Update: pieces are now available: Henri Lefebvre, The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology : Contribution to the International Congress of Sociology, Amsterdam, August 1956, translated by Matthew Dennis, edited by Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton

Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton, Thinking Past Henri Lefebvre: Introducing “The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology”

A translation of Henri Lefebvre’s 1956 essay ‘The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology’ is forthcoming in Antipode in issue 1 of 2016. The essay first appeared as “Théorie de la rente foncière et sociologie rurale”, in the Transactions of the Third World Congress of Sociology. It was later reprinted in Lefebvre’s collection Du rural à l’urbain in 1970.

The essay was translated by Matthew Dennis, and edited by Adam David Morton and me. We also wrote an introduction to the piece providing the background and linking it to a range of historical and contemporary debates – which is actually longer than the essay itself.

Adam and I hope that this will be the first of a few pieces of Lefebvre’s rural writings to appear in English. Until now only a couple of pieces on this topic have been translated: one essay in Key Writings and one in the first volume of the Critique of Everyday Life.

You can read more about the overall project in a post for Politics Reconsidered: Why read a long dead French Marxist to think about land struggles today?