Henri Lefebvre 1901 – 1991

Henri Lefebvre was a French Marxist philosopher and sociologist whose work shaped the critical theory of everyday life and the philosophy of urban space. A long-time member of the French Communist Party until his expulsion in 1958, he produced the three-volume Critique of Everyday Life, in which he argued that the alienation diagnosed by Marx persists in the rhythms and routines of modern life. His later Production of Space provided the foundation for a new Marxist geography, and his concept of the right to the city has become central to contemporary urban studies and political theory.

Henri Lefebvre was born in 1901 at Hagetmau in the Landes, in southwestern France. He studied philosophy at Aix-en-Provence and the Sorbonne, took the agregation in 1921, and joined the French Communist Party in 1928. With Norbert Guterman he produced in the early 1930s the first French anthologies and translations of Marx's early writings and of Hegel and Lenin, helping to introduce Hegelian Marxism into France.

Excluded from the PCF in 1958 over his criticisms of Stalinism, Lefebvre took a chair in sociology at Strasbourg and from 1965 at Nanterre, where he taught during the events of May 1968. His vast output includes Dialectical Materialism (1939), the Critique of Everyday Life in three volumes (1947, 1961, 1981), Introduction to Modernity, The Sociology of Marx, The Right to the City (1968), The Production of Space (1974), and Rhythmanalysis (posthumous).

Lefebvre rescued from orthodox Marxism the everyday, the city, and the spatial as primary terrains of analysis and of political contestation. His arguments that space is produced by social practice and that the right to the city is the right to remake urban life have shaped urban studies, geography (especially through David Harvey and Edward Soja), and the global movements for the right to the city. He died at Pau in June 1991.