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 his short study of Dialectical Materialism.24 La Conscience mystifiée is important in terms of an attempt to work out why large parts of the working classes came to embrace fascism in the early 1930s. Lefebvre and Guterman also produced a selected works of Hegel for Gallimard in 1938, and translated Lenin’s notebooks on Hegel’s dialectic.25
Other figures in the post-war French reception of Hegel were undoubtedly more important. Foremost here were Alexandre Kojève’s famous lectures on Hegel, attended by an extraordinary audience including Louis Althusser, Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, André Breton, Alexandre Koyré, Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre and many others.26 Jean Hyppolite did not attend, since he was developing his own reading of Hegel and was wary of being influenced. Hyppolite’s translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and his detailed study Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, together with his readings of the work on the philosophy of history and the Logic, were enormously influential.27 Hyppolite supervised several student theses on Hegel, including the recently rediscovered one by Michel Foucault.28
The story of the French reception of Hegel is widely discussed, but Lefebvre has an important minor role in it.29 His reading was one that was largely independent of Kojève’s influence. In his reading of Hegel and Marx together, he is perhaps more significant in terms of debates about Marxism.30 The presentation of Hegel’s work in the Morceaux choisis comprises short, almost aphoristic selections, from a few pages to a few lines. Hegel looks, superficially at least, a lot like Nietzsche. The Introduction stresses the importance of Hegel to Marxism, and the way he might be read in the contemporary context of fascism – the Introduction was written in 1938. Lenin’s notebooks similarly stress the importance of Hegel to Marx. The chapter on Hegel here is a helpful indication of key aspects of his reading.
Nietzsche
Lefebvre was also a pioneer in the French reading of Nietzsche. Many of Nietzsche’s books had been translated into French in the first half of the twentieth century, though like the English translations from the same period they were not always reliable. In the first part of the century Nietzsche was influential in a range of fields, and politically was read by both left and right.31 Things changed with the Nazi use of his works, and in the Anglophone world the German émigré Walter Kaufmann did valuable work after the war in rehabilitating his reputation as a philosopher, though at the expense of making him largely apolitical.32 In Germany, the pre-war work of Karl Jaspers and Karl Löwith was important in this regard too.33
In France, Lefebvre led the way with his own anti-fascist study Nietzsche in 1939.34 It can be seen as the third part of an informal trilogy of works condemning the rise of nationalism and fascism in Europe, along with La Nationalisme contre les nations in 1937 and Hitler au pouvoir, les enseignements de cinq années de fascisme en Allemagne in 1938.35 All these books shared the fate of being condemned by the occupying German forces following the invasion.36 Lefebvre holds Nietzsche no more responsible for Nazism than Marx is for state socialism (p. 39). Georges Bataille’s own significant book On Nietzsche, originally published in 1945, makes some similar moves in defending Nietzsche from the fascist appropriation, and makes brief reference to Lefebvre’s book.37 What set Lefebvre’s 1939 book apart was that, as well as his discussion of Nietzsche, it included translations of key passages, probably prepared with the aid of Guterman.
Nietzsche’s ideas of moments, time and history, his understanding of life, and his reflections on poetry, music and theatre were crucial inspirations for Lefebvre. Later work on space would also owe something to his influence. The later French interest in Nietzsche is quite widely discussed in the literature, given his importance to Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze, among others, but Lefebvre tends to have only a minor role in these studies.38 The chapter on Nietzsche here, the longest part of the study, is a very good indication of the importance Lefebvre put on his work.
Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche
As well as the three discrete chapters on each thinker individually, in the long opening discussion of ‘Triads’ and the brief ‘Conclusion and Afterword’, Lefebvre explores the links between them in a more systematic way. Yet Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche is not the only work in which Lefebvre explores the relation between these three key thinkers and his own ideas. Many of his books could be discussed here, but foremost among them would be Metaphüosophy.39 It equally can be found in some of his substantive works on other themes, notably in The Production of Space, written around the same time as this study, and in La Fin de l’histoire from 1970, which shows that Lefebvre was a significant theorist of time and history as well as space.
For too long, Lefebvre has been seen in English-language debates simply as an innovative thinker in two registers – his cultural studies work on everyday life; and his urban and spatial writings.40 Both are important aspects, certainly, but only two facets of his writings. The translation of Metaphilosophy has, one hopes, helped to indicate the broader reach of his theoretical endeavour. His theoretically catholic approach is especially well exemplified in this book. It provides an excellent orientation to how Lefebvre read, appropriated and utilized Marx. It demonstrates the crucial importance of his reading of Hegel, who was central in understanding his relation to Marx, the state, logic and dialectics. And it sheds a great deal of light on his relation to Nietzsche. In this book, written almost half a lifetime after his first engagement with Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche in the 1930s, he returns to these three figures with the benefit of many years of thinking about them and using their ideas. It was to be one of his last major philosophical writings but, over forty years since its publication, its themes remain surprisingly relevant today, especially since Lefebvre’s abiding interest is in how these thinkers enable us to think the world.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to David Fernbach and Adam David Morton for comments on an earlier draft.
1) Beginning without recourse to any cognitions1 other than elementary, any findings other than basic, we can put forward the following propositions:
a) The modern world is Hegelian. In fact, Hegel elaborated and drove to its ultimate conclusions the political theory of the nation-state. He asserted the supreme reality and value of the state. Hegelianism
