ABSTRACT

After a prolonged period of virtual isolation and separate development, modern geography and Western Marxism crossed paths during the 1960s to begin what is now promising to become a mutually transformative encounter. At first, the connection between these two essentially 20th-century disciplines and discourses was peripheral and built primarily on a one-way flow of ideas. A distinctively Marxist geography took shape from an infusion of Western Marxist theory and method and formed part of a new critical human geography arising in the 1970s in response to the increasingly establishmentarian positivism of mainstream geographical analysis. The Marxist critique jostled some of the foundations of modern geography, but it remained inward-looking, unsettled in its critical stance, and largely unnoticed outside the disciplinary discourse.