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

Social Justice and the City (Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation) by David Harvey

Throughout his distinguished and influential career, David Harvey has defined and redefined the relationship among politics, capitalism, and the social aspects of geographical theory. Laying out Harvey's position that geography could not remain objective in the face of urban poverty and associated ills, Social Justice and the City is perhaps the most widely cited work in the field.

Harvey analyzes core issues in city planning and policy--employment and housing location, zoning, transport costs, concentrations of poverty--asking in each case about the relationship between social justice and space. How, for example, do built-in assumptions about planning reinforce existing distributions of income? Rather than leading him to liberal, technocratic solutions, Harvey's line of inquiry pushes him in the direction of a "revolutionary geography," one that transcends the structural limitations of existing approaches to space. Harvey's emphasis on rigorous thought and theoretical innovation gives the volume an enduring appeal. This is a book that raises big questions, and for that reason geographers and other social scientists regularly return to it.

"One of the most influential books in human geography, Social Justice and the City is a generative work that has influenced decades of urban studies scholars. Harvey skillfully demonstrates the material forces that produce cities, urban geographies, and the problems that are often associated with them. In so doing, he opened up new territory for understanding some of the fundamental and enduring problems of the city." --Laura Pulido, author of Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles

"Several comfortable notions . . . are profoundly shaken in this extraordinary book." --Annals of the Association of American Geographers

"A penetrating analysis of contemporary urbanism which may indeed be the signal for a change of direction, if not a revolution, in geographic thought. The time is certainly ripe for this. But it will appeal to and stimulate many other disciplines and professions. It will be controversial for it brings into question concepts and values that are fundamental to our way of life." --Times Higher Education Supplement 

David Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His many books include A Brief History of Neoliberalism and Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development.