Lefebvre pronunciation
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Henri Lefebvre
French philosopher and sociologist (1901–1991)
For the French wrestler, see Henri Lefèbvre (wrestler).
Henri Lefebvre (lə-FEV-rə; French:[ɑ̃ʁiləfɛvʁ]; 16 June 1901 – 29 June 1991) was a French Marxistphilosopher and sociologist, best known for furthering the critique of everyday life, for introducing the concepts of the right to the city and the production of social space, and for his work on dialectical materialism, alienation, and criticism of Stalinism, existentialism, and structuralism. In his prolific career, Lefebvre wrote more than sixty books and three hundred articles.[4] He founded or took part in the founding of several intellectual and academic journals such as Philosophies, La Revue Marxiste, Arguments, Socialisme ou Barbarie, and Espaces et Sociétés.[5]
Biography
Lefebvre was born in Hagetmau, Landes, France. He studied philosophy at the University of Paris (the Sorbonne), graduating in 1920. By 1924 he was working with Paul Nizan, Norbert Guterman, Georges Friedmann, Georges Politzer, and Pierre
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Henri Lefebvre: Philosopher of Everyday Life
Rob Shields, Professor, Carleton University, Ottawa Canada
An exapnded and revised version of this paper appears in A. Elliott and B. Turner eds 2001. Profiles in Contemporary Social Theory (London:Sage). Do not cite from this draft without perfmission. HTML version copyright Rob Shields 2002.Biography and Theoretical Context
Who was Henri Lefebvre? Surveys of French intellectual life in the 1950s and 60s remark that he is a permanent outsider, yet one of the most influential forces in French left-wing humanism. Although an unorthodox writer who was officially excluded from the Parti Communiste Français long before the work of thinkers such as Lyotard, Althusser or Foucault on the French left caught the attention of most Anglophone theorists, Lefebvre figured as the most translated of French writers during the 1950s and 1960s. Thanks to his 1939 paperback on Dialectical Materialism (Lefebvre 1967) translated into over two dozen languages and printed on a vast scale in over a dozen editions) h- •
Henri Lefebvre
(1901–91)
French*Marxistphilosopher and sociologist. Lefebvre published 70 books in his lifetime on an incredibly wide array of topics, and is generally regarded as one of the great theoreticians of the 20th century. Because of his interests in space and everyday life (indeed his name is virtually synonymous with these concepts), he tends to be read more in geography departments than philosophy departments. Unfortunately for Anglophone readers, the English translations of his work reflect this bias.
Lefebvre was born in the rural town of Hegetmau just outside the Pyrenees, France. And though he moved to Paris at an early age to study at the Sorbonne, he retained a strong link with the countryside throughout his life. In the 1920s Lefebvre taught philosophy in Paris and was part of the small group of anti-*Bergson, Marxist thinkers known as the Philosophies group. He joined the Communist Party (PCF) in 1928. In this period he took a keen interest in the work of the Surrealists, and was a familiar of Tristan Tzara and André Breton, but it was a short-lived passion.
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