ABSTRACT
The mid-1970s was a remarkable phase of Henri Lefebvre’s intellectual and political career. Having published La production de l’espace in 1974,2 he embarked upon an ambitious project on the theory and historical geography of the modern state on a world scale.The result of this inquiry, which appeared in France between 1976 and 1978, was a sprawling, four-volume treatise entitled De l’État.3 In significant part because it has never been translated into English, De l’État has been largely ignored in the rediscovery of Lefebvre’s work on urbanism and capitalist spatiality during the last decade within Anglo-American geography.Yet De l’État arguably represents an essential pillar within the corpus of Lefebvre’s mature writings on sociospatial theory.
