Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
claimed to supersede liberalism.” Charles Krauthammer, a conservative
columnist for the Washington Post, plainly believes the
future is still there for the taking; the complacent “The End of
History” honeymoon is over.
“Democratic realism,” says Krauthammer, is what American
foreign policy calls for: the Right should reclaim the utopian
spirit for itself and make it real, project through military might
its conservative values across global space. If the masses can be
kept mystified at home, neocon power elites can produce space
abroad—and control the world. A new inner and outer dialectic
infuses Lefebvre’s theory of capitalist domination and expansion.
“The 1990s were a holiday from history,” Krauthammer writes,
an illusory period during which we imagined that the existential
struggles of the past six decades against various totalitarianisms
had ended for good. September 11 reminded us rudely that
history had not ended, and we found ourselves in a new existential
struggle, this time with an enemy even more fanatical,
fatalistic and indeed undeterable than in the past. Nonetheless,
we had one factor in our favor. With the passing of the Soviet
Union, we had entered a unique period in human history, a unipolar
era in which America enjoys a predominance of power
greater than any that has existed in the half-millennium of the
modern state system. 7
The offensive edge to the cybernanthrope’s world order, bolstered
by high-tech weapons of mass destruction and distraction,
schemed in think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, is
a grave threat to our collective future. What Lefebvre bequeaths
us is a theoretical apparatus that helps us demystify these machinations,
probe into this dark Dr. Strangelove labyrinth, explain its
logic, and understand its mentality, in all its madness. Meanwhile,
his legacy equips us with a youthful spirit of confrontation: a battle
around not only ideas and scholarly critique but also political
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