Understanding Henri Lefebvre / Edition 1

by Stuart Elden

Overview

Henri Lefebvre has been celebrated as one of the most influential social theorists of the twentieth century. Understanding Henri Lefebvre places Lefebvre in his historical and intellectual context and analyzes the extraordinary range of his work, across politics, philosophy, history, literature and culture.

Particular emphasis is given to Lefebvre's trilogy of inspirational thinkers-Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche; his links to contemporaries such as Heidegger, Axelos and the Situationalists; and his critiques of existentialism and structuralism. Analysis of his writings on cities are balanced with those on rural communities, the production of space connected to ideas of time and history, and everyday life linked to the festival and cultural revolution.

Understanding Henri Lefebvre offers the most wide-ranging and reliable account of this central theorist available.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826470027
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	03/01/2004
Series:	Continuum Studies in Philosophy
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Stuart Elden is a Professor of Political Geography at Durham University.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgements	v
	Introduction: Henri Lefebvre 1901-91	1
1	Rethinking Marxism	15
	A new reading of Marx	15
	The 'juvenile presumptions' of existentialism	19
	Structuralism as the French ideology	22
	Logic and dialectics	27
	Applications of the dialectic	36
	Alienation	39
	Production	43
	The Party and beyond	46
2	Engaging with philosophy	65
	Beyond Marxism	65
	The Philosophies group, Schelling and Hegel	67
	Nietzsche against the fascists	73
	Heidegger and the metaphysics of the Grand Guignol	76
	Metaphilosophy	83
	Descartes and literature	85
3	The critique of everyday life	110
	A day in the life	111
	A critique of the present	115
	Festival and revolution	117
4	From the rural to the urban	127
	The town and the country	129
	A sack of potatoes	135
	Reading rural spaces	137
	The spectre of the urban	140
	Reading urban spaces	147
5	Space and history	169
	Time and moments	170
	History	175
	The production of space	181
	Time, space and rhythm	192
6	Politics and the state	211
	De l'Etat-An overview	215
	The State Mode of Production	222
	Autogestion and the right to difference	226
	The world scale	231
	The state organization of space	236
	Politics, the political and the possible	241
	Bibliography of Lefebvre's writings	257
	Index of Names	263

Editorial Reviews

'...the most thorough, complete and rich account of the full range and scope of Henri Lefebvre's intellectual concersn from the 1920s to his death in 1991.'--Sanford Lakoff "Capital and Class "

'...In a relatively short book, Elden has achieved a great deal. He combines considerable breadth of understanding, with a rigourous attention to the details of Lefebvre's work...Anyone with more than a passing interest in Lefebvre, especially if they have been unable to interrogate his original works in French, will benefit from a detailed engagement with Elden's sensitive and provocative analysis of one of France's most important theories.'--Sanford Lakoff

'...'s intellectual concersn from the 1920s to his death in 1991.'--, "Capital and Class "

'...Lefebvre was extraordinarily prolific and his oeuvre contains numerous works that are often neglected or have yet to be brought into focus by commentators. This is something that Elden's truly compendious Understanding Henri Lefebvre helps to correct...Elden has performed a fine service to Lefebvre scholarship here. His book will help to orient an English-speaking audience to the sophisticated philosophical background of one of the most original calls to revolutionary thought and action of the twentieth century.'--Andrew Aitken

From the Publisher