Henri Lefebvre
| Henri Lefebvre | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
16 June 1901 Hagetmau, France |
| Died | 29 June 1991 (aged 90) Navarrenx, France |
| Alma mater | University of Paris (MA, 1920;DrE, 1954) |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School |
Continental philosophy Western Marxism Hegelian Marxism |
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Main interests
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Everyday life · Dialectics · Alienation · Mystification · Social space · Urbanity · Rurality · Modernity · Literature · History |
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Notable ideas
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Critique of everyday life · Theory of moments · Rhythmanalysis · Right to the city · The production of social space |
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Influenced
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Henri Lefebvre (French: [ləfɛvʁ]; 16 June 1901 – 29 June 1991) 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, 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.
Lefebvre was born in Hagetmau, Landes, France. He studied philosophy at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne), graduating in 1920. By 1924 he was working 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). Seven years later, Lefebvre published his first volume of The Critique of Everyday Life. His early work on method was applauded and borrowed centrally by Sartre in The Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). During 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. Ironically, he 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 (e.g. immediately, the lack of an opinion on Algeria, and more generally, the partial apologism for and continuation of Stalinism) and intellectual thought (i.e. Structuralism, especially the work of Louis Althusser).
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