Stuart Elden (PAIS) and Adam David Morton (Political Economy, University of Sydney) have been awarded a small grant from the Independent Social Research Foundation on the project ‘Henri Lefebvre’s writings on Rural Sociology, Ground Rent and the Politics of Land’.

The grant is to support the translation of essays by the French Marxist Henri Lefebvre on the political economy of ground rent and rural sociology. Stuart and Adam will edit these essays and present them as a book with substantial notes and introduction, on the model of a previous book of Lefebvre’s essays that Stuart co-edited with Neil Brenner – State, Space, World, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

The first essay from the project, “The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology” was recently publishing in the journal Antipode, translated by Warwick Philosophy PhD student Matthew Dennis, and edited and with an introduction by Stuart and Adam. Several more such essays will appear in the edited book.

When Stuart and Adam were first beginning the project they wrote a short piece for the Politics Reconsidered blog answering a key question about this project: Why read a long dead French Marxist to think about land struggles today?