Background
Lefebvre, Henri was born in 1901 in Hagetmau, Gascony.
Lefebvre, Henri was born in 1901 in Hagetmau, Gascony.
University of Aixen-Provence. 1954, Doctorat d’état, Sorbonne.
1961-1965, Professor, University of Strasbourg. 1965, Professor, University of Paris, Nanterre. 1970, Founder-editor of journal Espaces et société.
Lefebvre denounced nationalism in 1937 and Hitler in 1938: in 1928 he had joined the French Communist Party and was expelled from it in 1958. He supported the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and served in the Resistance.
Lefebvre was a key figure in the development of French Marxist philosophy and an influential critic of early structuralism as propounded by Althusser and Lévi-Strauss. As a student he rebelled against the philosophical orthodoxies as imparted in the French universities of the 1920s. and was a founder member of the ‘Philosophies circle, a radical group functioning between 1929 and 1934. that included Georges Politzer, Norbert Guterman and Paul Nizan among its members He was responsible for the dissemination of fresh perspectives on Marx and Marxism, regarding Marx as a thinker who saw persons and things as ‘totalities' rather than merely from the point of view of economic determinism. In similar vein he developed Marx's account of the inversion of the Hegelian dialectic, maintaining that it should be understood as aufbegung, ‘a transcendence in the double Hegelian sense of an affirmation and negation at once'. In his book Métaphilosophie (1965) he advocated a much more open form of philosophical thought, one that expanded and elaborated the Marxian categories and concepts. He pro* posed that philosophy was itself a type °t alienation and that a study of the numerous modem forms of alienation could yield insights and critical understanding of socialist as well as bourgeois societies. In his analysis of ‘everyday life’ (1971) Lefebvre descries a passivity and fragmentation in the situations of persons who have become mere consumers and live within what he calls ‘a closed circuit' of production-consumption-production. The remedy for this state is. he maintains, to transform the everyday situation rather than the workplace, regenerating the human capacity for creative activity, instigating a new way of life and using technology to effect the cultural and not simply the industrial changes that would inaugurate the conditions required for full human living- In the 1930s, with Norbert Guterman, Lefebvre translated selections in French of the Marx 1844 Manuscripts and Lenin's Philosophical Notebooks. These works, along with Lefebvre's own Dialectical Materialism (1939), became highly influential, although his book was banned during the Nazi occupation of France. After the liberation his political and philosophical life became increasingly stormy. In spite of his loyalty to the Communist Party he was obliged to write and publish a ‘self-criticism’, repudiating the unorthodox ideas he had propounded. In the late 1950s, after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, he supported de Stabilization and as a result was e*pelled from the Party. He regarded the May 1968 rebellions in Paris as having not only the Political but the cultural temper he had advocated and fostered in his students.