This book focuses on the various phenomena of daily life and considers them in new ways. "The Critique of Everyday Life" is perhaps the richest, most prescient work by one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers. The trilogy which provided the philosophy behind the 1968 student revolution in France, it is considered to be the founding text of what we now know as cultural studies. Whether discussing sport, household gadgets, the countryside, surrealism, Charlie Chaplin or religion, Lefebvre always concentrates on the minutiae of lived experience in work and leisure, daydreams, and festivities. Denounced by both the right and left when it was first published in France in 1947, today this text is recognized as a path-breaking, radical, and hugely influential book.
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.
- "Although we have become extrmely cynical, on the positive side we see things more sharply, more lucidly, and we have refined our intellectual and literary techniques. Most of the pharisees of political and social life come from the petty bourgeoisie: as oppressor or victim, the petty bourgeois like "
- "More precisely, nowadays, we do not know we live. And at the end of our lives, we scarcely know how we have lived them. And how bitter this unhappy consciousness is ..."
- "Should a disaster happen, too harsh a winter or too dry a summer, a storm or an epidemic, then the community will regret this feast day when it devoured its own substance and denied its own conditions."
Proletarian China
Work Without the Worker
Unexceptional Politics
Psychopolitics
Redemption and Utopia
A Life Beyond Boundaries