Product Description

The Critique of Everyday Life is perhaps the richest, most prescient work by one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers. The trilogy which provided the philosophy behind the 1968 student revolution in France, is considered to be the founding text of what we now know as Cultural Studies. Whether discussing sport, household gadgets, the countryside, surrealism, Charlie Chaplin or religion, Lefebvre always concentrates on the minutiae of lived experience in work and leisure, daydreams and festivities. A work of enourmous 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. Denounced by both the right and left when it was first published in France in 1947, today this text is recognized as path-breaking, radical and hugely influential. Volume 1 is a groundbreaking analysis of the alienating phenomena of daily life under capitalism. Volume 2 identifies categories within everyday life, such as the theory of the semantic field and the theory of moments. And, Volume 3 explores the crisis of modernity and the decisive assertion of technological modernism.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #119449 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-01
• Format: Special Limited Edition
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 3
• Binding: Paperback
• 972 pages

Review
A savage critique of consumerist society. --Publisher's Weekly

One of the great French intellectual activists of the twentieth century. --David Harvey

The last great classical philosopher. --Fredric Jameson

About the Author
Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991), former resistance fighter and professor 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.