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 inevitable. They also allowed Lefebvre to imagine a new type of society where life itself would be a work of art, constituted by desire and creativity. Along with Andre Breton and many of the other surrealists, Lefebvre joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1928. But while the surrealists' relationship to the Party was volatile and short-lived, Lefebvre stayed on and served as one of its most prominent intellectual spokesman throughout the next three decades, [Page 838]despite the fact that his ideas often conflicted with their interpretations of Marxism that favored “scientific” notions of objective determination. Like Georg Lukács, Lefebvre argued for a more philosophical and humanist reading of Marx that extracted the Hegelian residue in the concepts of alienation, reification, and class consciousness.

Beginning with the first volume of Critique of Everyday Life, written in 1947, Lefebvre suggested that capitalism was commoditizing not only labor but also leisure, family, sexuality, the body, and the imagination. He emphasized that “there can be alienation in leisure just as in work. … So we work to earn our leisure, and leisure has only one meaning: to get away from work” (1991, 39–40; italics in original). Like the Frankfurt school, Lefebvre observed that Western societies were becoming increasingly oriented around consumption and commercial entertainment, but while these apparatuses of the culture industry promised relief from the workplace, in reality they represented an extension of alienation in everyday life. Lefebvre sought to theorize the junction of instrumental rationality and mass culture through the term “the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption” (1984, 68–109).

Nonetheless, Lefebvre refused to succumb to the pessimism and despair that engulfed other Marxists in the decades after World War II. From Lefebvre's perspective, the consumer culture did not represent the triumph of “false needs” because leisure, pleasure, and self-expression are all essential human faculties. What are false are not the needs that capital promises to fulfill but the commodities and signs that are supposed to realize them. Lefebvre wrote, “They can thus hold a real content, correspond to a real need, yet still retain an illusory form and a deceptive appearance” (1991, 40). Although their diagnoses of postwar society were otherwise quite similar, Lefebvre thus felt compelled to differentiate himself from Herbert Marcuse: “Can terrorist pressures and repression reinforce individual self-repression to the point of closing all issues? Against Marcuse we continue to assert that they cannot” (1984, 66). As early as 1962, Lefebvre had identified young people as a potentially revolutionary agent of social change: “Everywhere we see them showing signs of dissatisfaction and rebellion. … It is they who continue the uninterrupted dialogue between ideal and experiment” (1995, 195). In May 1968, the speculations of Lefebvre and the like-minded Situationist International momentarily came to fruition as young people seized the streets of Paris while general strikes and mass demonstrations involving millions nearly toppled the French government.

...