Abstract
The Anglo-American reception of Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) is a classic case of misrecognition. Although he has been called a sociologist, an urbanist, and a social theorist, he has rarely been understood as a philosopher. The recently translated third volume of the Critique of Everyday Life should correct past impressions, not only because Lefebvre himself subtitles the book “Toward a meta-philosophy of everyday life,” but also as the work makes original contributions to philosophy. It is not excessive to claim that he is the eco-philosopher of the twenty-first century, for he made the connection between the massive despoiling of the global ecosystems, the new shape of social time and social space, and the struggle for the transformation of everyday life, which, he claims, is the key to the project of changing life and repairing our collective relationship to nature.
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Works Cited
Lefebvre, Henri. Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. by Sacha Rabinovitch. New York: Harper and Row, 1971.
Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life, Volume I, trans. by John Moore. London: Verso, 1991.
Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations for Sociology of the Everyday, Volume II, trans. by John Moore. London: Verso, 2002.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Critique of Everyday Life, Volume III: From Modernity to Modernism (Towards a Metaphilosophy of Everyday Life), trans. by Gregory Elliott with a preface by Michel Trebitsch. London/New York: Verso, 2005.
Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. by Stewart Elden and Gerald Moore. New York and London: Continuum Press, 2004.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.
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© 2015 Stanley Aronowitz
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Aronowitz, S. (2015). Henri Lefebvre: The Ignored Philosopher and Social Theorist. In: Against Orthodoxy. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137387189_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137387189_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-43887-4
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