Critique of Everyday Life (Volume 1)

“If true politics involves a knowledge of everyday life and a critique of its requirements, conversely everyday life involves a critique of all politics.”
The first volume of Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life is a work of enormous intellectual range and subtlety by one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and sociologists. Linking philosophical exposition with economics and literary criticism, lyrical meditations with harsh polemics, the Critique is a profound investigation of alienation in the realities of everyday life.
Whether he is discussing sport, household gadgets or the countryside, surrealism, Charlie Chaplin or religion, Lefebvre is constructing a matrix of lived experience, exploring the boundaries of oppression and resistance in work and leisure, daydreams and festivities. Published in France in 1947 at the birth of postwar consumerism, the Critique was first denounced by official philosophers and later “rediscovered” throught the Situationists in the 1960s. Today it can be seen as an enduringly radical text, untimely today only in its intransigence and optimism.
This translation of the second edition (1958) of French sociologist and philosopher Lefebvre's Critique de la Vie Quotidienne will introduce the English reader to his examination of the forces and structures that govern various aspects of our daily lives and in particular the role played by alienation in its various manifestations. The text includes a lengthy analytical introduction by the author that did not appear in the first edition of 1947. Lefebvre's Marxist orientation and terminology often make for tough reading, and there is a tendency here to make claims that lack clear supporting evidence. Nevertheless, it is to be hoped that Volumes 2 and 3 will eventually be translated, thereby allowing a fuller study of Lefebvre's thought.