Henri Lefebvre, On the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography

Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton | November 4, 2021

Tags: Henri Lefebvre space
Henri Lefebvre, space
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A collection of previously untranslated writings by Henri Lefebvre on rural sociology, situating his research in relation to wider Marxist work.

In collaboration with Stuart Elden, we are pleased to present Lefebvre’s key works on rural questions, including the first half of his book Du rural à l’urbain and supplementary texts. On the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography (published March 2022) reveals the production of the rural as a key site of capitalist development and as a space of struggle.

When we contemplate a field of wheat or maize, we are well aware that the furrows, the pattern of sowing, and the boundaries, be they hedges or wire fences, designate relations of production and property

—Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

On the Rural is the first English collection to translate Lefebvre’s crucial but lesser-known writings on rural sociology and political economy, presenting a wide-ranging approach to understanding the historical and rural sociology of precapitalist social forms, their endurance today, and conditions of dispossession and uneven development.

In On the Rural, we present Lefebvre’s key works on rural questions, including the first half of his book Du rural à l’urbain and supplementary texts, two of which are largely unknown conference presentations published outside France. On the Rural offers methodological orientations for addressing questions of economy, sociology, and geography by deploying insights from spatial political economy to decipher the rural as a terrain and stake of capitalist transformation. By doing so, it reveals the production of the rural as a key site of capitalist development and as a space of struggle.

This volume delivers a careful translation—supplemented with extensive notes and a substantive introduction—to cement Lefebvre’s central contribution to the political economy of rural sociology and geography.

Contents

Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton, ‘From the Rural to the Urban and the Production of Space’

1. Introduction to From the Rural to the Urban (1969)

2. Problems of Rural Sociology: The Peasant Community and its Historical-Sociological Problems (1949)

3. Social Classes in Rural Areas: Tuscany and the mezzadria classica (1950)

4. Perspectives on Rural Sociology (1953)

5. Social Relations, Population Phenomena, and Labor Problems in the Agricultural Sector of Underdeveloped Countries (1954)

6. The Village Community (1956)

7. The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology (1956)

8. The Marxist–Leninist Theory of Ground Rent (1964)

9. Introduction to the Psychosociology of Everyday Life (1960)

10. The New Urban Complex: Lacq-Mourenx and the Urban Problems of the New Working Class (1960)

11. Experimental Utopia: For a New Urbanism (1961)

12. The Valley of Campan: A Study in Historical Sociology (1963)

The set image reproduces Grant Wood, Fall Plowing (1931).

Author: Stuart Elden

Stuart Elden is Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of books on territory, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, and Henri Lefebvre. Shakespearean Territories was published by University of Chicago Press in 2018; and Canguilhem by Polity in 2019. His next book will be The Early Foucault, due with Polity in June 2021. As well as co-editing Henri Lefebvre, From the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography by University of Minnesota Press in 2022, he is currently writing a book on Foucault’s work in the 1960s. He runs a blog at www.progressivegeographies.com

Author: Adam David Morton

Adam David Morton is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He is author of Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy (2007); Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of Uneven Development (2011), recipient of the 2012 Book Prize of the British International Studies Association (BISA) International Political Economy Group (IPEG); and co-author of Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (2018) with Andreas Bieler. The volume Henri Lefebvre, On the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography is out in 2022 with University of Minnesota Press, co-edited with Stuart Elden.

Henri Lefebvre, From the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography – a new collection of writings forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press, 2022

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Henri Lefebvre, On the Rural: Economy, Sociology, Geography