Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche. Henri Lefebvre
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The links and tensions between Hegel and Marx are well known, and Lefebvre explores some of them here. Lefebvre argues that there is also much common ground between Marx and Nietzsche – their atheism and materialism; their critique of Hegel’s political theology, and of language, logos and the Judeo-Christian tradition; the stress on production and creation, and the body – though there is equally obviously much to contrast. Lefebvre suggests that Nietzsche’s proclamation that ‘God is dead’ has tragic repercussions more than simple atheism and naturalism; that for Nietzsche rationality is not just limited but also illusory; and that production and society are the focus for Marx, creation and civilisation for Nietzsche (pp. 192–93). Equally, while Marx renders Hegel’s dialectic materialist, Nietzsche makes it tragic. Civilisation, while it is discussed here and there in Marx, is distinct from the mode of production, and is most developed in Nietzsche. In Nietzsche, poetry and art take the place of knowledge, and the oeuvre is more important than the product. Nietzsche is obviously more interested in the individual, Marx the collective. While for Hegel and Marx it is the notion of Aufhebung – lift up, abolish or supersede – which characterizes the transitions of history, for Nietzsche it is the notion of Überwindung – overcoming (pp. 26, 31).5 In this and other later works Lefebvre tends to use the French term dépassement to grasp both processes together, though earlier in his career he had complained that the word was ‘contaminated by mysticism and the irrational’ because it also translates the Nietzschean term.6
We might further explore or challenge aspects of each of those readings, but Lefebvre works through each thinker in detail in turn in this study, and the strengths or limits of his readings can now be evaluated by his Anglophone readers. Instead, in this Introduction, I want to step back and discuss how Lefebvre reached the point where he could make these claims.
Marx
Lefebvre is best known as a Marxist, and one of his continual claims was that Marxism provides the essential framework to his ideas. He was a member of the French Communist Party between 1928 and 1958, but while he distanced himself from its organizational forms, he never moved away from this framework of thought. Lefebvre would often claim that he was interested in showing how Marxist ideas could be brought to bear on problems or issues that Marx himself had only treated in minor ways, if at all.
His lifelong project on the notion of everyday life, for example, draws on ideas of alienation, and explores how this can be found in many more aspects of the human condition. In the three volumes of the Critique of Everyday Life he published in 1947, 1961 and 1981, Lefebvre explored many dimensions, relentlessly examining new aspects and developing his theorization.7 To these three key moments we should add 1958, in which he re-edited the first volume with a long new preface; 1968, when he published Everyday Life in the Modern World; and 1992, when the book he was working on at his death, Elements of Rhythmanalysis, appeared.8
Equally, in The Sociology of Marx he suggested that while Marx was not a sociologist there is a sociology in Marx, and he explored how this might be the case.9 His work on rural and urban sociology draws on some of the claims made by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology and Engels’s work on the working class in England, but goes far beyond these works.10 This is both through detailed empirical work and through making substantial theoretical pronouncements. His doctoral thesis, for example, was a study of peasant communities in the Pyrenees, and he spent several years at Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique as a rural researcher.11 Seeing the transitions in and around his home town led him to his work on the urban condition. The now well-known works on the right to the city and the urban revolution developed from this.12 The Production of Space is the theoretical culmination of his studies of both rural and urban politics, as well as his detailed grounding in the philosophical tradition. Politically, Lefebvre would also make many important contributions, particularly evident in 1973’s The Survival of Capitalism and his books on the state.13
As well as these Marxist contributions, Lefebvre made several significant contributions to scholarship on Marx and Marxism. Right at the start of his career Lefebvre had worked with Norbert Guterman on Marx. Together, in 1928, they were two of the founders of the journal La revue marxiste, one of the first Marxist journals in France. Guterman was a Jewish émigré from Eastern Europe, and a multi-linguist. He and Lefebvre collaborated on many projects – Guterman taking the lead on translations; Lefebvre on introductions – until Guterman had to leave Europe just before the war broke out. Guterman settled in New York where he worked as a translator, and forged links with many of the members of the Frankfurt School. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Lefebvre and Guterman published the first excerpts from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,14 and in 1934 produced the collection Morceaux choisis de Karl Marx.15 Later criticized by Louis Althusser for not respecting chronology and mixing up material from different periods, without historical information,16 this collection actually showed Lefebvre’s long-standing insistence that we should read Marx as a whole. Nonetheless, its short excerpts and thematic organization means that it provides only a sampling of the richness of Marx’s work. Lefebvre wrote several books on Marx over his career, including Marx 1818–1883, Pour connaître la pensée de Karl Marx, The Sociology of Marx and Marx.
Marxist Thought and the City is one of the most successful of his books on Marx, developing a systematic reading of this theme in both Marx and Engels.17 Lefebvre also wrote books on Marxism, including the bestseller Le marxisme, for the popular Que sais-je? series.18 His 1947 book Logique formelle, logique dialectique was the planned first volume of a sequence of eight on dialectical materialism written in direct opposition to the Stalinist position.19 The second volume, Méthodologie des sciences, was written and printed, but publication was blocked by French Communist Party censors. It was finally published eleven years after Lefebvre’s death.20 In English, the most substantial statement comes in his early book Dialectical Materialism, as well as The Sociology of Marx. Dialectical Materialism and Le marxisme are two important works in stressing the importance of the theory of alienation to Marx’s work, showing that this term is not just central to Marx’s early writings, but crucial in his later discussion of reification, fetishism and mystification. In 1963 and 1966, Lefebvre and Guterman again collaborated on a two-volume selection of Marx’s texts for Gallimard.21 Unlike Morceaux choisis, this presents material chronologically, showing the development of Marxist thought. Relatively little of his extensive work on Marx and Marxism is available in English, so the chapter on Marx in the present volume is a valuable contribution in its own right.
Hegel
Throughout his long career, Lefebvre saw Marx’s work as important, indeed essential, to an understanding of our times, but not something that could stand alone. In a 1971 discussion with Leszek Kołakowski he declared that, to understand the present moment, Marx was the ‘unavoidable, necessary, but insufficient starting point’, even if the work was to be an ‘analysis of the deception or of the errors or the illusions that originated with the thought of Marx’.22 In Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche he suggests that Marx’s thought today is not dissimilar to Newton’s work in the light of the modern theory of relativity – a stage to start from, true at a certain scale, a date, a moment (p. 10). As such, Lefebvre continually pushes Marxism beyond simply a reliance on the writings on Marx, Engels and Lenin, and brings other thinkers into the dialogue. Hegel and Nietzsche were the only two other thinkers that he held up as significant to the same degree.
Hegel was a crucial thinker for Lefebvre from his earliest writings, produced as part of the group around the Philosophies journal in the 1920s, along with Guterman, Georges Politzer, Georges Friedmann and Pierre Morhange. It was through this work that Lefebvre and his colleagues first discovered Marx, and not unsurprisingly, Lefebvre always insisted on the importance of Hegel to understanding Marx. This was a concern throughout his career, and it is with the benefit of hindsight that we can see this as a fundamental challenge to the Althusserian project.23 Lefebvre also worked explicitly on Hegel. He plays an important role in the early work La Conscience mystifiée, written with Guterman, as well as in