Critique of Everyday Life Volume 1 Critique of Everyday Life Volume 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday Critique of Everyday Life Volume 3: From Modernity to Modernism All the publications identified above are also now available in a single volume: Critique of Everyday Life: The One-Volume Edition

摘要

'To penetrate ever more deeply into the content of life, to seize it in its shifting reality, to be ever more lucid about the lessons it has to teach us - this is the essential precept of research.' [1991 (a), p. 182]. Henri Lefebvre writes this revealing phrase in the first volume of Critique of Everyday Life. He was then in his mid-40s, and in the midst of what was perhaps the most productive period of his perennially productive life. The date of its publication places it in the breathless and hopeful pause after the Liberation and before the pall of the Cold War was to descend upon Europe. This accounts for, or perhaps merely justifies, the powerful Utopian tone of this work, which Michael Gardiner refers to as his 'Marxian Prometheanism'[2000, p. 90], although it must be said that this tone permeates much of his early work. Lefebvre's approach to research was all-consuming, and indeed it could not have been otherwise given his focus upon the construction of everyday life - he was continually and joyously suspended in his subject, in the concrete spaces and complex interactions of the countryside and the city. In this, his work resonated with that of Friedrich Nietzsche, who was a great influence on Lefebvre, and who informed and affirmed his willingness to allow his work to be suffused with poetic and mythic vision as well as careful analysis.