Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 2

Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 2:Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday

  • Paperback

Identifies categories within everyday life, such as the theory of the semantic field and the theory of moments

Henri Lefebvre’s magnum opus: a monumental exploration of contemporary society.
Henri Lefebvre’s three-volume Critique of Everyday Life is perhaps the richest, most prescient work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. Written at the birth of post-war consumerism, the Critique was a philosophical inspiration for the 1968 student revolution in France and is considered to be the founding text of all that we know as cultural studies, as well as a major influence on the fields of contemporary philosophy, geography, sociology, architecture, political theory and urbanism. A work of enormous 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.
This is an enduringly radical text, untimely today only in its intransigence and optimism.

Reviews

  • The last great classical philosopher.

    Fredric Jameson
  • One of the great French intellectual activists of the twentieth century.

    David Harvey
  • A savage critique of consumerist society.

    Publishers Weekly