Everyday Life

Introduction

Heller wrote “Everyday Life” in the late 1960s at the Institute of Sociology in Budapest; it appeared in Hungarian in 1970, in German in 1978 and in English in 1984. Building on Lukács’s late aesthetics, which begins from everyday thinking before turning to art and science, she defined everyday life as the totality of activities through which individuals reproduce themselves as particular persons and thereby make the reproduction of society possible. Habit, repetition, pragmatic thinking and the use of objects, customs and language form its structure. The book asks how a person can relate consciously to this sphere and become an individual rather than a merely particular being – for Heller the humanist meaning of socialism. It became a reference work for the sociology of everyday life in Eastern and Western Europe.

More works by Agnes Heller

• 1987Beyond Justice