Book review: Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, by David Harvey.

Abstract

The British geographer David Harvey, one of the exponents in the movement of the critical renewal of geographical science, is well known of Brazilian Geography. The book “Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom”, not yet published in Portuguese, is divided into two parts, in addition to a preface, a prologue and an epilogue. The first part, called “Universal Values”, has five chapters. The second part, “Geographical Knowledges”, in turn, has four chapters. In the first part of the book, Harvey's concern is the discussion of contemporary issues in the light of a geographical perspective. Hence the need to guide a discussion of universal values ​​that arise in a proposal that comes from the Kantian tradition, passing through liberalism, conservatism, neoliberalism, religion, humanism, socialism, and all the utopias that, thus, clash with concrete and particular cases. Harvey then dialogues with several theorists from different sources who call attention to the need to build responses and alternatives to universal cosmopolitanism anchored in concepts that, in a way, place geographic knowledge at the center. However, these theorizations, such as the post-colonial perspective, even fighting liberal cosmopolitanism, succumbed in the construction of oppositions that make difficult the elaboration of a more global alternative, such as the opposition between space and place, harshly criticized by Harvey.