ABSTRACT
Henri Lefebvre was one of the earliest and one of the most vehement critics of structuralism as formulated by both Louis Althusser and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lefebvre, for example, explored Les Pyrrhénées, to become an ethnologist and a sort of "local patriot", when he turned the beautiful and somewhat romantic excursions through his native region into yet another Marxist practice. Lefebvre knows how to argue his Marxism. But while a communist, he stuck to translating and quoting Marx, Hegel and Lenin. Lefebvre's Introduction to Modernity seemed attuned to the methodology of Claude Lévi-Strauss' Structural Anthropology. Like a criminal who revisits the scene of the crime, or the analysand who "abreacts" the traumatic event, Lefebvre always returned to his pet subjects—"socialism, psychoanalysis, and existentialism", which dominated Parisian thinking in the 1960s. Because art and literature had been his passions when he was a young man, structuralism's "creative horizon", he stated, appealed to him.
