Includes bibliographical references and index -- v. 3. From modernity to modernism (towards a metaphilosophy of daily life)

The first volume of Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life is a work of enormous intellectual range and subtlety by one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and sociologists. Linking philosophical exposition with economics and literary criticism, lyrical meditations with harsh polemics, the Critique is a profound investigation of alienation in the realities of everyday life. Whether he is discussing sport, household gadgets or the countryside, surrealism, Charlie Chaplin or religion, Lefebvre is constructing a matrix of lived experience, exploring the boundaries of oppression and resistance in work and leisure, daydreams and festivities. Published in France in 1947 at the birth of postwar consumerism, the Critique was first denounced by official philosophers and later “rediscovered” throught the Situationists in the 1960s. Today it can be seen as an enduringly radical text, untimely today only in its intransigence and optimism. “A savage critique of consumerist society.” — Publishers Weekly Henri Lefebvre, former taxi-driver, resistance fighter and professor of sociology at Strasbourg and Nanterre, was born in 1901 and died on 29 June 1991. He was the author of sixty books on philosophy, sociology, politics, architecture and urbanism. His Critique of Everyday Life, Volume II and Critique of Everyday Life, Volume III are also published by Verso.