Where to start with reading Henri Lefebvre?

This comes in response to a question to me on Twitter. Where should you start with Henri Lefebvre?

I think many people, especially in Geography, go to The Production of Space. That’s a major work, certainly, but I don’t think it’s a good place to start. It’s a difficult book, which was Lefebvre’s writing up – the theoretical culmination – of several years working on urban and, earlier, rural questions. All-too-often it is read through the lens of the first chapter – a broad, conceptual schema – and not balanced by the much more historical study found in later chapters. I’ve heard several people say that this was the first, and last, thing of Lefebvre they read, or started to read. Any serious engagement with Lefebvre has to come to terms with this book, but it’s not a good place to start.

The Critique of Everyday Life is another way in. The books of that series – three volumes from 1947 to 1982, and his last book Elements of Rhythmanalysis, which he saw as an informal fourth volume – are of their time, and are perhaps less radical and challenging today than they were then. The three volumes have been reissued in a single book by Verso. I think Everyday Life in the Modern World is the best single place to go for this aspect of his work – it’s been in English for a long time, and has been reissued by Bloomsbury and is now in their Revelations series too.

I mentioned the urban work above, and Writings on Cities (which includes the French book La droit à la ville as The Right to the City and various other pieces) and The Urban Revolution are good places to start. At the very least, read them before you read The Production of Space. Towards an Architecture of Enjoyment is an important recent addition, which acts as a bridge between the urban work and The Production of Space. You can read the introduction here. His most theoretical urban book Marxist Thought and the City came out with University of Minnesota Press in late 2016.

If the relation between space and politics is of interest, the State, Space, World collection shows that after The Production of Space Lefebvre continued to think about these questions, but with a larger remit than the city. It gives a sample of the work in Lefebvre’s largely untranslated masterwork, De l’Etat (long out of print). In that register, The Survival of Capitalism (out of print) and The Explosion: Marxism and the French Upheaval (on May 1968) also show his political economic analysis in practice. They really should be read together – the French version of the The Survival of Capitalism reprinted parts of The Explosion, which are excised from the English translation, but without them the book loses some of its bite – a comparison is here. There is also Introduction to Modernity, a curious, interesting but uneven collection of pieces, recently reissued in Verso’s Radical Thinkers series.

Lefebvre was, first and foremost, a Marxist philosopher, and any engagement with his work really needs to come to terms with both parts of that description. Dialectical Materialism is a really important work, but not an easy read, and I’d say the The Sociology of Marx is well-worth a look, probably ahead of most other things. It is out of print, but easily available second-hand. It gives a good sense of the overall trajectory of what Lefebvre was trying to do, which can be described as taking Marxist thought into lesser-known or explored areas. While there is much more on these questions today, Lefebvre wrote pioneering studies of Marxism in relation to everyday life, the city, space, time, aesthetics and so on – The Sociology of Marx gives some sense of what he was doing. His philosophical contributions are much less known in English, but Key Writings (recently reissued in the Revelations series) gives a representative sample of his work in this register, along with an overall take on his work. His crucial book Metaphilosophy was published by Verso in 2016, and this sets his diverse concerns in a wider, theoretical context for Anglophone readers. Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche or the Realm of Shadows was published with Verso in 2020. It’s a major work which summarises his debt to these three crucial thinkers. Both Metaphilosophy and Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche have introductions from me.

The works listed above are those in English translation. Much of Lefebvre remains untranslated. The most recent book to appear in English is On the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) which includes nearly all of his short pieces on this theme. One earlier piece is here, and for some comments on the collection, see here.

Of untranslated works, La fin de l’histoire rebalances his temporal concerns with his better-known understanding of space; and La somme et le reste gives a sense of the trajectory of the first half of his career and life. Parts of both are in Key Writings. There are plenty more important books, though there is quite a bit of repetition, and some works that are very much of their own moment. Several French books are out of print, and many of these extremely difficult to find, but there were a series of new editions in the 2000s, until rights issues put an end to that valuable work.

In terms of the secondary literature, there is much more to chose from now than there was in the past. Andy Merrifield’s Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction gives a good sense of the relation between the man and his work, while Rob Shields’s Lefebvre, Love and Struggle and my Understanding Henri Lefebvre are more directed towards the work in itself. I think it’s fair to say mine is the most comprehensive study, though it still leaves lots under-examined, and its philosophical approach isn’t to everyone’s taste.

Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies and Thirdspace have good discussions of Lefebvre alongside other concerns. There are chapters on Lefebvre in works by Derek Gregory and others, and loads of journal articles. More recently there have been a few books using Lefebvre in relation to other disciplines, though most have a spatial perspective – Sue Middleton’s Henri Lefebvre and Education; Benjamin Fraser’s Henri Lefebvre and the Spanish Urban Experience and Toward an Urban Cultural Studies: Henri Lefebvre and the Humanities; Chris Butler’s Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City (good on the legal); Łukasz Stanek’s Henri Lefebvre and Space (excellent on architecture and urbanism), and the edited collections Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre, Understanding the City: Henri Lefebvre and Urban Studies, Urban Revolution Now and Organisational Space and Beyond. Nathaniel Coleman’s Lefebvre for Architects has recently been published. If you read French, Rémi Hess, Henri Lefebvre et l’aventure du siècle is indispensable. A 2019 edited collection by Jenny Bauer and Robert Fischer, Perspectives on Henri Lefebvre: Theory, Practices and (Re)Readings is useful.

Two recent books in English are Patrick Rumsby, Henri Lefebvre, Boredom and Everyday Life (Lexington) and Christian Schmid, Henri Lefebvre and the Theory of the Production of Space (Verso).

In November 2022 a short autobiographical sketch was translated by David Fernbach at the Verso blog – “I am not a good Communist” – Henri Lefebvre’s Autobiography from 1957.

Incidentally, there is another Henri Lefebvre, whose book The Missing Pieces was translated in 2014. It’s an interesting book on abandoned, lost, destroyed, forgotten and unfinished works, but it’s not by the same person. A short excerpt is available on the Berfrois website