Henri Lefebvre on State, Space, Territory

Abstract

In this article, we offer an account of how the French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre can be read as a theorist of territory. While Lefebvre’s writings on state space have generated some interest in recent years, the territorial dimensions of his thinking on this issue have not been explored. Meanwhile, the question of territory has been oddly undertheorized in the post-1970s literatures on international relations and spatialized political economy. Against this background, we suggest that Lefebvre’s work contains some insightful, if unsystematic, observations on the relationship between states, space and territory. Following consideration of Agnew’s (1994) influential injunction that social scientists transcend the ‘‘territorial trap,’’ we develop this reading of Lefebvre with reference to three key dimensions of his approach to state space as territory—first, the production of territory; second, state territorial strategies; and third, the ‘‘territory effect,’’ namely, the state’s tendency, through its territorial form, to naturalize its own transformative effects on sociospatial relations. Thus construed, Lefebvre’s approach productively raises the issue of how the territorial trap is actually constructed and reproduced. In this article, we offer an account of how the French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) can be read as a theorist of territory. While Lefebvre is well-known as a theorist of space, his works on the state are only now beginning to be discussed in English-language literature. During the last decade, in the context of a broader intensification of scholarly interest in the geographies of state space (Brenner, Jessop, Jones, and MacLeod 2003), Lefebvre has been appropriately credited for his pioneering, reflexive attention to the spatial articulations of state power (Brenner 1997a,b, 2004; Elden 2004). 1