ABSTRACT
Lefebvre is perhaps best-known as the ‘father of the dialectic’ in France and was for many years also best-known outside France for his works on the dialectic. Focusing on dialectical materialism as a general method developed by Marx but applied by him to only a limited number of fields, Lefebvre proposed dialectical materialism as a universal method. While Althusser and ‘scientific Marxists’ saw economics and materialism as the legacy of Marx, Lefebvre saw dialectical materialism as the rigorous core of Marx’s insight. The dialectic itself thus became the cornerstone of Lefebvre’s philosophical critique of the formal logic of traditional philosophies. As noted briefly in Chapters 2 and 3, the basic difference may be summed up by saying that while formal logic, exemplified by simple mathematics, focused on the singular identity and differences between elements, dialectical logic focused on relationships between elements and the process by which new states of affairs arise out of deep contradictions in the status quo.
