Citizens’ agora: The new urban question

Andy Merrifield, Radical Philosophy

What would Rousseau, who penned his classic Discourse on Inequality in 1755, have made of things today? Had he still been around, had he travelled around the globe a bit, he’d have doubtless despaired of how little ‘civilized’ society had ameliorated the ‘artificial’ inequalities that derive from the conventions that govern us. Maybe he’d have also played a cameo role in a new documentary, Inequality for All, directed by Jacob Kornbluth with economist Robert Reich as the unlikely lead.1Already a big hit at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, Inequality for All follows Reich teaching his packed undergraduate class on Wealth and Poverty at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1978, says Reich, your typical male worker doing just fine in the USA was pulling in around $48,000 a year; your boss back then was probably making around $390,000. Thirty-odd years on, in 2010, the former struggles to earn $33,000 a year, while the latter’s average share has bloated to well over a million bucks a year. ‘Where America leads’, Reich says, ‘the rest of the world follows. This same thing is affecting people all over the world. If nothing is done to reverse this trend, Britain will find itself in exactly the same place as America in just a few years’ time.’ Indeed, as at December 2010, 10 per cent of the fattest cats in the UK own 40 per cent of the national wealth; and Royal Bank of Scotland bankers, after finagling Libor interest rates and suffering losses for 2012 of £5.2 billion, now award themselves bonuses in excess of £600 million.

Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction

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Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction by Andy Merrifield

Henri Lefebvre’s Youthfulness of Heart

by Andy Merrifield, The Brooklyn Rail, 2004

I never met Henri Lefebvre, the French Marxist philosopher, nor saw him lecture. Some of my friends who did said he was a real knockout. Others who had contact with him recall his warm, slow, melodious voice, his boyish passions, his virility—even in old age—and the posse of young, attractive women invariably in his train. Portraits cast him as a Rabelaisian monk and Kierkegaardian seducer all rolled into one. I’m sorry I missed this act, missed the man himself, en direct, live. But I did see him on British TV once, back in the early 1990s. The series, “The Spirit of Freedom,” was strictly for insomniacs and appeared in the wee hours. Each of the four programs tried to assess the legacy of Left French intellectuals during the twentieth-century. The cynical tone throughout wasn’t too surprising given that its narrator and brainchild was Bernard-Henri Lévy—BHL, as the French media know him—Paris-Match’s answer to Jean-Paul Sartre.