Reinventing Radical Geography: Is All That's Left Right?

These are indeed both trying and heady times for radical geographers. Politically, many of us are feeling battered and bruised by backlashes against progressive ideas and politics. In the social sciences, the emergence of postmodern and poststructuralist philosophies, theories, and methods has deeply shaken our faith in modernist science, and in social theories and methods which claim broad and extensive explanatory power. Radical traditions of inquiry, in particular Marxism, have been subjected to severe and sweeping criticism as the “incarnation” of the flaws of rationalist social science (for example, Deutsche,1991; Harvey, 1992; Mouffe, 1988; Palmer, 1990). If every age has its demons, historical materialism is certainly a central one for postmodern scholars.