ABSTRACT

This chapter argues that a dialogue is only possible between certain varieties of humanism and historical materialism, and that the insights of critical theory are particularly useful in identifying these variants. It also argues that humanism and historical materialism as represented in geography tend to reinforce rather than reverse this divorce. The chapter discusses some more mundane methodological aspects of the problem of synthesis, and of the attempt to interrelate the concerns of humanistic and Marxist research. The most surprising absence is critical theory, although humanistic Marxists with affinities to it such as Sartre and Raymond Williams are cited by several authors, particularly Audrey Kobayashi. Marxism has to recognize this primacy without falling, in the name of 'science', into a crass materialism which overlooks and suppresses, both in theory and practice, all the other interactively established dimensions. If synthesis requires the unification of different theories it implies the joining together of the different concerns of humanists and Marxists.