Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction - autonomous learning

H e n r i L e F e b v r e
an isolated Pyrenean peasant community in the valley of Campan,
near Tarbes. He laid low with locals, and with local maquisands,
until the Liberation. He got to know mountain shepherds on the
slopes, studied them, learned their rituals and folklore and façon
de vivre, and even spotted a sort of primitive communism in their
daily life. He didn’t know it then, but he’d already embarked on
everyday life research, pregnant in his doctorate on peasant sociology,
Les Communautés Paysannes Pyrénéennes (eventually
defended in Paris in June 1954). 7
Methodologically, Lefebvre deployed a sort of “participant
observation,” which, coupled with long sessions in the archives of
Campan’s Town Hall, led him to discover a passion for historical
excavation he never knew he had. Jean-Paul Sartre, for one, appreciated
the virtues of Lefebvre’s rural “regressive–progressive”
methodology—a methodology informing his work on urbanism
and space decades later. “In order to study complexity and reciprocity
of interrelations—without getting lost in it—Lefebvre,”
Sartre noted, “proposes ‘a very simple method employing auxiliary
techniques and comprising several phases: (a) Descriptive.
Observation but with a scrutiny guided by experience and a
general theory. … (b) Analytico-Regressive. Analysis of reality.
Attempt to date it precisely. … (c) Historical-Genetic. Attempt to
rediscover the present, but elucidated, understood, explained.’ ”
“We have nothing to add to this passage,” Sartre added, “so clear
and so rich, except that we believe that this method, with its
phase of phenomenological description and its double movement
of regression followed by progress, is valid—with the modifications
which its objects may impose upon it—in all the domains of
anthropology.” 8
As Lefebvre documented the plight of the rural peasant and
the agrarian question under socialism, his “critique of everyday
life” took shape. After 1947, this became both a methodology and
a political credo: an insistence that dialectical method and the
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