Skip to main content
Critique of Everyday Life: The Three-Volume Text

Critique of Everyday Life: The Three-Volume Text

Current price: $44.95
Publication Date: May 6th, 2014
Publisher:
Verso
ISBN:
9781781683170
Pages:
912
Usually Ships in 1 to 2 Weeks

Description

Henri Lefebvre’s magnum opus: a monumental exploration of contemporary society.

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, untimely today only in its intransigence and optimism.

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.

Praise for Critique of Everyday Life: The Three-Volume Text

“A savage critique of consumerist society.”—Publishers Weekly

“One of the great French intellectual activists of the twentieth century.”—David Harvey

“The last great classical philosopher.”—Fredric Jameson