THEORY AND ESSENTIALISM IN MARXIST GEOGRAPHY

Many Marxist geographers are involved in the current attempt within human geography to create nonessentialist forms of social explanation. This project has been carried forward with great, though uneven, success. I argue that the concept of ‘theory’ is an area of our discourse where essentialism tenaciously persists. I explore some essentialist meanings of ‘theory’ in Marxist geography and offer a nonessentialist alternative meaning, embedded within an explicitly nonessentialist Marxism.