The Revolution of Everyday Life is a 1967 book by Raoul Vaneigem, Belgian author, philosopher and former member of the Situationist International (1961-1970). In French the title of the work was more elaborate: Traité du savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations, or Treatise on Living for the Younger Generations. John Fullerton & Paul Sieveking, the first translators of the work into English, chose this alternative title. Though later translators such as Donald Nicholson-Smith prefer the original French title, publishers generally insist upon the latter title, by which it has become well-known in the English-speaking world.
The book was, along with Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, one of the most significant major works written by members of the Situationist International (1957-1972).
The book takes the field of "everyday life" as the ground upon which communication and participation can occur, or, as is more commonly the case, be perverted and abstracted into pseudo-forms. The author considers that direct, unmediated communication between "qualitative subjects" is the 'end' to which human history tends - a state of affairs still frustrated by the perpetuation of capitalist modes of relation and to be "called forward" through the construction of situations. Under these prevailing conditions, people are still manipulated as docile "objects" and without the "qualititive richness" which comes from asserting their irreducible individuality - it is toward creating life lived in the first person that situations must be "built" . So to speak, it is the humiliation of being but a "thing" for others that is responsible for all the ills Vaneigem equates with modern city life - isolation, humiliation, mis-communication - and toward creating new roles that flout stereotyped convention that freedom comes.
Contents of the Donald Nicholson-Smith translation (Rebel Press, 2003):
Part One: Power’s Perspective
The Impossibility of Participation: Power as the Sum of Constraints
The Impossibility of Communication: Power as Universal Mediation
The Impossibility of Realisation: Power as Sum of Seductions
Survival and False Opposition to it
Part Two: Reversal of Perspective