Commentary Stirrings in the attic: On the distinction between historical geographical materialism and critical realism Michael Samers University of Kentucky, USA Abstract Kevin Cox’s (2013) analysis of the distinction between historical geographical materialism (HGM) and critical realism (CR) offers a sharp and remarkably timely discussion, despite that the debate between HGM and CR appears to be buried to one degree or another in geography’s philosophical archives. Its timeliness stems from a relative exhaustion with post-structuralism in the 21st century, a continually explicit, or more likely implicit use of CR, and a return to Marxism in especially political ecology. Cox’s (2013) rehearsal of this debate impels us once more to think carefully, for example, about how we “abstract” in our research. While my commentary broadly concurs with Cox’s (2013) analysis of the distinction between HGM and CR and the significance of this debate, I suggest that his analysis would have benefitted from a dialogue with work in human geography over the last decade, which has addressed some thorny ontological and epistemological issues with respect to, let us say, dialectics and the notion of totality. By the same token, his apparent calls for a simple recovery of certain philosophical or methodological elements of HGM warrants further reflection. Nonetheless, I argue in my concluding section that for economic geography, at least, his excavation of the debate is vital insofar as a decade ago, economic geography began to embrace “relationality” as if the whole history of dialectics did not exist. In a similar way, practice-based economic geographies risk marginalizing theory and the problem of abstraction in the social sciences. Keywords critical realism, dialectics, economic geography, historical geographical materialism, post-structuralism Introduction Reading Kevin Cox’s (2013) paper reminds me of returning to a dusty chest in an attic. The chest has not been opened for quite some time, but longing to explore its contents and reconcile some philoso- phical memories, it is dusted off, and its ontological and epistemological heirlooms reassessed. The putative antiques in question are those of critical realist and historical materialist geographies, and while turning out to be extremely valuable for social research in the 21st century, the Corresponding author: Michael Samers, Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, 859 Patterson Office Tower, Lexington, KY, USA. Email: michael.samers@uky.edu Dialogues in Human Geography 3(1) 40–44 ª The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/2043820613485049 dhg.sagepub.com