Henri Lefebvre: A Brief Review

Abstract

This paper elaborates on the French Romantic Revolutionary Henri Lefebvre's theorization of everyday life, who construed everyday life as a site for production, consumption, socialization, alienation and resistance. The author particularly rejects the commonsensical and dismissive construction of everyday life as "mundane, trivial, unobserved" and sides with Lefevre's understanding who saw everyday life as one that disentangles the nuances of the relationship between individual and history and offers an understanding of the course of the transformation of the world we live in. The author argues that Lefebvre was against the reduction of everyday life to everyday things and practices", or to a life contesting the philosophical, supernatural, sacred, and the artistic"; for him, the everydayness of life lies in "manifold lived experiences" which revolve around such culturally embedded things and practices. Against conventional Marxist thinking, Lefebvre argues that daily life is the "base" from which the mode of production endeavours to constitute itself as a system, to programme this base. The author gives an outline of the new areas of research in the field of sociology of everyday life and drops some important methodological hints.