Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

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Moments
A roll of the dice will never abolish chance.
—Stéphane Mallarmé,
Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard
Henri Lefebvre started the tumultuous decade of the 1960s
laughing as a new man, if not quite a total man. He celebrated
his sixtieth birthday with a new job (chair of sociology at the
University of Strasbourg), a couple of new books (Critique of
Everyday Life—Volume 2 and Introduction to Modernity), and
some new militant friends, younger friends—like Guy Debord
and the Situationists—who’d ignite each other in the explosion of
1968. (By that point, Lefebvre was teaching at suburban Paris-
Nanterre, where the initial spark of student discontent had been
generated.) In 1961, he also inaugurated himself with a new status:
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