Henri Lefebvre Quotes on Politics
Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life (three volumes, 1947–81), The Production of Space (1974), and the late writings on the urban and the right to the city gave twentieth-century French Marxist philosophy one of its most influential reorientations toward the spatial and quotidian dimensions of political life. The central commitment is that the standard Marxist analysis of capitalist domination as the appropriation of surplus value at the point of production must be supplemented by the parallel analyses of the colonization of everyday life by commodity logic and the systematic production of capitalist space (urban planning, the metropolitan-suburban distinction, the spatial organization of consumption and leisure). The framework, drawing on Marx, Hegel, and the surrealist and situationist French intellectual currents, shaped subsequent radical urban geography through David Harvey, Edward Soja, and the broader contemporary political theory of the urban.
Quotes
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Attributed to Henri Lefebvre:
“Everyday life is the supreme court where wisdom, knowledge and power are brought to judgment.”
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Attributed to Henri Lefebvre:
“Space is a social product.”
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Attributed to Henri Lefebvre:
“The right to the city is the right to remake ourselves and our city.”
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“Change life! Change society!”
Henri Lefebvre (1991; original French edition, 1974), as quoted in Fainstein The City Builders (2001), p. 272 -
“Pressure from below must therefore also confront the state in its role as organiser of space, as the power that controls urbanization, the construction of buildings and spatial planning in general. The state defends class interests while simultaneously setting itself above society as a whole, and its ability to intervene in space can and must be turned back against it, by grass-roots opposition, in the form of counter-plans and counter-projects designed to thwart strategies, plans and programmes imposed from above.”
Henri Lefebvre (1974) The Production of Space . Translated to English in 1991 by Donald Nicholson-Smith; cited in: "Henri Lefebvre on Governance and Space" on thepolisblog.org 2012.10 -
“Change life! 'Change society!' These precepts mean nothing without the production of an appropriate space . … new social relationships call for a new space, and vice versa.”
Henri Lefebvre (1991; original French edition, 1974), as quoted in Fainstein The City Builders (2001), p. 272 -
“The 'meaning' of life is not to be found in anything other than that life itself. It is within it, and there is nothing beyond that. 'Meaning' cannot spill over from being; it is the direction, the movement of being, and nothing more. The 'meaning' of a proletarian's life is to be found in that life itself: in its despair, or conversely in its movement towards freedom , if the proletarian participates in the life of the proletariat, and if that life involves continuous, day-to-day action (trade-union, political...).”
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