Published in 1962, when Lefebvre was beginning his career as a lecturer in sociology at the University of Strasbourg, this book established his position in the vanguard of the movement which was to culminate in the events of May 1968. It is a book which supersedes the conventional divisions between academic disciplines. Lefebvre's lectures have become legndary, and something of the charismatic presence and delivery is captured in this book, which he intended ''to be understood in the mind's ear ...and not simply to be read''. It not only explores modernity, it exemplifies it. Equally experimental in conception is the book's structure, 12 ''preludes'' through which a range of recurrent themes are interwoven in free-form counterpoint: irony as a critical tool, utopianism, nature and culture, the Stalinization of Marxism, the alienation of everyday life and the cybernetic society. What gradually emerges is not only a series of original concepts about humanity and culture, but an invocation of the complexity of social contradictions. Yet, the fragmented structure of the book is not left to float free. Its shifting and eclectic melodies and leitmotifs have a solid ground base: the wish to rehabilitate the marxist dialectic as a method for understanding and transforming the modern world. This programme is at the heart of the book, and gives its underlying coherence, making it not only useful reading for all students of European cultural history, but also a key text for marxism in the post-communist world of the late-20th century. Henri Lefebvre is the author of ''Le Nationalisme Contre les Nation'', ''La Rythmanalyse'', ''The Production of Space'' and ''Critique of Everyday Life''.

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