A Marx for Our Time: Henri Lefebvre and the Production of Space

Henri Lefebvre, who died last year at an age between 86 to 89 (the records aren't clear), was perhaps the greatest Marxian thinker since Marx, and certainly one of the greatest philosophers of our time. Sociologists can appreciate significance by realizing that what they know of Marx's work itself is quite limited. The latter has been homogenized and simplified by generations of textbook writing and misleading scholarship.' To understand Marx it is necessary first to know how he thought and analyzed social phenomena, rather than what he said. By this I mean an understanding of the powerful dialectical schema that Marx developed in critique of both Hegel and Fichte.2 Lefebvre was one of the very few analysts of society who really knew how Marx thought, and it is indicative that one of first books was on Marxian dialectics (Lefebvre 1939).3 This work contains many of the themes that Lefebvre was to develop later. In 1974 Lefebvre published a monumental book, The Production of Space, which has just appeared in translation (1991) and which the publisher claims to be his major philosophical work. I would rank another work, three-part book The Critique of Everyday Life (which is being translated only now), as most significant, but the book on space must rank a close second. Yet Lefebvre also has made important contributions to the theory of the state (a four-volume masterpiece), to the sociology of the arts, to poststructuralism, to existentialism, to scholarship on Descartes, Pascal, Nietzsche (as early as 1939), and Lukacs, among other thinkers, and to the theory of modernity/ postmodernity.4 What I like most about Lefebvre is how he engaged time. He did not write in isolation, but lived the life of a Parisian intellectual and participated in lively debates with others about the nature of Marxism, political action, the intellectual foundations of structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernity, and (reaching back) existentialism. Consequently he took the trouble both to read the work of others and to attempt a dialogue in writing-a rarity among American academics. When reading Lefebvre, one can find all sorts of sometimes veiled, sometimes explicit references to the current ideas and books in the Parisian milieu, which may escape the uninformed reader.5