Lebensweise (Mode of Life)

Definition

Lebensweise — "mode of life" or "way of life" — is the Marxist-historiographical category that Harald Dehne distinguishes from Alltag (everyday life). Drawn from Marx and Engels's Deutsche Ideologie, it denotes "the complex of specific living conditions, habits and traditions, behavioral patterns, and thought forms of a particular group or class," and is closely associated with "mode of production" (Glossary, p. 314). In Dehne's systematic comparison, Lebensweise is the macro-structural concept: oriented to the total complex of society, to "law-governed regularities" and "socially binding (normative)" patterns, and to longer-term linear sequences ("long waves"). Alltag, by contrast, is the microstructural concept: the angle of "real individuals," the empirical multiplicity of "what is special, unique, and contradictory," and the cyclical rhythms of "pulsing life" (Dehne, pp. 121–125). Crucially, Lebensweise "is an inclusive concept; Alltag has its place both within the concept of Lebensweise (on its most concrete level) as well as arrayed alongside it" (p. 125).

The concept exists to keep the levels of abstraction separate: it "made no sense to string together different levels in subjectivity, individuals, classes and society into a concept of mode of life, since … A social class, qua social subject, does not eat, sing or sleep" (Lothar Kühne, quoted p. 121).

Key Thinkers

• Harald Dehne — the chapter that systematizes the Lebensweise / Alltag distinction and shows why the two must not be conflated (no author page yet — see log).
• Alf Lüdtke — uses Lebensweise for the shared modes of life of working-class milieus, though he warns against "one and the same monolithic unaltering relation of 'dependency'" (p. 12).
• Henri Lefebvre — the adjacent French term mode de vie and the critique of everyday life.

Related Concepts

• Alltagsgeschichte — the field for which Lebensweise supplies the structural pole.
• Everyday Life — the concrete, cyclical micro-level that Lebensweise includes.
• Historical Experience — the experiential dimension that links the two levels.
• Workers' Culture — the stratum-specific Lebensweise of the industrial working class.
• Eigensinn — the self-willed practice that Lebensweise frames without determining.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — Dehne's three-part comparison of Lebensweise and Alltag (angle of orientation, generalizability of insights, temporal form of movement; pp. 121–125); the Kühne stricture against conflating levels (p. 121); the glossary definition (p. 314).
• Critique of Everyday Life (Lefebvre 1991) — the French mode de vie/vie quotidienne distinction.

Open Questions

• Does the Lebensweise/Alltag distinction successfully avoid the very objectivism alltagsgeschichte set out to correct, or does it merely divide the terrain?
• Is Lebensweise a period-bound category (the "mode of life" of industrial classes), or does it extend to post-industrial and digital modes of life?