Henri Lefebvre's magnum opus: a monumental exploration of contemporary society.
Henri Lefebvre’s three-volume Critique of Everyday Life is perhaps the richest, most prescient work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. Written at the birth of post-war consumerism, the Critique was a philosophical inspiration for the 1968 student revolution in France and is considered to be the founding text of all that we know as cultural studies, as well as a major influence on the fields of contemporary philosophy, geography, sociology, architecture, political theory and urbanism. A work of enormous range and subtlety, Lefebvre takes as his starting-point and guide the “trivial” details of quotidian experience: an experience colonized by the commodity, shadowed by inauthenticity, yet one which remains the only source of resistance and change.
This is an enduringly radical text, untimely today only in its intransigence and optimism.
Critique of Everyday Life Volume One: Introductionby Henri Lefebvre
Translated by John Moore
Preface by Michel Trebitsch
A groundbreaking analysis of the alienating phenomena of daily life under capitalism.
Critique of Everyday Life Volume Two: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everydayby Henri Lefebvre
Translated by John Moore
Preface by Michel Trebitsch
Identifies categories within everyday life, such as the theory of the semantic field and the theory of moments.
by Henri Lefebvre
Translated by Gregory Elliott
Preface by Michel Trebitsch
Explores the crisis of modernity and the decisive assertion of technological modernism.
Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991), former resistance fighter and professor of sociology at Strasbourg and Nanterre, was a member of the French Communist Party from 1928 until his expulsion in 1957. He was the author of sixty books on philosophy, sociology, politics, architecture and urbanism.
See also:
