ABSTRACT
Throughout the twentieth century, Henri Lefebvre made extensive contributions to philosophy, political theory, sociology, geography and state theory. Much of this work was academically marginalised in France for most of the last three decades of his life by the dominance of structuralist and poststructuralist influences in the social sciences, and it has only been rediscovered in recent years through a series of newly published editions. 1 Likewise, in the English-speaking world, there was little exposure or understanding of his work before the early 1990s, when the progressive translation of a number of key texts began. 2 Lefebvre’s strongest influence in Anglophone countries has been on the discipline of critical human geography, where the publication of The Production of Space in 1974 was instrumental in the development of radical, materialist and theoretically critical approaches to space. 3 Largely because of this ‘geographical’ introduction of his work to the social sciences outside France, his writings on space and urban questions have tended to be read much more widely than other elements of his corpus. However, Lefebvre’s vast intellectual output and the breadth of his theoretical, sociological and political concerns make it difficult to comprehend one aspect of his oeuvre properly without being aware of how it relates to others. This chapter will begin the task of explaining the central currents that run through his work by focusing on his non-reductionist philosophical position, which can be characterised most simply as part of a humanist Marxist tradition, supplemented by the ideas of Hegel and Nietzsche. 4 In arguing that these three thinkers need to 12be read together, Lefebvre notes how each grasped ‘something that was in the process of becoming’ in the ‘modern world’. 5 Marx contributes the theoretical materials for a transformative critique of capitalist social relations, Hegel reminds us of the overwhelming power of the state and Nietzsche highlights the celebration of art, festival and bodily pleasures that are the hallmarks of ‘civilization’. 6 A number of philosophical themes that flow from the encounter between these three influences recur in Lefebvre’s writing, including the pervasiveness of human alienation, the need to situate social phenomena within a totality that is constantly open to transformation and renewal and a strident opposition to all forms of intellectual reductionism. 7 In relation to the last of these, Lefebvre particularly opposed the fragmentation of social thought into artificial specialisations. Similarly, he sharply criticised the tendencies to collapse social relations into mental constructs such as language or discourse that are present in various poststructuralist forms of philosophical idealism. This characteristic of Lefebvre’s thinking makes it much more difficult to place his ‘open Marxism’ under the umbrella of poststructuralism than has been asserted by some writers. 8
