Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. 1 Introduction

Henri Lefebvre’s magnum opus: a monumental exploration of contemporary society.<br><br>Henri Lefebvre’s three-volume <i>Critique of Everyday Life</i> is perhaps the richest, most prescient work by one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. Written at the birth of post-war consumerism, the <i>Critique</i> was a philosophical inspiration for the 1968 student revolution in France and is considered to be the founding text of all that we know as cultural studies, as well as a major influence on the fields of contemporary philosophy, geography, sociology, architecture, political theory and urbanism. A work of enormous range and subtlety, Lefebvre takes as his starting-point and guide the “trivial” details of quotidian experience: an experience colonized by the commodity, shadowed by inauthenticity, yet one which remains the only source of resistance and change.<br><br>This is an enduringly radical text, untimely today only in its intransigence and optimism.