Henri Lefebvre’s Writings on Rural Sociology, Ground Rent and the Politics of Land

The research project intends to produce a translated and edited collection of Henri Lefebvre’s writings on ground rent, rural sociology and the politics of land, with either Verso or University of Minnesota Press. This edited collection, a joint project of Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton, will include a substantive introduction, along with extensive editorial notes to the texts. The introduction will situate Lefebvre in relation to wider Marxist work on land, including classic texts such as Marx, Lenin and Kautsky, commentaries relevant to Latin America and more recent work on agrarian change. It will relate Lefebvre’s ideas to contemporary work on political economy, rural development and the Latin American context in which they continue to find a receptive audience.

Lefebvre is a major thinker in a range of fields, including sociology, geography and urban studies. His work on the rural has been neglected in Anglophone debates. Stuart Elden has edited, co-edited and/or co-translated several of the volumes of his work in English, and Adam David Morton is a leading expert on political economy and Latin America, where rural land issues are of crucial importance. Together they edited and introduced one essay of Lefebvre’s on rural questions, for the journal Antipode, which can be seen as a pilot study of the present proposal.

In addition a co-authored article on will be submitted to Development and Change. The essay will be differentiated from the introduction of the edited volume through its focus on peasantries and social movements.