Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

p r e F a c e
Marx, he’d grasp everything “at the root.” It was his grand style
that a Le Monde obituary emphasized when Lefebvre peacefully
passed away, a few days after his ninetieth birthday, on June 29,
1991. The major daily described his life, as only the French could,
as “adventures of a dialectician.” 4 They bid adieu to the “last great
classical philosopher,” to the last great French Marxist, in a valediction
that hailed the demise of not so much a generation as a
mode of thinking. The obituary almost implied that Lefebvre’s
departure signaled the end of the twentieth century, the “short
twentieth-century” that Eric Hobsbawm described, replete with
all its promise and horrors. 5 Lefebvre knew that century firsthand.
He traversed its big historical shifts and tumultuous events,
its world wars, its major avant-garde movements. He’d belonged
to the French Communist Party; fought against fascism for the
Resistance Movement; lived though the growth of modern consumerism,
the age of the Bomb, and the cold war; and witnessed
the tumbling of the Berlin Wall. He’d driven a cab in Paris, broadcasted
on radio in Toulouse, taught philosophy and sociology at
numerous universities and high schools, and godfathered the 1968
generation of student rebels. Lefebvre was a man of action as well
as ideas.
He was a Marxist who introduced into France a whole body
of humanist Marxism. But he was a Marxist who seemed to reinvent
himself, conceive a new sound, probe a new idea, reach a
new note, almost every decade. Each reinvention built on an
already accomplished body of work, yet took it further, propelled
it onward. Frequently, these restless formulations recreated the
old world in a new way; other times they somehow anticipated
what was about to unfold in reality. He authored more than sixty
books, since translated into thirty different languages, and made
brilliant analyses on dialectics and alienation, everyday life and
urbanism. The “retired” professor never let up in the 1970s and
1980s, never rested on his emeritus laurels. Always peripatetic,
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