Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1: Introduction - Hardcover

Henri Lefebvre

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0860913406 ISBN 13: 9780860913405

Publisher: Verso Books, 1997

Synopsis

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, untilmely today only in its intransigence and optimism. Volume One is a groundbreaking analysis of the alienating phenomena of daily life under capitalism.

About this title

Review:

"Henri Lefebvre was the last great classical philosopher. His career was distinguished by this feature--rare enough even in the most productive creative lives--namely, to have had a new idea every decade. The concept of 'everyday life' was one of [his] ideas: now that it has been fruitfully disseminated through any number of thought modes, from cultural studies to the new urbanism, it behoves us to return to the source, in this first, prophetic postwar statement."--Frederic Jameson

About the Author:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Verso Books
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0860913406
• ISBN 13: 9780860913405
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 310