Some Face Posthumous Justice Too: Lefebvre, Marxism and a Debt to Nietzsche

Through his work on cities and the urban, as well as on the importance of everyday life, Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) has enjoyed a posthumous renaissance, and is now one of the most influential of French Marxists. But was he one? He always claimed to be. Yet he took from Nietzsche crucial and lifelong components of his personal theoretical framework: personality, alienation, ethics, and even language. Commentators oscillate between accepting his claim to having successfully placed Marx and Nietzsche in separate silos on the one hand and asserting that he had done what he equally always insisted he had not – build his own system. Marxists themselves may not be satisfied with either formulation, even if the risk they run in separating Lefebvre from his Nietzschean heritage may be to extract a theory of the urban that is dead on arrival, or at least requiring resuscitation by Marxist means.