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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.
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.
312 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1947
About the author
Henri Lefebvre
153 books391 followersHenri Lefebvre was a French sociologist, Marxist intellectual, and philosopher, best known for pioneering the critique of everyday life, for introducing the concepts of the right to the city and the production of social space, and for his work on dialectics, alienation, and criticism of Stalinism, existentialism, and structuralism.
In his prolific career, Lefebvre wrote more than sixty books and three hundred articles. He founded or took part in the founding of several intellectual and academic journals such as Philosophies, La Revue Marxiste, Arguments, Socialisme et Barbarie, Espaces et Sociétés.
Lefebvre died in 1991. In his obituary, Radical Philosophy magazine honored his long and complex career and influence:
the most prolific of French Marxist intellectuals, died during the night of 28–29 June 1991, less than a fortnight after his ninetieth birthday. During his long career, his work has gone in and out of fashion several times, and has influenced the development not only of philosophy but also of sociology, geography, political science and literary criticism.
In his prolific career, Lefebvre wrote more than sixty books and three hundred articles. He founded or took part in the founding of several intellectual and academic journals such as Philosophies, La Revue Marxiste, Arguments, Socialisme et Barbarie, Espaces et Sociétés.
Lefebvre died in 1991. In his obituary, Radical Philosophy magazine honored his long and complex career and influence:
the most prolific of French Marxist intellectuals, died during the night of 28–29 June 1991, less than a fortnight after his ninetieth birthday. During his long career, his work has gone in and out of fashion several times, and has influenced the development not only of philosophy but also of sociology, geography, political science and literary criticism.
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November 29, 2019
I’ve read two books in quick succession – this one and de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life – and I have to say French Philosophers can be a pain in the arse. I don’t mind them being obscure so much, but it would be nice if they actually talked about what it was they said they were going to talk about in their books. I think I got totally lost when de Certeau started talking about Bourdieu and Foucault – which is a bit strange, because I’ve actually read books by these guys and have even read all of the one’s de Certeau refers to. So, I don’t think it was outrageous for me to imagine I would be in with a chance of understanding what he was talking about. No such luck, though. And as for ‘everyday life’ – I had thought I had a bit of experience with that too. I mean, his book wasn’t called the experience of rocket surgery…
I found this easier to understand than de Certeau’s. I am going to eventually read the second volume of this one – if only because I’m a bit perverse like that. Even so, there were quite a few things in this that really annoyed me.
First of all – this book is showing its age. It was written by a Marxist from just after WW2. It sees Marxism as the sole means of understanding the world. It also stresses that the communist parties have misunderstood materialist dialectics and the importance of philosophy. It also stresses that the ideas of early Marx on alienation (and therefore sociology) are essential to understanding the later Marx’s ideas on politics and economics. All of this is probably true enough – but this is also likely to be a debate that is of limited interest to readers today who wouldn’t know materialist dialectics from Hegelian phenomenology. As such, it does read strangely 70 odd years later. And he spends so long on this stuff that you start to think, when are we going to get to everyday life?
That is made worse by the fact that the preface, almost entirely on the same theme, takes up nearly half of the text.
I read both Lefebvre and de Certeau for more or less the same reason. I’ve become a bit obsessed with an idea that comes out of Marx. That is, that humans make their own world and that this also makes their lives, but never quite from whole cloth – that is, we have to make do with what is available and cobble our lives together – or as the French like to say, ‘bricolage’. For Marx, the essential thing about being human is ‘work’ – but by this he meant that we work to make our own world in our own image, but that in making that world we engage in a kind of feedback loop, since our world makes us at the same time. Increasingly, every aspect of our world is made by humans so as to also make us certain kinds of people. That is, every aspect of our world had been built and designed often with the express purpose of making us more and more suitable ‘neoliberal subjects’ – that is, keen purchasers who are constantly aware of our duty to work and to consume.
Let me give you an example that has been particularly getting under my skin over the last few weeks. I went to Bali recently and a friend of mine recommended someone to drive us around. Actually, the driver was one of the highlights of the trip, because we got to talk to him for a full day about stuff we could never have found out otherwise – like: how does Balinese Hinduism differ from the Indian variety, what do the Balinese think of the Indonesians, what do the Balinese think of the Australians… He was, of course, far too polite to answer any of these questions as fully as we might have liked, but since we had no other access to native Balinese, this was as good as it was likely to get.
Except, all of this was only part of what I learnt. One of the other things didn’t become clear until I was back in Australia. And it relates to one of the things Lefebvre says in this, that capitalism is centrally concerned with atomising us. I think this is a fairly uncontroversial statement, as far as it goes – Margaret Thatcher even says much the same thing. But one of the things that has annoyed me over the last few years is how it is almost totally impossible to get around Melbourne (and this is definitely true of Bali too) if you can’t drive. Our public transport system is okay – but it pales in comparison to say London’s or Paris’s. We are told we ‘can’t afford’ a better public system, but really the system we currently have is a choice. We also have a very expensive private transport system – one that costs us perhaps a thousand times more than what a very good public transport system would cost. Actually, it probably costs us much more than that. We drive cars, but for most of the car’s life it is parked. A car, of course, costs more than the cost of the car, but also the cost of the roads it is to drive on – and these are generally funded from the public purse. Even if a public transport system was empty half of the time, it would likely be more cost effective than our current private car system. Which brings me back to Thatcher. She is supposed to have said at some stage, “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure.”
The thing is that driving in a car does a number of things that reinforce the ideology of capitalism – that is, that makes it common sense to live a life that confirms to the existing order, while simultaneously rejecting any alternatives that might otherwise be much better sense.
First of all, when driving a car, you feel like you are in control of yourself in ways that you clearly are not in a bus or a train. You are moving about in what feels very much like your own space in a car – you can have your own music playing, for instance, but even if it is completely silent, you still feel like you are in ‘your’ space. You can change your mind and change lanes or your route or even your destination at your own whim. You are ‘atomised’ in the sense you are likely to feel like you don’t rely on the needs of other people. But really, much of this is myth. No one really gets all that much joy from spending hours in a traffic jam, and the more cars there are the more likely it is that our road systems will not cope with the load. And how ‘free’ you feel stuck in traffic is very much open for discussion. Still, our lived experience with our private transport system (owning our own car) does not seem to undermine our love of this ‘freedom’ – even if the word ‘commute’ feels like a four letter word.
And that is pretty much what I was hoping I would learn more in this book – in fact, of the two books I’ve been talking about here.
In some ways this book does do that. For instance, there is a chapter called Notes Written One Sunday in the French Countryside. He wanders into a church and then talks to us about the conflicting emotions he feels – as an ex-believer, the smell of the incense, the desire to believe again, his various ‘escape routes’ from the organised religion of his past. How he plotted to ‘bring the church down’ through revelation or by starting cults and so on. This was all interesting in its own way, but what particularly caught my attention was that he makes it clear that the church often wins these battles, not by force of argument, but rather by force of custom.
So, saying adieu – meaning ‘goodbye’ – literally means ‘to god’ – or ‘I commend you to god’. In Italian, for instance, what we might say in English as ‘you are welcome’ becomes ‘prego’ – literally, ‘I pray’. It is not that this stuff is meaningless – you only have to listen to Trump talking about the ‘war on Christmas’. You know, a war that he has stopped, and now allows people to say ‘merry Christmas’ again, after the ‘socialist republic of Obama’ forced everyone to say happy holidays… this stuff means things, and it shapes how we behave. If Trump makes a mistake it is that the more these things are left unconscious, the more they shape how we behave. Because not thinking about these things means not questioning them. This is much the same as when we used to unthinkingly say ‘mankind’ – or when the universal person was always a ‘he’. That we are now ‘humanity’ and the universal person has become ‘they’ is a significant step forward – even if it isn’t nearly enough.
He spends a lot of this saying that literature has proven a popular way to understand ‘everyday life’, but that really too much has been said about literature and not nearly enough about everyday life. The problem is that he then spends so much time talking about literature – Kafka, Flaubert, Brecht – and that makes his protests all ring a little hollow.
Like I said, I wanted this to look more at the literal events of everyday life – to do more to show what he meant. I wanted this to be the case because I really do think there are interesting things to learn from the study of everyday life – Bourdieu’s Distinction being a case in point, which is perhaps the book I was hoping this would be. Too much of this is the assertion of the superiority of Marxism in endlessly bland and general terms, and not enough of this is ‘proof’ of that superiority by showing how Marxism allows us to see the otherwise obscure meaning behind social behaviours.
I want to end with one of the things he says that I’d never thought about before and am surprised had never occurred to me. He was talking about religion and life for those in the countryside and he said that often those living in social systems that depended on farming need to have a strict balance to the number of people that can live in their society at any one time. That is, that the society can only support so many people, too many and they all starve, too few and there aren’t enough people to do the work. This would then mean having some sort of ‘birth control’ that would regulate the numbers of people the society can have. I knew about this, obviously enough. The Australian Aboriginal communities have practiced this kind of birth control forever – or for 60,000 years, whichever is longer. But what he said that made my head spin was that such communities are also likely to believe in reincarnation. That is, that since there are only so many spaces available to be filled, each of those spaces needs to filled by you in place of one of your ancestors – so that you become the reincarnation of that ancestor. Now – isn’t that interesting?
I found this easier to understand than de Certeau’s. I am going to eventually read the second volume of this one – if only because I’m a bit perverse like that. Even so, there were quite a few things in this that really annoyed me.
First of all – this book is showing its age. It was written by a Marxist from just after WW2. It sees Marxism as the sole means of understanding the world. It also stresses that the communist parties have misunderstood materialist dialectics and the importance of philosophy. It also stresses that the ideas of early Marx on alienation (and therefore sociology) are essential to understanding the later Marx’s ideas on politics and economics. All of this is probably true enough – but this is also likely to be a debate that is of limited interest to readers today who wouldn’t know materialist dialectics from Hegelian phenomenology. As such, it does read strangely 70 odd years later. And he spends so long on this stuff that you start to think, when are we going to get to everyday life?
That is made worse by the fact that the preface, almost entirely on the same theme, takes up nearly half of the text.
I read both Lefebvre and de Certeau for more or less the same reason. I’ve become a bit obsessed with an idea that comes out of Marx. That is, that humans make their own world and that this also makes their lives, but never quite from whole cloth – that is, we have to make do with what is available and cobble our lives together – or as the French like to say, ‘bricolage’. For Marx, the essential thing about being human is ‘work’ – but by this he meant that we work to make our own world in our own image, but that in making that world we engage in a kind of feedback loop, since our world makes us at the same time. Increasingly, every aspect of our world is made by humans so as to also make us certain kinds of people. That is, every aspect of our world had been built and designed often with the express purpose of making us more and more suitable ‘neoliberal subjects’ – that is, keen purchasers who are constantly aware of our duty to work and to consume.
Let me give you an example that has been particularly getting under my skin over the last few weeks. I went to Bali recently and a friend of mine recommended someone to drive us around. Actually, the driver was one of the highlights of the trip, because we got to talk to him for a full day about stuff we could never have found out otherwise – like: how does Balinese Hinduism differ from the Indian variety, what do the Balinese think of the Indonesians, what do the Balinese think of the Australians… He was, of course, far too polite to answer any of these questions as fully as we might have liked, but since we had no other access to native Balinese, this was as good as it was likely to get.
Except, all of this was only part of what I learnt. One of the other things didn’t become clear until I was back in Australia. And it relates to one of the things Lefebvre says in this, that capitalism is centrally concerned with atomising us. I think this is a fairly uncontroversial statement, as far as it goes – Margaret Thatcher even says much the same thing. But one of the things that has annoyed me over the last few years is how it is almost totally impossible to get around Melbourne (and this is definitely true of Bali too) if you can’t drive. Our public transport system is okay – but it pales in comparison to say London’s or Paris’s. We are told we ‘can’t afford’ a better public system, but really the system we currently have is a choice. We also have a very expensive private transport system – one that costs us perhaps a thousand times more than what a very good public transport system would cost. Actually, it probably costs us much more than that. We drive cars, but for most of the car’s life it is parked. A car, of course, costs more than the cost of the car, but also the cost of the roads it is to drive on – and these are generally funded from the public purse. Even if a public transport system was empty half of the time, it would likely be more cost effective than our current private car system. Which brings me back to Thatcher. She is supposed to have said at some stage, “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure.”
The thing is that driving in a car does a number of things that reinforce the ideology of capitalism – that is, that makes it common sense to live a life that confirms to the existing order, while simultaneously rejecting any alternatives that might otherwise be much better sense.
First of all, when driving a car, you feel like you are in control of yourself in ways that you clearly are not in a bus or a train. You are moving about in what feels very much like your own space in a car – you can have your own music playing, for instance, but even if it is completely silent, you still feel like you are in ‘your’ space. You can change your mind and change lanes or your route or even your destination at your own whim. You are ‘atomised’ in the sense you are likely to feel like you don’t rely on the needs of other people. But really, much of this is myth. No one really gets all that much joy from spending hours in a traffic jam, and the more cars there are the more likely it is that our road systems will not cope with the load. And how ‘free’ you feel stuck in traffic is very much open for discussion. Still, our lived experience with our private transport system (owning our own car) does not seem to undermine our love of this ‘freedom’ – even if the word ‘commute’ feels like a four letter word.
And that is pretty much what I was hoping I would learn more in this book – in fact, of the two books I’ve been talking about here.
In some ways this book does do that. For instance, there is a chapter called Notes Written One Sunday in the French Countryside. He wanders into a church and then talks to us about the conflicting emotions he feels – as an ex-believer, the smell of the incense, the desire to believe again, his various ‘escape routes’ from the organised religion of his past. How he plotted to ‘bring the church down’ through revelation or by starting cults and so on. This was all interesting in its own way, but what particularly caught my attention was that he makes it clear that the church often wins these battles, not by force of argument, but rather by force of custom.
So, saying adieu – meaning ‘goodbye’ – literally means ‘to god’ – or ‘I commend you to god’. In Italian, for instance, what we might say in English as ‘you are welcome’ becomes ‘prego’ – literally, ‘I pray’. It is not that this stuff is meaningless – you only have to listen to Trump talking about the ‘war on Christmas’. You know, a war that he has stopped, and now allows people to say ‘merry Christmas’ again, after the ‘socialist republic of Obama’ forced everyone to say happy holidays… this stuff means things, and it shapes how we behave. If Trump makes a mistake it is that the more these things are left unconscious, the more they shape how we behave. Because not thinking about these things means not questioning them. This is much the same as when we used to unthinkingly say ‘mankind’ – or when the universal person was always a ‘he’. That we are now ‘humanity’ and the universal person has become ‘they’ is a significant step forward – even if it isn’t nearly enough.
He spends a lot of this saying that literature has proven a popular way to understand ‘everyday life’, but that really too much has been said about literature and not nearly enough about everyday life. The problem is that he then spends so much time talking about literature – Kafka, Flaubert, Brecht – and that makes his protests all ring a little hollow.
Like I said, I wanted this to look more at the literal events of everyday life – to do more to show what he meant. I wanted this to be the case because I really do think there are interesting things to learn from the study of everyday life – Bourdieu’s Distinction being a case in point, which is perhaps the book I was hoping this would be. Too much of this is the assertion of the superiority of Marxism in endlessly bland and general terms, and not enough of this is ‘proof’ of that superiority by showing how Marxism allows us to see the otherwise obscure meaning behind social behaviours.
I want to end with one of the things he says that I’d never thought about before and am surprised had never occurred to me. He was talking about religion and life for those in the countryside and he said that often those living in social systems that depended on farming need to have a strict balance to the number of people that can live in their society at any one time. That is, that the society can only support so many people, too many and they all starve, too few and there aren’t enough people to do the work. This would then mean having some sort of ‘birth control’ that would regulate the numbers of people the society can have. I knew about this, obviously enough. The Australian Aboriginal communities have practiced this kind of birth control forever – or for 60,000 years, whichever is longer. But what he said that made my head spin was that such communities are also likely to believe in reincarnation. That is, that since there are only so many spaces available to be filled, each of those spaces needs to filled by you in place of one of your ancestors – so that you become the reincarnation of that ancestor. Now – isn’t that interesting?
February 24, 2018
I'm very impressed that Volume 1 (273 pages) of the three-part "Critique of Everyday Life" is basically the introduction to the series. Henri Lefebvre does not fool around. One of the first books to focus on the consumption of the 20th-century individual, and how one is placed in such a world. Lefebvre is in good terms with literature, cinema, and history in marking his critical stance in how systems rule the world in such a manner that leaves citizens alienated even in their own culture. His writing is not dry, and I'm more in tuned when he writes about Charlie Chaplin or Charles Baudelaire, but I feel I should read Karl Marx, instead of knowing him through other books. Without a doubt an important book that I think even today (Critique of Everyday Life was written in the 1950s) is essential to what's going on in the world. As things get worse in our contemporary lives, the book makes more sense.
January 5, 2016
Everyone, in its quest to make sense out of this skydive-without-parachute experience called 'life', creates a personal mythology. We elaborate, some with more craft than others, a divine collage of our own history and social ideas that carefully hides the unbearable senselessness of existence. The social aspect of this is, in brevity, a collection of doctrines, usually condensed in words that Plato would love to show us we don't really understand, but that anyway have a profound influence on our behavior: liberty, freedom, democracy (the American holy trinity), and a big and interesting etc. Lefebvre's suggestion is revolutionary for a marxist intellectual: ignore and avoid such concepts, as they only lead to alienation, unless we are able to find them ourselves in our every-day life. Start, that is, from the beginning, 'you' and 'what you did today'. Take a step back from the empty intelectual world of grandiose words and observe how your daily actions are both cause and effect of the social. In sum: understand from your particular.
I believe that interpreting the everyday on an ideological level is a powerful start to, first, construct any new social structure, as anything that is not based and sustained on the daily material world is bound to collapse under the immense power of customs and routine: man is a creature of habit. And second, to improve our lives, by living in concordance with society and carefully aware of our own actions; to descend from the world of ideas into the cave, set the fire, sit down, relax, and think deeply about the things that matter, the daily.
An excellent read for the 30 year olds in crisis. It is unfortunately too marxist at some spots, mainly because of historical reasons, but the book is otherwise filled with incisive insights that suggest a new way of thinking of 'the social' that seems, surprisingly, to have a future.
I believe that interpreting the everyday on an ideological level is a powerful start to, first, construct any new social structure, as anything that is not based and sustained on the daily material world is bound to collapse under the immense power of customs and routine: man is a creature of habit. And second, to improve our lives, by living in concordance with society and carefully aware of our own actions; to descend from the world of ideas into the cave, set the fire, sit down, relax, and think deeply about the things that matter, the daily.
An excellent read for the 30 year olds in crisis. It is unfortunately too marxist at some spots, mainly because of historical reasons, but the book is otherwise filled with incisive insights that suggest a new way of thinking of 'the social' that seems, surprisingly, to have a future.
December 30, 2015
You guys, help. I hate theory SO MUCH.
August 25, 2018
What I found most intriguing about this work is in how, as a “critique of everyday life,” Lefebvre is trying not to dispel but deepen everyday life. I had been much taken by Surrealism in my early twenties but became disillusioned by it without quite understanding why. As presented here, it is in its denial of quotidian existence, in its search for an other than. No, it is already here. In what we already have. I really liked how Lefebvre asks us to revitalize writers like Kierkegaard and Baudelaire by requiring that we embed their words in our world rather than take them as a quest for something other. It is almost a synthesizing of the antithesis in lived reality.
Of most importance though is Lefebvre’s critique of individualism. As much as I am enchanted by existentialism the radical individuality presented by the likes of Sartre and Camus never quite settled in with me. I maintained these writers but with a disquieted mind. It had always held dearly to Heidegger’s Mitsein (Being-with) for this reason without exactly being able to resolve the issue. Lefebvre puts into words these doubts I have had and presents a more fundamentally dialectical interpretation of lived reality in its materialist implications.
The feelings I get of Lefebvre is that he is a mix of Marx and Nietzsche. However, this gets him in some trouble. The penultimate chapter is a panegyric towards a bygone time. The fault is in trying to make a sociology out of periods of humanity that are inaccessible. Nietzsche was able to do so in his Birth of Tragedy because he was a philologist exploring documented artistic expression. Lefebvre is trying to make a scientific/Marxist interpretation of postulates. This cannot be. Granted, it leads up to a wonderful discourse on religion – one that is beautifully crafted and well executed. I fear he felt the preamble was necessary to get to this but given that his whole thesis is on alienation he could have started from there.
Of most importance though is Lefebvre’s critique of individualism. As much as I am enchanted by existentialism the radical individuality presented by the likes of Sartre and Camus never quite settled in with me. I maintained these writers but with a disquieted mind. It had always held dearly to Heidegger’s Mitsein (Being-with) for this reason without exactly being able to resolve the issue. Lefebvre puts into words these doubts I have had and presents a more fundamentally dialectical interpretation of lived reality in its materialist implications.
The feelings I get of Lefebvre is that he is a mix of Marx and Nietzsche. However, this gets him in some trouble. The penultimate chapter is a panegyric towards a bygone time. The fault is in trying to make a sociology out of periods of humanity that are inaccessible. Nietzsche was able to do so in his Birth of Tragedy because he was a philologist exploring documented artistic expression. Lefebvre is trying to make a scientific/Marxist interpretation of postulates. This cannot be. Granted, it leads up to a wonderful discourse on religion – one that is beautifully crafted and well executed. I fear he felt the preamble was necessary to get to this but given that his whole thesis is on alienation he could have started from there.
August 6, 2011
Henri Lefebvre kind of invented cultural studies with this book, in 1947! Lefebvre is circuitous, contradictory, poetic, sharp and savvy with a perceptive eye for the ordinary as the essence of an issue. The 'Foreword', about 100 pages long, is a superb introduction to his work and ideas with excellent explorations of work and leisure, of alienation, and of the importance of Bertold Brecht and Charlie Chaplin to left-of-centre political struggles. He makes a powerful case throughout for the importance of Marxism as both an analytical tool and as the basis for action. This is a key piece of work in the developments that took Lefebvre away from the French Communist Party's slavish Stalinism and that led to his marginalisation in favour of Sartre and Althusser, as well as his influence on the Situationists and others in the events of May '68 and earlier. Lefebvre's 'rediscovery' since the early 1990s alongside the increasingly marginalisation of both Sartre and Althusser in both scholarship and politics is welcome.
It is the first of three volumes where he explores the meanings and experiences of the ordinary, and develops some of our theoretical and conceptual tools for analysing that mundane world. Frustrating, annoying, quite one of the most important books I've ever read.
It is the first of three volumes where he explores the meanings and experiences of the ordinary, and develops some of our theoretical and conceptual tools for analysing that mundane world. Frustrating, annoying, quite one of the most important books I've ever read.
October 15, 2008
this is really interesting, forward thinking stuff. the thing is, it is not written like philosophy. it is somewhat stream of consciousness, leaving a ton of room for interpretation. which is why it's still important, since every lefty academic thinks they get it since it can be interpreted in whatever form of neo-post-whatever they like. worth reading for the digs at existentialism and sartre alone, though.
November 14, 2020
An extremely challenging, often opaque book that yields great riches in its analysis of the deforming forces of commodification and their effect on human society and being.
September 18, 2017
I remember I picked up this book because I wanted to know how to overcome the first step in fighting back against the system of capitalism, and what it is that ought to be targeted. According to Lefebvre, it is the alienation from our work, people, time, activity, and our minds. And I agree with him, alienation, or in other words how capitalism dehumanizes us from the human experience is why people will cling to their ideologies, and some even insist a love of capitalism. Like how Lefebvre argues that the most disturbing thing about concentration camps is how close they operate to a regular capitalist town, the real horror is how cushy we are with people living in squalor and how the bourgeoisie is simply a fact of life.
So what does Henry suggest we ought to do? I think this process goes something like this: we need people, our comrades, to look to the present day and understand how the everyday effects our perceptions of society. Then we need to fight for things that will change our everyday experience, whether it's creating new technologies that are available to everyone, limiting the work week to 48 hours, or any other tactics that might apply. Gradually, these victories in changing the everyday life can set us on a course for socialism. Of course, Lefebvre doesn't advocate for a simple reform, he is a Marxist after all, and I agree that a party that is able to collect the people that can carry the task out of changing the everyday life is necessary, and that will be the social force to spark a revolution. I can see that alot of it might be conflicting with other Marxist views, but this seems like a practical way to change our communities, and the most necessary. I also like how Lefebvre describes the power of art, but that action is what inspires art, and vice versa. That art gets to the bottom of our consciousness and is a great avenue in understanding how our societies, collectively, think.
So what does Henry suggest we ought to do? I think this process goes something like this: we need people, our comrades, to look to the present day and understand how the everyday effects our perceptions of society. Then we need to fight for things that will change our everyday experience, whether it's creating new technologies that are available to everyone, limiting the work week to 48 hours, or any other tactics that might apply. Gradually, these victories in changing the everyday life can set us on a course for socialism. Of course, Lefebvre doesn't advocate for a simple reform, he is a Marxist after all, and I agree that a party that is able to collect the people that can carry the task out of changing the everyday life is necessary, and that will be the social force to spark a revolution. I can see that alot of it might be conflicting with other Marxist views, but this seems like a practical way to change our communities, and the most necessary. I also like how Lefebvre describes the power of art, but that action is what inspires art, and vice versa. That art gets to the bottom of our consciousness and is a great avenue in understanding how our societies, collectively, think.
December 31, 2022
Not typically a huge leftist theory nerd, but got a strong enough recommendation on this one and really loved it. Wish I'd reviewed sooner after reading because would have had more to say. Writing isn't what I would call accessible but for a text of this type it's surprisingly readable and does a good job defining its terms and repeating itself.
Has a clear vision of what is important, that being everyday , day to day existence, both in terms of what's wrong with the current system and what is important when implementing the economies of the future- what good is a revolution if it does not impact the daily lives of the people that it claimed to be fighting for? To the end of the failings of the current system, Lefebvre zooms in on alienation, of people being disconnected from their work because they have no control over what they do or how their employer operates, as well as being disconnected from the facts of everyday life outside the home because of it- the idea of a total disconnect from work and life rather than them being integrated. Lefebvre forsees the future anti-work movements and strongly repudiates them- recognizing the importance of work to both the functioning of society and the spirit of man, while acknowledging the current mode of production has made it so that work does not properly fulfill either of those needs. Much of this is an acknowledgement of incomplete information- one, on the existing knowledge of everyday life, and there are many thoughts on how to properly study and capture that, and two, of what the future "total man" would like, a man unburdened by alienation- he theorizes, but acknowledges that is impossible to know until man reaches that point.
There's plenty of other stuff I'm neglecting, including a wholesale critique of religion taken from the French countryside, where all alienation in life is funneled into the church and totally captured, but there's a lot here and I read it a month ago. Found this one overall to be both interesting and life-affirming, taking the small moments and tedium and elevating to the level of political importance in a way I hadn't really seen.
Has a clear vision of what is important, that being everyday , day to day existence, both in terms of what's wrong with the current system and what is important when implementing the economies of the future- what good is a revolution if it does not impact the daily lives of the people that it claimed to be fighting for? To the end of the failings of the current system, Lefebvre zooms in on alienation, of people being disconnected from their work because they have no control over what they do or how their employer operates, as well as being disconnected from the facts of everyday life outside the home because of it- the idea of a total disconnect from work and life rather than them being integrated. Lefebvre forsees the future anti-work movements and strongly repudiates them- recognizing the importance of work to both the functioning of society and the spirit of man, while acknowledging the current mode of production has made it so that work does not properly fulfill either of those needs. Much of this is an acknowledgement of incomplete information- one, on the existing knowledge of everyday life, and there are many thoughts on how to properly study and capture that, and two, of what the future "total man" would like, a man unburdened by alienation- he theorizes, but acknowledges that is impossible to know until man reaches that point.
There's plenty of other stuff I'm neglecting, including a wholesale critique of religion taken from the French countryside, where all alienation in life is funneled into the church and totally captured, but there's a lot here and I read it a month ago. Found this one overall to be both interesting and life-affirming, taking the small moments and tedium and elevating to the level of political importance in a way I hadn't really seen.
October 17, 2024
read volume I with hf. 3am & mid emotional storm thoughts again but striking in its specificity to um well, everyday life, and the simple profundity of its message. A little Marxian (as in the writer not the tradition) in its almost plain-speaking but discrete diction & prose--though as the very French intellectual flair indicates it can function as a screed & gossip book as much as a rigorous text. but certainly the one of the few french books to really answer "the point is to *change it!*" part of marx's call. some memorable points are him writing abt the 1) surrealists 2)non-monogamy 3) MONEY especially i thought that section was rlly good and 4) anytime he really contrasts his ideology with the ideology of social convention. anytime he wrote about private consciousness my eyes perked up a little--very effective in capturing the lack of meaning in the bourgeois lifestyle & alienation from what is human. & also the mystifications one goes under to cope with the pressures of everyday. lots of highlights i should transpose to my personal notebook
thought quite a bit about
1) the part in chapter 6 where he writes man considers his community to be his relationships his house his wealth his family--rather than the extensive community of *man* and *workers* at large. (thought my own personal dating history vs. the life of like KA in particular)
2) the money section and how he underlies the value and sanctification of money both as bourgeois aspiration and a iron railing of modern existence (thought about something oof said "he has never had the experience of making sure ur income is low enough to stay on medicaid long enough for surgery")
3) my heart and what to do with my life :( its certainly a book that summoned a lot of introspection & conversations
thought quite a bit about
1) the part in chapter 6 where he writes man considers his community to be his relationships his house his wealth his family--rather than the extensive community of *man* and *workers* at large. (thought my own personal dating history vs. the life of like KA in particular)
2) the money section and how he underlies the value and sanctification of money both as bourgeois aspiration and a iron railing of modern existence (thought about something oof said "he has never had the experience of making sure ur income is low enough to stay on medicaid long enough for surgery")
3) my heart and what to do with my life :( its certainly a book that summoned a lot of introspection & conversations
March 25, 2024
I wish I could provide a more nuanced review here. I picked up this book ahead of reading Lefebvre work on urbanism and the social production of space. I figured that it would perhaps be helpful to get a feel for Lefebvre's broader writing on Marxism before delving into more specific works about space. Given this, I read this book with no real expectations and little in the way of prior knowledge.
I will say that the reading experience was rather laboured. Between the rather esoteric references, a meandering, nearly stream-of-conscious writing style, and general density of the material covered here, I think that I can safely say that I have not gotten even half of what this book has to offer on first read. I would argue most won't.
I certainly got the most out of this book in chapter three, Marxism as a critical knowledge of everyday life. Really quite wonderful reflections on the role of critique and action to be had in the first portion of the chapter. Following that, critiques are levied across multiple areas of everyday life. These perhaps show their date, as many now feel perhaps less radical than when written. It was interesting though to see these sociological critiques developed in their original form. Outside of chapter three, I found Lefebvre's reflections on fetishism in the second to last chapter and the linkages between Marx as a philosopher and economist to be quite interesting.
In sum, can I appreciate the work as influential? Yes. Have I gotten all I can out of it and found it especially altering to the way I think, not necessarily. As an undergraduate geography student, hopefully this helps some others interested in reading.
I will say that the reading experience was rather laboured. Between the rather esoteric references, a meandering, nearly stream-of-conscious writing style, and general density of the material covered here, I think that I can safely say that I have not gotten even half of what this book has to offer on first read. I would argue most won't.
I certainly got the most out of this book in chapter three, Marxism as a critical knowledge of everyday life. Really quite wonderful reflections on the role of critique and action to be had in the first portion of the chapter. Following that, critiques are levied across multiple areas of everyday life. These perhaps show their date, as many now feel perhaps less radical than when written. It was interesting though to see these sociological critiques developed in their original form. Outside of chapter three, I found Lefebvre's reflections on fetishism in the second to last chapter and the linkages between Marx as a philosopher and economist to be quite interesting.
In sum, can I appreciate the work as influential? Yes. Have I gotten all I can out of it and found it especially altering to the way I think, not necessarily. As an undergraduate geography student, hopefully this helps some others interested in reading.
August 8, 2018
Henri Lefebvre’s first volume to his “Critique of Everday Life” often swerves between enlightening and frustrating. Between fascinating insights and revolutionary possibilities (Lefebvre’s thoughts on the Festival and Fetishization are excellent) are excessively venomous polemics and a tendency to justify views by throwing around the term “Marxist Dialectic.” Lefebvre’s tirades against the surrealists and the existentialists can be shallow at best, and hypocritical at worst. His writing about rural communities also suggests an an acknowledged romanticism that reinforces many of his biases against “modernity” and the urban. Nonetheless, Lefebvre is an engaging writer and while this first volume is a mixed bag of sorts it is thought provoking material. The call to explore the everyday is still valuable and much needed. I look forward to continuing volumes 2 and 3 to see how Lefebvre’s thought advances.
April 15, 2024
Le premier opus d'une trilogie majeure. Cependant l'avant-propos de l'édition est long et perd de son intérêt sans le contexte, or cela constitue la majeure partie de l'ouvrage. Un bouquin très dense et précis, génial bien qu'évidemment obsolète sur plusieurs aspects mais en ce sens.. un classique.
February 17, 2020
Marxist writers did not learn organizational skills from Marx. Nice thoughts, but all mixed up, so it is hard to follow.
April 27, 2017
(Vol. 1. only): Dense, often fuzzy critique of an increasingly at-sea French culture, circa the immediate aftermath of WWII, taking potshots at all kinds of sacred cows and luminaries while giving serious side-eye at idea of Soviet Union as a supposed Marxist utopia and haven for the idealized “Total Man.” Interesting considerations of alienation, the Holocaust, and (in the ridiculously long foreword) the function of silent film comedians as bellwethers for members of societies stumbling through the toe-stubbing growing pains of modernity. Aims for a dissection of rough outlines of life, rather than grand concepts of being, focused on how Marxist principles should be implemented on a quotidian basis, and how their implementation is frustrated by the base realities of existence. Gets a bit lost in the woods in the process. Most interesting in the festival section, which at least clearly elucidates a phenomenon (albeit one frequently discussed elsewhere), although the disdain for the very mechanics by which everyday people array their lives is telling of a larger inability to view people as anything but moronic automatons incapable of realizing the inequities of the power systems under which they exist. Maybe most satisfying in its conception of alienation as an eternal element of the human condition, one that functions as much as a motivating factor for forward progress as a debilitating detriment to the perpetually mystified common man.
Read
February 14, 2008There's really two parts to this volume: a 100-page Foreword added in 1958, and the book proper (which is only another 150 pages), which was written in 1947. The foreword is a bit strange and uneven. I liked the discussions of Chaplin and Brecht, which introduce Lefebvre's idea of the "reverse image," which I'd someday like to properly compare to Benjamin's dialectical images (both are notions of image in which the contradictions of a system are embodied and can be made visible, but there are important differences, too). The discussion of alienation had useful parts, but overall seemed to be directed at a set of debates that I wasn't familiar with.
The main body of the book is more solid, though there's still a lot of variation (the chapters range from the programmatic Marxian theorizing of "Marxism as critical knowledge" to the more essay-like "Notes written one Sunday in the French countryside" (though this, too, ends with a block of Marxist theory).
Well worth reading, but volume 2 is much more interesting and cohesive.
The main body of the book is more solid, though there's still a lot of variation (the chapters range from the programmatic Marxian theorizing of "Marxism as critical knowledge" to the more essay-like "Notes written one Sunday in the French countryside" (though this, too, ends with a block of Marxist theory).
Well worth reading, but volume 2 is much more interesting and cohesive.
April 28, 2012
(8/10) Despite the title, this is not so much a critique of everyday life as a groundwork for such a critique, and in the process of laying that groundwork Lefebvre creates a fundamentally new conception of the social sciences. I'm still trying to wrap my head around some of it, but I think this is an area that political thought plays far too little attention to. Most of the Big Issues seem to be about exceptional events, whereas the everyday motions of our lives seem to be taken for granted when they are, in fact, socially constructed and a vital method of control.
Lefebvre doesn't really go into that much detail about the specifics of everyday life, which might frustrate some, although it does at least stop this book from seeming outdated. (Maybe he does this more in the other volumes.) Rather, he lays out a conceptual framework that has been taken up by cultural studies and related disciplines to approach more specific issues. It's not always an easy read, but for the theoretically-inclined Lefebvre is essential.
Lefebvre doesn't really go into that much detail about the specifics of everyday life, which might frustrate some, although it does at least stop this book from seeming outdated. (Maybe he does this more in the other volumes.) Rather, he lays out a conceptual framework that has been taken up by cultural studies and related disciplines to approach more specific issues. It's not always an easy read, but for the theoretically-inclined Lefebvre is essential.
January 19, 2018
Lefebvre decries the capitalsit condition of the cult of individualism and the fragmentation of society. We are shown that alienation and mystified consciousness plague humanity, dissolving all sense of community. Broken into six easily digestible chapters with a lengthy forward, The Critique of Everyday Life aims to rebuild that lost community where man was not atomized and social functions, such as festivals, were not perfunctory and corresponded to the sacred. Beginning with avant-garde literature (DADA, Surealism), the critique denigrates the illusory and the ideal, proclaiming that bourgeois mentality promises the beyond while social change remains static. Essentially, this work is revolutionary; it calls for a qualitative change in life and culture. The following two volumes probably plunge further into everyday life, probing and analyzing what makes humanity so unreceptive and alienated. With that being said, Lefebvre's work was as pertinent then as it is today and perhaps even more so with today's modern technology.
September 29, 2021
vorwort halbe buch
December 25, 2014
Review of Volume 1 (which the cover above corresponds to):
For some reason at some point I'd gathered the impression that Lefebvre's work was difficult, even impenetrable. How utterly false! On the contrary, his style is lucid, swift, even poetic and beautiful in places. His particular views of the tasks of criticism, and the necessity of reimagining and re-creating our ways of analysis and the creation of meaning are well expressed and still carry some great weight.
A real pleasure (though it is true I will tarry with a few other books before launching into Volume 2, published many years later).
For some reason at some point I'd gathered the impression that Lefebvre's work was difficult, even impenetrable. How utterly false! On the contrary, his style is lucid, swift, even poetic and beautiful in places. His particular views of the tasks of criticism, and the necessity of reimagining and re-creating our ways of analysis and the creation of meaning are well expressed and still carry some great weight.
A real pleasure (though it is true I will tarry with a few other books before launching into Volume 2, published many years later).
August 9, 2014
The first in an epic 3-part series, Lefebvre suggests a new field of study- everyday life. His approach is far less rigid than typical Marxist approaches. But like similar Marxist takes (Trotsky's approach to culture, for instance) he's interest in studying everyday culture in order to transform and improve the daily life of society, not simply to chronicle society's approach. In his first attempt, he's outlining that approach, and defending it -- maybe too much so -- from possible critics on the Left and in academia.
July 3, 2014
Lefebvre's classic text is anything but rigorous formal philosophy, and his proposed solution to the ills of the world ("think more about everything, transform the everyday rather than transcending it, disdain the fantastic") is the sort of characteristic mushy rah-rah stuff even the greatest minds seem to settle on...but man, the journey to the end is entertaining (his "Notes Written One Sunday" is hilarious). This book, for good or ill, will remain lodged firmly in mind as I muddle through my own work in cultural studies.
September 15, 2014
Verso just put out a beautifully done paperback edition that includes all three volumes of this masterpiece of post war social theory. Volume 1 was finished in 1945. Last 4-5 pages conclude this volume with penetrating, lyrical, easy to follow summary of the key tool.. dialectics.. and the core problem.. alienation.
Need to go back and take notes, and keep them close. Enough said.
Need to go back and take notes, and keep them close. Enough said.
April 15, 2008
The thing is, this book is really important--it is just that the ideas have been really watered down by the past sixty years. I'm pretty sure the author did not intend to encourage a bunch of self described revolutionaries to take of puppeteering, but I could be wrong. I usually am.
January 5, 2014
Have been thinking about reading this book for a long time, but it seems to be not as good as I expected. The argument is a bit vague and discrete. For dialectic analysis, I would recommend reading Durkheim.
September 26, 2008
lagi butuh buku ini...
December 10, 2009
An excellent book. Lefebvre is smarter than the run of the mill philosophers
Read
August 16, 2012very good
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