ABSTRACT
Positivism (and philosophical idealism) remained Harvey's horizon of reference as he embarked upon his first job at the University of Bristol. There, he quickly homed in on a very Marxian problem, even if he initially offered a very non-Marxian solution:
how to unify knowledge in a discipline traditionally fragmented, cut up into various subdisciplines, each with its own rather fragile identity. There was regional geography here, economic geography there , political geography somewhere else. And that said nothing about land-use planning, industrial location, or urban geography, nor about physical geography. The discipline was plainly all over the place. It was bourgeois in every sense, in terms of form and content. Places, landscapes, events and people were all supposed to be unique, exceptional; there were no general principles, no capacity to derive laws, no points of overlap. "I wanted to do battle with this conception of geography," Harvey vowed, "by insisting on the need to understand geographical knowledge in some more systematic way." At the time,
1.;)4 statistical techniques and quantitative methods were growing in credibility, and "it seemed to me that the obvious resource here was the philosophical tradition of
positivism-which, in the 1960s, still had a very strong sense of the unity of science. That was why I took Hempel and Popper seriously. I thought there should be some way of using their philosophy of science to support the construction of a more unitary geographical knowledge.'" The fruit of this labor was the stunningly erudite Explanation in Geography, which helped spearhead geography's "quantitative revolution" and inspire a whole generation of "space cadets," on both sides of the Atlantic, who'd put their numbers where their mouths were and correlate geography into a legitimate "spatial science."
