey's newest reviewed in Bookforum

The Fall issue of Bookforum, now available online, includes Scott McLemee’s review of David Harvey’s Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom.

In an intriguing move, McLemee situates Harvey’s work between the cosmopolitanism of Kant’s and that of Thomas Friedman, the frequent cheerleader globalization. McLemee writes, “David Harvey’s Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom [is] strangely timely. Harvey digs beneath the cosmopolitan doxa to a layer of Kant’s thought—his concern with geography—that has returned with a vengeance, even for those who only crib from thirdhand cribs of Kant’s corpus. For despite Friedman’s hectic urgings to the contrary, the world is not, as it happens, flat.”

McLemee continues by defining what distinguishes Harvey’s work:

But Harvey’s book is not, happily, just another reminder that Enlightenment thought was not so enlightened after all. Nor is it a polemic in which cosmopolitanism itself is unmasked as neoliberalism with a human face. Harvey’s patient and systematic labor here involves unpacking the notions about space, place, and the relation of culture and environment that are embedded in arguments about globalization.

For more on Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, you can read the book’s prologue and to view videos of David Harvey’s talks, visit davidharvey.org.