Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1

This is the book which provided the philosophy behind the 1968 student Revolution in France, and is considered to be the founding text of all that we now know as cultural studies. Whether discussing sport, household gadgets, the countryside, surrealism, Charlie Chaplin or religion, Lefebvre always concentrates on the minutiae of lived experience in work and leisure, daydreams and festivities. Denounced by both the right and left when it was first published in France in 1947, today this text is recognized as a path-breaking, radical and hugely influential book. Lefebvre always returns to the ubiquity of alienation, the necessity of revolt. This is an enduringly radical book, untimely today only in its intransigence and optimism.