Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
bad rap would soon become a spectacular media bonanza. A new
spirit of freedom seemed to be dawning, and now we’re living in
its scary midst. Perhaps he’d suspected as much. I’d little realized
back then—couldn’t realize—how Lévy’s program The Spirit of
Freedom and the companion book Les Aventures de la Liberté
set the tone for the shallowness and narrowness the new century
would come to epitomize. Punctuated by subheadings like “The
Great Hopes,” “Times of Contempt,” “Lost Illusions,” and “The
End of the Prophets,” the text’s cynicism reeked: give up the ghost,
abandon all hope ye who enters here.
Around the same time as Les Aventures de la Liberté hit French
bookstores and around the time Le Monde announced Lefebvre’s
death—the death of a style—across the Atlantic another scurrilous
book by Francis Fukuyama danced to a similar refrain:
“the end of history.” 4 Extending an article-length thesis that had
aired a few years earlier in the conservative National Interest,
Fukuyama flagged up “the end point of mankind’s ideological
evolution … the final form of human government”: liberal bourgeois
democracy. We’ve reached the moment, Fukuyama bragged,
of “remarkable consensus.” Liberal democracy had won its legitimacy,
conquering all rival ideologies, and, he thought, we should
be glad. Hereditary monarchy had run its course a while back, and
so had fascism; and now, apparently, so had communism. There’s
no other tale to tell, no alternative, no other big idea left, nothing
aside from bourgeois democracy and free-market economics.
It was totalitarian now even to think about other big ideas about
human progress. The year 1991 heralded, in the infamous words
of George Bush, Sr., “a New World Order.” 5 “We cannot picture to
ourselves,” Fukuyama proclaimed in The End of History and the
Last Man, “a world that is essentially different from the present
one, and at the same time better. Other, less reflective ages also
thought of themselves as the best, but we arrive at this conclusion
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