Lefebvre, Henri (1901–1991)

Henri Lefebvre was a French Marxist sociologist and philosopher. Lefebvre is best known for his theorizing of geography and urban space, but his three-volume Critique of Everyday Life also offers a trenchant analysis of consumer culture and capitalism's colonization of leisure time and private life. Over the course of the twentieth century, Lefebvre was at the center of many pivotal cultural, political, and intellectual movements, including the avant-garde of Dada and surrealism, the uprisings of May 1968, and the development of postmodernism.

Lefebvre's intellectual roots were formed between the two world wars as he mixed Marxism with the insights of Dada and surrealism. The interwar avant-gardes explored how art, performance, and spontaneous action could disorient the dominant ideology in which social conventions appear as natural and ...