Critique of Everyday Life

Resumen del libro

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.

A savage critique of consumerist society. Publishers Weekly