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Basing his discussion on everyday life in France, Lefebvre shows the degree to which our lived-in world and sense of it are shaped by decisions about which we know little and in which we do not participate.
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), ,, " Everyday Life in the Modern World the text of this book is printed on 100% recycled paper Henri Lefebvre tt--------- --- ----. �eryday Life in the Modern World / Translated by Sacha Rabinovitch HARPER TORCHBOOKS Harper & Row, Publishers New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London c Contents La vie quotidienne dans Ie monde moderne 1 An Inquiry, and Some Discoveries 1 published in 1968 by 2 The Bureaucratic Society of Controlled Consumption 68 Editions Gallimard, Paris Everyday Life in the Modern World translation first published in 1 9 7 1 by Allen Lane The Penguin Press and is here reprinted by arrangement. This translation Copyright ©-197 1 by Sacha Rahlnovitch All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 1 0022. First HARPER TORCHBOOK STANDARD BOOK NUMBER: edition published 1 9 7 1 06- 1 3 1 608-3 3 Linguistic Phenomena 1 10 4 Terrorism and Everyday Life 1 43 5 Towards a Permanent Cultural Revolution 1 94 Everyday Life in the Modern World 1 An Inquiry, and Some Discoveries In the past fifty years ... Imagine that you have before you a complete set of calendars dating from 1 900, of which you select one at random that happens to represent a year towards the beginning of the century. Pencil poised, you then close your eyes and make a cross beside a day in this year; you open your eyes and you find that it is the sixteenth of Ju.1J,eyou have marked. Now you try to discover what took place on this particUIa:raay"-among so many others in a relatively peace ful and prosperous year - for this continent and country at least. You go to the public library and consult the national press for this date; you are confronted with news items, accidents, the sayings of contemporary personalities, a clutter of dusty reports and stale information and some unconvincing revelations concerning the wars and upheavals of the time; but there is practically nothing that might enable you to foretell (or to suppose that a reasonably perceptive person living in those days could have foretold) any of the events about to take place, those occurrences that must have been silently developing in the hidden depths of time; on the other hand, neither will you find much information as to the manner in which ordinary men and women spent that day, their occupations, preoccupations, labours or leisure. Publicity (still in its infancy), news items and a few marginal reports are all that is now available to reconstruct the everyday life of those twenty-four hours. 2 Everyday Life in the Modern World Having perused papers and periodicals from this not-so-distant past - noting the familiarity of headlines and the out-of-date typo graphy - you can now give rein to your fancy: might not something have happened on that sixteenth of June which the press has omit ted to report ? You are indeed free to imagine that it is precisely then that a certain Mr Einstein - of whom nobody at the time had ever heard - had his first perception of relativity in the Zurich room where he inspected patents and toed the narrow lonely path between reason and delirium. Nor can anyone prove that you are wr