Richard Peet

J. Richard Peet (born 16 April 1940 in Southport, England) is a retired professor of human geography at the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University in Worcester MA, USA.

Peet received a BSc (Economics) from the London School of Economics, an M.A. from the University of British Columbia, and moved to the USA in the mid-1960s to complete a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley.

He began teaching at Clark University shortly after completing his PhD from Berkeley, remained there for over 50 years, with secondments in Australia, Sweden and New Zealand.

Peet’s areas of interest include social and economic geography, the geography of power, political ecology, liberation ecology, development theory, geography of consciousness and rationality, philosophy and social theory, and critical policy studies.

Peet’s doctoral research applied von Thunen’s theories to the global expansion of commercial agriculture.

However much of his later work was inspired by living in the racially and socially charged situation in America during the 1960s.

His early books and articles helped define the field of radical and critical geography.

Peet has written extensively on a variety of topics.

Along with other authors such as David Harvey he was part of a movement of radical geographers that have drawn on Marxist theory and techniques.

He uses the techniques of political economy, looking for interconnections and processes at a variety of scales and over time.

Peet believed that geography must do more than simply provide explanations and descriptions of problems studied, but rather attempt to propose alternatives.

His political economy focus received critique, from feminists and post-capitalist thinkers.

Peet was married twice, latterly to geographer Elaine Hartwick (1962-2022 ).

He had three children with her and at least one son from his previous marriage.

As of 2024, he lives in central Massachusetts.

Peet founded the radical journal of geography, Antipode at Clark University, in 1970 with Ben Wisner and other radical graduate students.

It is now one of the top 10 journals in the anglophone world of geography, but until 1978 it was housed in a basement room in the Graduate School of Geography, and until the late 70s, mimeographed from typewritten pages stapled by hand, then distributed by mail to subscribers.

During the 1980s and 1990s Peet's focus shifted to the politics and ecology of international development, particularly the systematic underdevelopment of nations peripheral to the capitalist west.

His work is critical of neo-liberal development theory and global governance institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization.

He was a supporter of the socialist revolution in Grenada, working there prior to the US invasion in 1983.

Peet was an editor until 1985, when the journal was sold to Blackwell, which later became Wiley.

He co-edited Economic Geography from 1992-1998.

In 2008 he founded a new independent journal, Human Geography: a new radical journal, free of the influence of large publishing houses.

It was sold to Sage Publishers, against the ethos of the journal, when he stood down.

He was last working on a book on global finance capital.