An Analysis of the Scientificity of the Critical Social Theory of the Marxist Geographer David Harvey

Abstract

This article presents the main theoretical foundations of the Marxist critical geographer David Harvey, who has influenced generations of geographers around the world since the 1960s. The objective is to analyze the scientificity of critical social theory, as well as to make an epistemological analysis of the economic theories elaborated by Harvey. The geographical analyzes based on David Harvey's philosophy of historical and materialistic dialectic converge on a critical theory of capitalism and social revolution. It is worth noting that even in his works considered close to postmodernist thought and regulation theory, the assumptions of determining the economic infrastructure and the vision of the class struggle as the engine of history were never abandoned. In his view, the contradictions of capital must be explained because they are universal and permeate other social contradictions. Because of that, it is possible to say that in David Harvey's work Marxism and postmodernism converge as analytical fields of critical social theory and are part of the critical-philosophical system of modern rationalist science. For this reason, it is possible to question the scientificity of geography proposed by Harvey in the light of the falsifiability criterion and based on the analysis of the context of justification as proposed by Karl Popper.

Keywords: Critical Social Theory; Scientific Paradigms; Philosophy of Science.