Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

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Everyday Life
One finds all one wants in the Grand Magasins of everyday
adventure, which never close, even on Sundays and holidays.
—Pierre Mac Orlan, Chroniques de la fin d’un monde
It’s astonishing to think that Henri Lefebvre began Volume 1 of
Critique of Everyday Life with the founding of the United Nations
and finished it with Volume 3, in 1981, during the first term of
Ronald Reagan. In between, in 1961, just as mass consumerism
really took off, he penned Volume 2. (He also wrote, as some of
his students barricaded Paris’s boulevards, Everyday Life in the
Modern World.) It was quite a stretch, quite a project: beginning
in the age of peace and consensus, continuing through a cold war
and a counterculture, and sealing it amidst a neocon backlash. His
opening salvo in 1947 was that of a man of the countryside, even
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