The Critique of Everyday Life: volume 3 Henri Lefebvre Verso, 179pp, £20 ISBN 1859845908

Parisians have a phrase for the world of boring daily routine that we simply ignore or take for granted: "Metro, boulot, dodo" or "commuting, working, sleeping". Henri Lefebvre, the French thinker who died in 1991 at the age of 90, spent much of his seven-decade writing career trying to make sense of this quotidian life through his own "sociology of everydayness". For Lefebvre, the technological changes of the 20th century were not matched by equivalent improvements in our mundane lives. The everyday was the embarrassing underside of capitalist progress, a "residual deposit, a great, disparate patchwork that modernity drags in its wake".

Lefebvre aimed to show that these apparently eternal daily routines were the product of historical change. The long gestation period of his magnum opus, The Critique of Everyday Life - published in three volumes between 1947 and 1981, with the last one only now translated into English - shows this clearly. The first volume was written during the rebuilding of France after the Second World War, when fuel, food and housing shortages made the simplest everyday routines a matter of fierce political debate. The second volume, published in 1961, came in the middle of the trente glorieuses, the 30-year boom that transformed France from an agrarian country into an urbanised consumer society.

This final volume foresees the trans- formation of daily life by new-right economics, examining emergent phenomena such as the extension of home ownership, the return to town centres by middle-class gentrifiers and the media invention of "lifestyle". Despite Lefebvre's claim that "critical knowledge of daily life does not require a special or perfect language", his own style has the awkward, stop-start quality of a creaky commuter train. In the earlier volumes, vivid detail compensates for this problem. There are memorable descriptions of French church congregations, traffic jams, suburban villas and the cheap slab blocks of public housing, which Lefebvre attacks as "the dictatorship of the right angle". The third volume, subtitled Towards a Metaphilosophy of Daily Life, moves away from these sociological pleasures towards philosophical abstraction. The book is worth persevering with, however. Lefebvre is one of the few modern writers to deal with those moments of limbo, exemplified by the unpaid labour of the daily commute, which remind us of the literal meaning of quotidian as "marking time".

The Critique's central insight is that "the only genuine, profound human changes are those which cut into the substance of everyday life and make their mark upon it". This idea inspired the Paris revolutionaries of May 1968, whose famed slogans - "Beauty is in the street", "Beneath the paving stones, the beach", "Never work" - condemned the oppressive boredom of daily life. Lefebvre was fond of pointing out that the evenements originated not on the radical Left Bank but at his own university, the concrete jungle of the new suburban campus at Nanterre - a bit like an English revolution starting in Croydon or Milton Keynes. Real social change, he argued, had to occur through a far-reaching transformation of the spaces and practices of daily life: how we catch buses and trains, spend time at our work desks, drive along motorways, get stuck in traffic jams and park our cars.

The straphangers and clock-watchers of the 21st century can take heart from Lefebvre's vision of a less dreary society in which "all moments would be equivalent in daily life. In that case, daily life would dissolve, as it were, like a bad dream."

Joe Moran's Reading the Everyday is published by Routledge

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