Critique of Everyday Life, Volume III

Twenty years after the publication of the second volume of the “Critique of Everyday Life”, which was widely regarded as prefiguring the protest movement of May 1968, Lefebvre returned to the theme of his great work in a dramatically changed conjuncture of neo-liberal reaction. With the hopes of the 1960s now dispelled amid a pervasive sense of ‘crisis’, Lefebvre ponders the fate of his original theoretico-political project, registering the middle-class recuperation of such key themes as “changer la vie”, before resuming the critical analysis of daily life. Equally rejecting uncritical nostalgia for the past and facile enthusiasm for the present, the twin errors that everything has changed and nothing has changed, positivist endorsement of what exists and ‘hypercritical’ rejection of it, the final instalment of the trilogy seeks to track the continuities and discontinuities in daily life in the intervening twenty years.