Criticism
Marxist geography's emphasis on constraints of structure upon human agency has been criticized extensively as deterministic, as not allowing for human agency and autonomy; human action appears determined by capitalism's structural mechanisms in Marxist analysis. By contrast, humanistic geography is a differing critical geography that concentrates on human will and autonomy in explaining geographical patterns. Unsurprisingly, much of the criticism directed at Marxists has emerged from the humanistic fold (although humanistic geography is itself seen as lacking for failing to account for behavioural constraints imposed by social structures).
Marxist geography is also subject to critiques of historical materialism and its applicability to modern-day post-industrial and capitalist societies. The importance placed by Marxists on the notion of class is also subject to critique. Marxist geographers have responded in kind to these polemics.
Read more about this topic: Marxist Geography
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)