Henri Lefebvre: Critique of Everyday Life

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: Introduction

by 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 Everyday

by 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.

Critique of Everyday Life Volume Three: From Modernity to Modernism

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:

Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord (1967) - full book online

Two Unpublished Notes on Architecture by Guy Debord (1959)

Two Unpublished Notes on Architecture

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Source: oeuvres. Gallimard, Paris, 2006;
Translated: from the original for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2008.

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Reflections on Architecture
Amsterdam may 29-June 2, 1959

1

The problem of architecture is not that of being seen from without or that of living within. It is in the dialectical relation interior-exterior, at the level of urbanism (houses-streets) and at the level of the house (interior-exterior).

2

All the facades of a house determine a “clear space” whose function is to play on the contradiction opening-closing.

3

Build an entire city in order to make love there with only one girl for few days.

4

The notion of the “street room” (H.O.) ^[1] reverses the false distinction of open and closed ambiences. The closed ambience itself opens onto the open ambience (which is demarcated by the closed ambiences).

On the architectural complex

Cf. Ors ^[2]. The baroque attitude (= contradiction) par excellence is wanting at one and the same time to follow the procession and to watch it pass (being inside the house and seeing it from a neighboring house).

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1. Har Oudejans – Dutche architect who joined the Situatonsit international in 1959. Expelled the next year for agreeing to build a church.

2. Eugenio d’Ors, author of Du baroque.