Henri Lefebvre was a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist, 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. Henri Lefebvre is known for his work on dialectics, alienation, criticism of Stalinism, existentialism, and structuralism. In his prolific career, Henri Lefebvre wrote more than sixty books and three hundred articles. Henri Lefebvre founded and took part in the founding of several intellectual and academic journals such as Philosophies, La Revue Marxiste, Arguments, Socialisme ou Barbarie, and Espaces et Sociétés. Lefebvre was born in Hagetmau, Landes, France. He studied philosophy at the University of Paris or the Sorbonne, graduating in 1920.
Henri Lefebvre worked with Paul Nizan, Norbert Guterman,
Georges Friedmann, Georges Politzer, and Pierre Morhange in the Philosophies
group seeking a "philosophical revolution". This brought them into contact with
the Surrealists, Dadaists, and other groups, before they moved towards the
French Communist Party (PCF).
Lefebvre joined the PCF in 1928 and became one of the most
prominent French Marxist intellectuals during the second quarter of the 20th
century, before joining the French resistance. From 1944 to 1949, he was the
director of Radiodiffusion Française, a French radio broadcaster in Toulouse.
Among his works was a highly influential, anti-Stalinist text on dialectics
called Dialectical Materialism (1940).
Henri Lefebvre published his first volume
of The Critique of Everyday Life. His early work on method was applauded and
borrowed centrally by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in Critique of
Dialectical Reason (1960).
During Henri Lefebvre's thirty-year stint
with the PCF, he was chosen to publish critical attacks on opposed theorists,
especially existentialists like Sartre and Lefebvre's former colleague Nizan,
only to intentionally get himself expelled from the party for his own heterodox
theoretical and political opinions in the late 1950s. Henri Lefebvre then went from serving
as a primary intellectual for the PCF to becoming one of France's most important
critics of the PCF's politics and intellectual thought.
In 1961, Henri Lefebvre became professor of sociology at
the University of Strasbourg, before joining the faculty at the new university
at Nanterre in 1965. He was one of the most respected professors, and he had
influenced and analysed the May 1968 student revolt. Henri Lefebvre introduced
the concept of the right to the city in his 1968 book Le Droit à la ville, and
the publication of the book predates the May 1968 revolts which took place in
many French cities. Following the publication of this book, Lefebvre wrote
several influential works on cities, urbanism, and space, including The
Production of Space (1974), which became one of the most influential and heavily
cited works of urban theory.
By the 1970s, Henri Lefebvre had also
published some of the first critical statements on the work of
post-structuralists, especially Michel Foucault. During the following years he
was involved in the editorial group of Arguments, a New Left magazine which
largely served to enable the French public to familiarize themselves with
Central European revisionism.
When Henri 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.
One of Henri Lefebvre's most important contributions to
social thought is the idea of the "critique of everyday life", which he
pioneered in the 1930s. Lefebvre defined everyday life dialectically as the
intersection of "illusion and truth, power and helplessness; the intersection of
the sector man controls and the sector he does not control", and is where the
perpetually transformative conflict occurs between diverse, specific rhythms:
the body's polyrhythmic bundles of natural rhythms, physiological (natural)
rhythms, and social rhythms (Lefebvre and Régulier, 1985: 73). The everyday was,
in short, the space in which all life occurred, and between which all fragmented
activities took place. It was the residual.
Henri Lefebvre argued that
everyday life was an underdeveloped sector compared to technology and
production, and moreover that in the mid 20th century, capitalism changed such
that everyday life was to be colonized—turned into a zone of sheer consumption.
In this zone of everydayness or boredom shared by everyone in society regardless
of class or specialty, autocritique of everyday realities of boredom vs.
societal promises of free time and leisure, could lead to people understanding
and then revolutionizing their everyday lives.
This was essential to Lefebvre
because everyday life was where he saw capitalism surviving and reproducing
itself. Without revolutionizing everyday life, capitalism would continue to
diminish the quality of everyday life, and inhibit real self-expression. The
critique of everyday life was crucial because it was for him only through the
development of the conditions of human life—rather than abstract control of
productive forces—that humans could reach a concrete utopian existence.
Henri Lefebvre's work on everyday life was heavily influential in French theory,
particularly for the Situationists, as well as in politics. The third volume has
also recently influenced scholars writing about digital technology and
information in the present day, since it has a section dealing with this topic
at length, including analysis of the Nora-Minc Report [fr] (1977); key aspects
of information theory; and other general discussion of the "colonisation" of
everyday life through information communication technologies as "devices" or
"services".
Lefebvre dedicated a great deal of his philosophical writings
to understanding the importance of space in what he called the reproduction of
social relations of production. This idea is the central argument in the book
The Survival of Capitalism, written as a sort of prelude to La Production de
l'espace (1974) (The Production of Space). These works have deeply influenced
current urban theory, mainly within human geography, as seen in the current work
of authors such as David Harvey, Dolores Hayden, and Edward Soja, and in the
contemporary discussions around the notion of spatial justice.
Lefebvre
is widely recognized as a Marxist thinker who was responsible for widening
considerably the scope of Marxist theory. The generalization of industry, and
its relation to cities (which is treated in La Pensée marxiste et la ville), The
Right to the City and The Urban Revolution were all themes of Lefebvre's
writings in the late 1960s, which was concerned, among other aspects, with the
deep transformation of "the city" into "the urban" which culminated in its
omnipresence or the complete urbanization of society.
Lefebvre contends
that there are different modes of production of space (spatialization) from
natural space ('absolute space') to more complex spaces and flows whose meaning
is produced in a social way (social space). Lefebvre analyzes each historical
mode as a three-part dialectic between everyday practices and perceptions (le
perçu), representations or theories of space (le conçu) and the spatial
imaginary of the time (le vécu).
Lefebvre's argument in The Production of
Space is that space is a social product, or a complex social construction which
affects spatial practices and perceptions. This argument implies the shift of
the research perspective from space to processes of its production; the embrace
of the multiplicity of spaces that are socially produced and made productive in
social practices; and the focus on the contradictory, conflictual, and,
ultimately, political character of the processes of production of space. As a
Marxist theorist Henri Lefebvre argues that this social production of urban
space is fundamental to the reproduction of society, hence of capitalism itself.
The social production of space is commanded by a hegemonic class as a tool to
reproduce its dominance.
Henri Lefebvre argued that every society
produces a certain space, its own space. The city of the ancient world cannot be
understood as a simple agglomeration of people and things in space. Lefebvre
argues that the intellectual climate of the city in the ancient world was very
much related to the social production of its spatiality. Then if every society
produces its own space, any "social existence" aspiring to be or declaring
itself to be real, but not producing its own space, would be a strange entity, a
very peculiar abstraction incapable of escaping the ideological or even cultural
spheres. Based on this argument, Lefebvre criticized Soviet urban planners on
the basis that they failed to produce a socialist space, having just reproduced
the modernist model of urban design and applied it onto that context:
In
his book The Urban Question, Manuel Castells criticizes Henri Lefebvre's Marxist
humanism and approach to the city influenced by Hegel and Nietzsche. Castells'
political criticisms of Lefebvre's approach to Marxism echoed the structuralist
Scientific Marxism school of Louis Althusser of which Henri Lefebvre was an
immediate critic.