althusser essays in self criticism

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Internet Archive Audio

This Just In
Grateful Dead
Old Time Radio
78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
Audio Books & Poetry
Computers, Technology and Science
Music, Arts & Culture
News & Public Affairs
Spirituality & Religion
Radio News Archive

Flickr Commons
Occupy Wall Street Flickr
NASA Images
Solar System Collection
Ames Research Center

All Software
Old School Emulation
MS-DOS Games
Historical Software
Classic PC Games
Software Library
Kodi Archive and Support File
Vintage Software
CD-ROM Software
CD-ROM Software Library
Software Sites
Tucows Software Library
Shareware CD-ROMs
Software Capsules Compilation
CD-ROM Images
ZX Spectrum
DOOM Level CD

Smithsonian Libraries
FEDLINK (US)
Lincoln Collection
American Libraries
Canadian Libraries
Universal Library
Project Gutenberg
Children's Library
Biodiversity Heritage Library
Books by Language
Additional Collections

Prelinger Archives
Democracy Now!
Occupy Wall Street
TV NSA Clip Library
Animation & Cartoons
Arts & Music
Computers & Technology
Cultural & Academic Films
Ephemeral Films
Sports Videos
Videogame Videos
Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

Wayback Machine (iOS)
Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

Explore the Collections
Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

Essays in self-criticism

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

Graphic Violence
Explicit Sexual Content
Hate Speech
Misinformation/Disinformation
Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

Contains pencil marks.

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

211 Previews

11 Favorites

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

No suitable files to display here.

EPUB and PDF access not available for this item.

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by station03.cebu on June 7, 2019

Bibliography

Academic tools.

Friends PDF Preview
Author and Citation Info
Back to Top

Louis Althusser

Louis Pierre Althusser (1918–1990) was one of the most influential Marxist philosophers of the 20 th Century. As they seemed to offer a renewal of Marxist thought as well as to render Marxism philosophically respectable, the claims he advanced in the 1960s about Marxist philosophy were discussed and debated worldwide. Due to apparent reversals in his theoretical positions, to the ill-fated facts of his life, and to the historical fortunes of Marxism in the late twentieth century, this intense interest in Althusser’s reading of Marx did not survive the 1970s. Despite the comparative indifference shown to his work as a whole after these events, the theory of ideology Althusser developed within it has been broadly deployed in the social sciences and humanities and has provided a foundation for much “post-Marxist” philosophy. In addition, aspects of Althusser’s project have served as inspiration for Analytic Marxism as well as for Critical Realism and Discourse Analysis. Though this influence is not always explicit, Althusser’s work and that of his students continues to inform the research programs of literary studies, political philosophy, history, economics, and sociology. At present, Althusser’s philosophy as a whole is undergoing a critical reevaluation by scholars who have benefited from the anthologization of previously unpublished texts. His concepts are also being increasingly employed by philosophers, political theorists, and activists who have returned to Marx and to Marxian analyses in order to explain and to envision alternatives to our present socio-economic conjuncture.

2.1 Christianity and Marxism

2.2 hegelian marxism, 2.3 marx not hegel, 2.4 historical work: montesquieu and feuerbach, 3.1 hermeneutic theory, 3.2 epistemology and philosophy of science, 3.3 the role of philosophy, 3.4 marxist philosophy, 3.5 social and political philosophy, historiography, 4.1 the relationship between theory and practice, 4.2 theory of ideology, 4.3 aesthetic theory, 4.4 marx’s philosophy redux, 5. late work (1980–1986): aleatory materialism, primary literature, secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

Louis Althusser was born on October 16 th , 1918 in Bir Mourad Raïs (formerly Birmandreis), a suburb of Algiers. Hailing from Alsace on his father’s side of the family, his grandparents were French citizens who had chosen to settle in Algeria. At the time of his birth, Althusser’s father was a lieutenant in the French Military. After this service was up, his father returned to Algiers and to his work as a banker. By all accounts save for the retrospective ones contained in his autobiographies, Althusser’s early childhood in North Africa was a contented one. There he enjoyed the comforts of the Mediterranean environment as well as those provided by an extended and stable petit-bourgeois family.

In 1930, his father’s work moved the family to Marseille. Always a good pupil, Althusser excelled in his studies and became active in the Scouts. In 1936, the family moved again, this time to Lyon. There, Althusser was enrolled in the prestigious Lycée du Parc. At the Lycée, he began taking classes in order to prepare for the competitive entrance exams to France’s grandes écoles . Raised in an observant family, Althusser was particularly influenced by professors of a distinctly Catholic tendency. These included the philosophers Jean Guitton and Jean Lacroix as well as the historian Joseph Hours. In 1937, while still at the Lycée, Althusser joined the Catholic youth group Jeunesse étudiantes chrétiennes . This interest in Catholicism and his participation in Catholic organizations would continue even after Althusser joined the Communist Party in 1948. The simultaneous enthusiasm that Althusser showed in Lyon for Royalist politics did not last the war.

In 1939, Althusser performed well enough on the national entrance examinations to be admitted to the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris. However, before the school year began, he was mobilized into the army. Soon thereafter, he was captured in Vannes along with the rest of his artillery regiment. He spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner of war at a camp in Northern Germany. In his autobiographical writings, Althusser credits the experiences of solidarity, political action, and community that he found in the camp as opening him up to the idea of communism. Indeed, his prison writings collected as Journal de captivité, Stalag XA 1940–1945 evidence these experiences. They also provide evidence of the cycles of deep depression that began for Althusser in 1938 and that would mark him for the rest of his life.

At the end of the war and following his release from the P.O.W. camp in 1945, Althusser took his place at the ENS. Now 27 years old, he began the program of study that was to prepare him for the agrégation , the competitive examination which qualifies one to teach philosophy in French secondary schools and that is often the gateway to doctoral study and university employment. Perhaps not surprisingly for a young man who had just spent half a decade in a prison camp, much happened during the three years he spent preparing for the exam and working on his Master’s thesis. Though still involved in Catholic groups and still seeing himself as a Christian, the movements that Althusser associated with after the war were leftist in their politics and, intellectually, he made a move to embrace and synthesize Christian and Marxist thought. This synthesis and his first published works were informed by a reading of 19 th Century German idealist philosophy, especially Hegel and Marx, as well as by progressive Christian thinkers associated with the group Jeunesse de l’Église . Indeed, it was 19 th Century German Idealism with which he was most engaged during his period of study at the ENS. In line with this interest (one shared with many other French intellectuals at the time), Althusser obtained his diplôme d’études supérieures in 1947 for a work directed by Gaston Bachelard and titled “On Content in the Thought of G.W.F. Hegel.” In 1948, he passed his agrégation , coming in first on the written portion of the exam and second on the oral. After this showing, Althusser was offered and accepted the post of agrégé répétiteur (director of studies) at the ENS whose responsibility it was to help students prepare for their own agrégations . In this capacity, he began offering courses and tutorials on particular topics in philosophy and on particular figures from the history of philosophy. As he retained this responsibility for more than thirty years and worked with some of the brightest thinkers that France produced during this time (including Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault), through his teaching Althusser left a deep and lasting impression on a generation of French philosophers and on French philosophy.

In addition to inaugurating his extended association with the ENS, the first few years spent in Paris after the war saw Althusser begin three other long-lasting relationships. The first of these was with the French Communist Party, the second with his companion and eventual wife, Hélène Rytmann-Légotien, and the third with French psychiatry. Begun to treat recurrent bouts of depression, this last affiliation continued for the rest of his life and included frequent hospitalization as well as the most aggressive treatments post-war French psychiatry had to offer such as electroconvulsive therapy, narco-analysis, and psychoanalysis.

The second relationship begun by Althusser was little happier and no less dependent than the first. At its outset, Althusser’s bond with Rytmann-Légotien was complicated by his almost total inexperience with women and by her being eight years older than him. It was also made difficult by the vast differences in their experience of the world and by her relationship with the Communist Party. Whereas Althusser had known only home, school, and P.O.W. camp, Rytmann-Légotien had traveled widely and had long been active in literary and radical circles. At the time the two met, she was also embroiled in a dispute with the Party over her role in the resistance during World War II.

Though Althusser was not yet a Party member, like many of his generation, he emerged from the War deeply sympathetic to its moral aims. His interest in Party politics and involvement with Party members grew during his time as a student at the ENS. However, the ENS’ suspicion of communists as well as Rytmann-Légotien’s troubles with the Party complicated Althusser’s relationship with each of these institutions. Nonetheless, shortly after being offered the post of agrégé répétiteur (and thus safe from being bypassed for the position due to his membership), Althusser joined the Communist Party. For the next few years, Althusser tried to advance the aims of the Communist Party as well as the goal of getting Hélène Rytmann-Légotien accepted back into it. He did so by being a good militant (going to cell meetings, distributing tracts, etc), by re-starting a Marxist study group at the ENS (the Cercle Politzer ), and by making inquiries into Hélène Rytmann-Légotien’s wartime activities in the hopes of clearing her name. By his own account, he made a terrible activist and he also failed to rehabilitate her reputation. Nonetheless, his relationship with the Party and with his future wife deepened during this period.

During the 1950s, Althusser lived two lives that were only somewhat inter-related: one was that of a successful, if somewhat obscure academic philosopher and pedagogue and the other that of a loyal Communist Party Member. This is not to say that Althusser was politically inactive at the school or that his communism did not influence his philosophical work. On the contrary, Althusser recruited colleagues and students to the Party and worked closely with the communist cell based at the ENS. In addition, at mid-decade, he published a few introductions to Marxist philosophy. However, in his teaching and advising, he mostly avoided bringing in Marxist philosophy and Communist politics. Instead, he catered to student interest and to the demands of each new agrégation by engaging closely with classic philosophical texts and with contemporary philosophy and social science. Further, the bulk of his scholarship was on 18 th Century political philosophy. Indeed, the only book-length study Althusser published during his lifetime was a work on Montesquieu, which appeared at the end of the decade. At the ENS, Althusser’s professionalism as well as his ability to think institutionally was rewarded in 1954 with a promotion to secrétaire de l’école littéraire , a post where he had some responsibility for the management and direction of the school.

It would have surprised no one if Althusser had continued to influence French political and philosophical life subtly, through the students that he mentored, through his scholarship on the history of political philosophy, through the colloquia among philosophers, scientists, and historians that he organized, and through his routine work as a Party member. However, in 1961, with an essay titled “On the Young Marx,” Althusser aggressively entered into a heated debate about the continuity of Marx’s oeuvre and about what constitutes the core of Marxist philosophy. Appearing at a time of crisis in the French Communist Party’s direction and seeming to offer a “scientific” alternative to Stalinism and to the humanist revisions of Marxism then being proffered, the theoretical viewpoint offered by Althusser gained adherents. Invigorated by this recognition and by the possibility that theoretical work might actually change Communist Party practice, Althusser began to publish regularly on Marxist philosophy. These essays occasioned much public discussion and philosophical activity both in France and abroad. At the same time as these essays began creating a stir, Althusser changed his teaching style at the ENS and began to offer collaborative seminars where he and his students attempted a “return to Marx” and to Marx’s original texts. In 1965, the fruit of one of these seminars was published as Reading Capital . That same year, the essays on Marxist theory that had made such a sensation were collected and published in the volume For Marx . Amplifying these books’ collective impact well beyond the realm of intra-party discussion was the general trend in literary and social scientific theory labeled “structuralism” and with which Althusser’s re-reading of Marx was identified.

At mid-decade, Althusser seized on these works’ popularity and the fact that his arguments had created a faction within the French Communist Party composed mostly of young intelligentsia to try and force change. This gambit to have the Party directed by theorists rather than by a Central Committee, whose Stalinism remained entrenched and who believed in the organic wisdom of the worker, met with little success. At the most, he succeeded in carving out some autonomy for theoretical reflection within the Party. Even though it is his most well-known intervention, this was not the first attempt by Althusser to try and influence the Party (he had tried once before during the mid 1950s from his position as cell leader at the ENS) and it would not be his last. While he lost much of the student support that his work had created when he remained silent during the “revolutionary” events of May 1968 (he was in a psychiatric hospital at the time), he campaigned once more to influence the Party during the mid 1970s. This intervention occurred in response to the French Communist Party’s decision to abandon traditional Marxist-Leninist aspects of its platform so as to better ally itself with the Socialist Party. Though Althusser’s position was well publicized and found its supporters, in the end, his arguments were unable to motivate the Party’s rank-and-file such that its leadership would reconsider its decision.

During the decades in which he became internationally known for his re-thinking of Marxist philosophy, Althusser continued in his post at the ENS. There he took on increasing institutional responsibility while continuing to edit and, with François Maspero, to publish his own work and that of others in the series Théorie . In 1975, Althusser acquired the right to direct research on the basis of his previously published work. Shortly after this recognition, he married his longtime companion, Hélène Rytmann-Légotien.

Following the French Left’s and the Communist Party’s electoral defeats in the 1978 elections, Althusser’s bouts of depression became more severe and more frequent. In November 1980, after a painful surgery and another bout of mental illness, which saw him hospitalized for most of the summer and whose symptoms continued after his return to the ENS in the fall, Althusser strangled his wife. Before he could be arrested for the murder, he was sent to a mental hospital. Later, when an examining magistrate came to inform him of the crime of which he was accused, Althusser was in so fragile a mental state that he could not understand the charges or the process to which he was to be submitted and he was left at the hospital. After an examination, a panel of psychiatrists concluded that Althusser was suffering at the time of the murder from severe depression and iatrogenic hallucinations. Citing a French law (since changed), which states that “there is neither crime nor delict where the suspect was in a state of dementia at the time of the action,” the magistrate in charge of Althusser’s case decided that there were no grounds on which to pursue prosecution.

The last ten years of Althusser’s life were spent in and out of mental hospitals and at the apartment in Paris’ 20 th arrondissement where he had planned to retire. During this period, he was visited by a few loyal friends and kept up some correspondences. Given his mental state, his frequent institutionalizations, his anomie, and the drugs he was prescribed, these were not very productive years. However, at mid-decade, he did find the energy to re-visit some of his old work and to attempt to construct from it an explicit metaphysics. He also managed to write an autobiography, a text he averred was intended to provide the explanation for the murder of his wife that he was never able to provide in court. Both texts only appeared posthumously. When his mental and physical health deteriorated again in 1987, Althusser went to live at a psychiatric hospital in La Verrière, a village to the west of Paris. There, on the 22 nd of October, 1990, he died of a heart attack

2. Early Work (1946–60)

Despite its being anthologized and translated during the mid 1990s, there has until recently been relatively little critical attention paid to Althusser’s writings prior to 1961. Certainly, in terms of method, style, and inspiration, the Althusser found in these works differs significantly from the Althusser of For Marx and Reading Capital . In his writings from the 1940s, for instance, his method and conclusions resemble those of the Marxist Humanists of whom he would later be so critical, while texts from the 1950s deploy without irony the Stalinist shibboleths he would later subject to such castigation. Nonetheless, as these texts announce many of Althusser’s perennial themes and because some of the contradictions these works possess are shared with his classic texts and are repeated again in his late work, these early essays, books, and translations are worthy of examination

Althusser’s philosophical output between 1946 and 1961 can roughly be divided into four categories. The first category includes those essays, mostly written between 1946 and 1951, where Althusser explores possible rapports between Christianity and Marxism. In the first of these essays “The International of Decent Feelings,” Althusser argues from what he takes to be “the truth of Christianity” against the popular post-war view that the misery, guilt, and alienation of the human condition in the atomic age is equally experienced by all subjects. For him, this existentialist diagnosis is a type of idolatry: it replaces recognition of our equality before God with our equality before the fear of death. In that it does so, it is twice anti-Christian. For, in addition to the sin of idolatry (death equals God), it fails to acknowledge the existence of a particular class, the proletariat, for whom anguish is not its lot and who is actually capable of delivering the emancipation from fear by re-appropriating the products of human production, including the atomic bomb. A subsequent essay from 1947, “A Matter of Fact,” continues in this vein, suggesting the necessity of socialist means for realizing Christian ends. It also includes a Hegelian critique of the existing Catholic Church which suggests that the church is incapable of such an alliance without a theological revolution. Each of these essays includes the suggestion that critique and reform will occasion a better church and a truer Christianity. By 1949, however, Althusser was totally pessimistic about this possibility and, in a letter to his mentor Jean Lacroix, he argued that the sole possibility for realizing Christian values is through communist action. Though some critics have argued that Christian and Catholic values and modes of reasoning inform all of Althusser’s philosophy, any explicit consideration of a practical and theoretical reconciliation between the two was abandoned at this point in Althusser’s development.

The second category of Althusser’s early work, one closely related to the first, are those texts that deal with Hegel. Written primarily for an academic audience, they approach Hegel’s philosophy either critically, in terms of the history of its reception and use, or exegetically, in terms of examining what possibility Hegel’s metaphysics, logic, politics, epistemology, and understanding of subjectivity offer to those interested in understanding and encouraging societal transformation. Between 1946 and 1950, the results of Althusser’s exegeses were positive: Hegel indeed had something to offer. This judgment finds its most detailed explanation in Althusser’s 1947 thesis “On Content in the thought of G.W.F. Hegel.” In addition to detailing Hegel’s relation to Kant and criticizing the simplification of the dialectic by Hegel’s commentators, Althusser argues in this work that the dialectic “cannot be attacked for its form” (1947, 116). Instead, Hegel can only be critiqued for a failure of the contents of the form (as these contents are specified in Hegel’s historical and political works) to have actually fulfilled the absolute idea. Following the Young Hegelians, then, Althusser uses Hegel’s dialectic against itself to criticize claims like the one made in The Philosophy of Right that the Prussian state is the fulfillment of the dialectic. Though he uses Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right to make his points and though he is in agreement with Marx that the Hegelian concept, realized in thought, must now be realized in the world, Althusser does not suggest in his thesis that Marx’s philosophy leaves Hegel’s insights about, history, logic, and the subject behind. Instead, he contends that Marx is guilty of committing the same error as Hegel in mistaking historical content for the fulfillment of the dialectic. Because all knowledge is historical, Althusser argues, Marxists can only correct for this error by appeal to the idea of the dialectic and to its end in the absolute and the eternal, to a time “when the human totality will be reconciled with its own structure” (1947, 156). Something like this argument will appear again in his classical work as a critique of the empiricist tendency in Marxist philosophy.

By the early 1950s, Althusser’s judgments that Marxism was, of necessity, Hegelian and that it aimed at human fulfillment had undergone revision. This transition to thinking about Marx as the originator of a philosophy totally distinct from Hegel’s was signaled in a review essay from 1950 which argued that the post-war mania for Hegel in France was only a bourgeois attempt to combat Marx. In two short essays from 1953 on Marxist philosophy, this switch is fully apparent. In these texts, Althusser aligns himself with the position advanced by Mehring and Lenin that, at a certain point in Marx’s development, Hegel is left behind and that, afterwards, Marx forged his own original concepts and methodology. In his description of what these concepts and methodology are, Althusser pretty much follows the Party line, insisting that Marx reversed the Hegelian dialectic, that historical materialism is a science, that the sciences verify dialectical materialism, and that the proletariat needs to be taught Marxist science from above. Though these essays repeat the Party philosophy as formulated by Lenin, Stalin, and Zhdanov, they also include recognizable Althusserian themes and show his thinking about these themes to be in transition. For instance, both essays retain the idea from Althusser’s 1947 thesis about the quasi-transcendental status of present scientific knowledge. Both also anticipate future concerns in their speculations about the ideological character of current scientific knowledge and in their incorporation of ideas from Mao about the relationship between theory and practice. Written as a response to Paul Ricoeur and representing the last example of this third category of Althusser’s early work, a text from 1955 argues for the objectivity of historical science. This is a theme to which he would return. Noticeably absent from this body of work, however, are the detailed and original claims Althusser would make in the early 1960s about Marx’s philosophy.

Two essays that Althusser wrote in the mid 1950s were the first to focus exclusively on Marxist philosophy and are interesting inasmuch as they evidence his rejection of Hegel and his embrace of the Party’s Marxism-Leninism. In addition, these texts suggest the need for a thorough study of Marx. This study, however, would wait until the beginning of the next decade. For the rest of the 1950s, most of Althusser’s published work involved the study of philosophical figures who preceded Marx. These figures included Montesquieu, on whose political philosophy and theory of history he wrote a book-length study, and Feuerbach, whose writings he translated and commented upon. The dual thesis of Althusser’s Montesquieu book: that, insofar as Montesquieu studies the “concrete behavior of men” he resists idealism and inaugurates the study of history as a science and that, insofar as Montesquieu accepts past and present political formations as delimiting the possibilities for political life, he remains an idealist, is one that will find echoes in Althusser’s study of Marx during the next decade. Similarly, inasmuch as he makes the argument in a commentary (1960) that part of his intention in translating Feuerbach is to show just what Marx owes in his early writings to the author of The Essence of Christianity so that these may be better seen as absent from Marx’s mature work, these studies of Feuerbach can also be seen as propaedeutic to the study of Marx which Althusser inaugurated in 1961 with his article “On the Young Marx”.

3. Classic Work (1961–1966)

With the perspective afforded by the mass of posthumous writings published since the 1990s, it has become clear that Althusser was perennially concerned with important issues in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, historiography, hermeneutics, and political philosophy. However, it is also true that the primary medium Althusser employed for thinking through problems in these areas was Marxist philosophy. This is especially true of the period between 1961 and 1966 when the majority of his published and unpublished work concerned itself with how to read Marx, the definition of Marxist philosophy, and how to understand and apply Marxian concepts. In addition, if we are to take Althusser’s retrospective word for it, the pieces he published during this period were intended as political-theoretical acts, polemics meant to respond to contemporary opinions and policies and to shift the terms of these arguments as well as the actions which were their results. For these reasons, it is natural when discussing these texts to focus upon the contexts that engendered them and upon the positions within Marxist philosophy that Althusser stakes out by their means. Alternatively, as Althusser indicates in many of these pieces his debts to contemporaneous theorists and to philosophical predecessors such as Spinoza, there is the temptation to understand his thought as a combination of the insights contributed by these thinkers with Marxist philosophy. While each is a useful approach to understanding and explaining Althusser’s philosophy, when excessive attention is paid to one or another of them, one risks historicizing his contributions or suggesting that they are merely derivative. Seeking to avoid either result, even though the following discussion will note the context for Althusser’s work, its relation to Marxist philosophy, and the non-Marxist philosophical insights that contribute to its method and conclusions, this account will also suggest the uniqueness of his contributions to hermeneutics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, historiography, and political philosophy.

For multiple, overlapping, and complicated reasons of which the most relevant may be the discrediting of Stalin’s personage, policies, and version of Marxist philosophy that followed Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech,” Europe in the late 1950s saw a blossoming of political and philosophical alternatives to the version of Marxism-Leninism promulgated by the Soviet Union. This version of Marxist philosophy had dominated European leftist thought and action since the dawn of the Cold War in 1947 and, in France, was widely disseminated via Communist Party schools and literature. While political and philosophical change were slow to occur in the French Communist Party, by the late 1950s, many intellectuals associated with the Party began to ask questions about what constitutes the core of Marx’s philosophy and about how this philosophy guides, relates to, or allows for political action.

For many of these intellectuals, answering this question meant a return to Marx’s early work (those texts written before 1845) in the hopes of finding the “key” to his philosophy. In pieces like “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1844), and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), these thinkers found and championed a Marx obviously indebted to a Hegelian dialectical understanding of subjectivity and historical development and deeply concerned about ending human alienation. It is to this project—that of finding the true method, aim, and intent of Marx’s philosophy in his early work’s emphasis on the realization of full human freedom and potentials through dialectical historical change—that Althusser made the first of his public “interventions” into Marxist philosophy. He inaugurated this effort with the essay “On the Young Marx” (1961), which sought to demonstrate that this method of looking to Marx’s early work for the key to his philosophy was methodologically suspect and ideologically driven. Further, in this essay and in subsequent work, he developed an alternate method of investigation or “reading” that would allow Marx’s true philosophy to be revealed in its purity.

From the fruits of this new method of reading, Althusser argued that not only was Marx the originator of a new philosophy, Dialectical Materialism, that had nothing to do with its Hegelian and Feuerbachian predecessors, but that he also founded a new science, Historical Materialism, which broke with and superseded such ideological and pre-scientific precursors as the political economics of Smith and Ricardo. For the most part, the essays collected in For Marx (1965) and the seminar papers issued as Reading Capital (1965) develop and utilize this method of reading in order to justify and describe Marxist philosophy and Marxist science as well as to distinguish between these two theoretical activities. In so doing, Althusser says quite a bit about the nature of knowledge and the general relations between philosophy, science, politics, and ideology. Further, Althusser applies this hermeneutic method to argue against what he labeled “empiricist” understandings of Marx. These included the Humanist interpretations of Marx described above as well as variations on the orthodox Marxist-Leninist theory, which specified the strict determination of culture and history by the existing modes of economic exchange and resulting class struggles. The following paragraphs discuss this theory of reading, how it produces a different understanding of Marx’s philosophy than that which is derived from Humanist and Economist readings, and how it informs his epistemology, philosophy of science, historiography, and political philosophy.

The label that Althusser gave to the method by which he approached Marx’s texts was that of a “symptomatic reading.” Instead of looking back at Marx’s early work in order to find the “essence” of his philosophy, one of whose expressions was Capital , and also instead of trying to build a true or consistent theory out of Marx’s oeuvre by explaining away contradictions within it and noting certain passages as key, Althusser argued that Marx’s true philosophy was largely absent from his work prior to 1845. Even in mature texts such as Capital , Althusser maintained that Marx’s philosophy remained largely implicit, as the background system of concepts which allowed the scientific work Marx was involved in generating to take place. The symptomatic method of reading was designed to make these concepts explicit and “to establish the indispensable minimum for the consistent existence of Marxist philosophy ” (1965a [2005], 35).

The three inspirations Althusser gave for this interpretive method were those provided by Spinoza, Freud by way of Lacan, and that provided by Marx himself. In addition, he added to these examples insights from the French tradition of historical epistemology about the way in which sciences come to be constituted. One of the ideas borrowed from Spinoza was the contention that texts and authors are the products of their times and that the thoughts authors set down on the page cannot help but be a part of, and be affected by, the ideological currents that accompany and allow for the satisfaction of needs in a specific era. So then, similar to the way in which Spinoza argued in the Theological Political-Treatise that by engaging in a materialist historical study of the Bible one could disentangle those prophetic laws and commands which were merely the result of temporal exigencies and the prophet’s imagination from those which represented the true word of God, so Althusser argued that one could disentangle those concepts which were merely ideological in Marx’s texts from those which comprised his true philosophy.

Though this theory was later to be complicated and revised, during this period, Althusser consistently argued that Marx’s work prior to 1845 was ideological and that it was saturated with non-Marxian concepts borrowed from Hegel’s and Feuerbach’s philosophical anthropologies. Althusser did recognize that some of Marx’s early work is marked by its rejection of idealist premises and concepts. However, inasmuch as this early work was seen to espouse a telic view of humanity in which the individual and society was said to undergo a necessary historico-dialectical development, Althusser identified it as fundamentally Hegelian. That there was a materialist correction to this basic narrative with Marx’s embrace of Feuerbach, Althusser also granted. However, the replacement by Marx of a speculative anthropology which saw the historical development of society as the self-fulfillment of human freedom with a materialist anthropology that cited the same logic of development but which specified that the motor of this development was human beings in their “sensuous life activity,” was seen by Althusser to represent little conceptual and no logical advance from Hegel.

This “theory of the break,” which held that Marx’s early work was Hegelian and ideological and that, after a decisive rupture in 1845 and then a long period of transition between 1845–1857, his work became recognizably Marxist and scientific, would seem to indicate that all one has to do to understand Marx’s philosophy is to read this mature work. However, the actual case is not so simple. While reading Capital and other late works is necessary for understanding Marx’s philosophy, it is not sufficient. It is not sufficient, Althusser argued, because, even in his post-1857 writings, Marx provides no systematic exposition of his epistemology or his ideas about social structure, history, and human nature, all of which were necessary for Marxist philosophy’s consistent and continuing existence.

Many interpreters of Marx, and not just those Althusser directly engaged with during the early 1960s, have maintained that such texts as the 1859 Preface and the 1844 Manuscripts provide keys to understanding Marx’s philosophy. However, Althusser made the case that these texts were contradictory and insufficient for this purpose. It is with this contention that the models provided by psychoanalysis and by Marx’s own critique of classical political economy come to inform Althusser’s overall hermeneutic strategy. Part of this strategy, Althusser maintains, is directly taken from Marx’s own method. Thus, in a way parallel to Marx pointing out in Capital V.II (1885) that Adam Smith needed the concept of the “value of labor” for his explanations of capitalist economic activity but could not fully generate it out of the systems of ideas available to him, Althusser argued that, though Marx was recognizably engaged in the work of Historical Materialism in Capital , the philosophical theory or background conceptual framework that allowed this investigation to proceed was not fully articulated.

The explicit project of Reading Capital and of many of the essays included in For Marx was to make these fundamental concepts explicit. It was to do so by paying attention to the theoretical “problematic,” or background ideological framework in which the work was generated, by analyzing those passages where a philosophical concept had to have been in use but was not made explicit, and by noting and explaining where and why one theoretical pronouncement is in contradiction with itself or with another passage. For Althusser, such areas of Marx’s text are “symptoms,” in the psychoanalytic sense of the word, of the necessary but unarticulated philosophical framework that underwrites and allows his scientific investigations. Of these frameworks, Marx was not fully conscious. However, they were what allowed him to investigate and describe such socio-economic events as the transformation of money into capital without recourse to Hegelian logic and concepts. Althusser argues that by paying attention to these passages in Marx’s text as well as by seeking out Marxist concepts as these were developed during the course of practical Marxist activity by theorists such as Lenin and Mao, an attentive reader can render explicit Marx’s philosophy.

That the concepts Althusser derived from his symptomatic reading of Marx, Lenin, and Mao were Marxist concepts was avowed. Nevertheless, Althusser also acknowledged that some of the concepts found latent in these texts were derived from and consistent with his philosophical and social scientific contemporaries as well as with those of Spinoza. Of course, this is not inconsistent with the theory of reading and authorship that underwrites a symptomatic reading of a text. Inasmuch as authors and readers are always said to think with concepts borrowed from or supplied by the problematic that they inhabit, there is no such thing as an innocent or objective reading: we understand things with and through the concepts available to us. Perhaps nowhere is this borrowing more evident than in Althusser’s ideas about how scientific and philosophic knowledge is generated. Though Althusser is very careful to back up his arguments about Marx’s epistemology with close analyses of Marx’s work, it is apparent that the model for knowledge acquisition that is developed in Reading Capital owes much to Spinoza and to the French tradition of historical epistemology.

With his re-reading of Marx, Althusser wished to offer an alternative to the two then dominant understandings of Marx’s philosophy. Both understandings were charged with the same mistake. This mistake was, fundamentally, an epistemological one: each cast Marx as an empiricist. At first glance, this charge might seem ridiculous. This is especially the case as, according to Althusser’s own critique, both understandings of Marx offered variants of the Hegelian claim that there is a reason to history. For Althusser, however, both readings were “empiricist” inasmuch as each ascribed to Marx a theory of knowledge in which the subject, by means of a process of observation and abstraction, comes to know what an object really and truly is, according to its essence. This is a definition of empiricism meant to include philosophers as diverse as Locke, Kant, and Hegel and traditions as varied as British Empiricism, German Idealism, Positivism, and Pragmatism. In the case of Humanist Marxism, the object that comes to be known by its essence is the human subject in its full freedom. It does so by means of critique and by creatively overcoming that which is alien to it or “merely historical.” In the case of orthodox Marxism-Leninism, this object is the economy, the reality that underlies, causes, and can explain all historical structures and transformations. The economy comes to be known as it truly is only by the proletariat, by those whom the historical process has endowed with an objective gaze and who possess the ability to make this truth objective.

In opposition to the empiricist model of knowledge production, Althusser proposes that true or scientific knowledge is distinguished from ideology or opinion not by dint of an historical subject having abstracted the essence of an object from its appearances. Instead, this knowledge is understood to be produced by a process internal to scientific knowledge itself. Though this transformation takes place entirely in thought, Althusser does not maintain that scientific knowledge makes no use of facts. However, these facts or materials are never brute. Rather, specific sciences start with pre-existing concepts or genera such as “humors,” “unemployment,” “quasars,” or “irrational numbers.” These genera may be ideological in part or in whole. Science’s job is to render these concepts scientific. This labor is what Althusser terms “theoretical practice.” The result of this practice is scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is produced by means of applying to these genera the body of concepts or “theory” that the science possesses for understanding them. This body of concepts may be more or less unified and consistent and it may be more or less consciously articulated. Further, the sum of the individual concepts that this theory consists of delimits the possible ways in which the genera that a science begins with can be understood.

When applied, a science’s theory weeds out ideological notions associated with the original concept or genera. The result of this application of theory to genera is the transformation of the “ideological generality into a scientific generality” (1963b [2005], 185). An example of such a process is the transformation in medical science of a concept like “phlegmatic humors” into the idea of blood-borne pathogens by dint of the theory of circulation and infectious disease. Once generated, such scientific concepts inform regular scientific practice, allowing specific research programs within an individual science to progress. Althusser himself gives examples of three such major transformations. The first is the founding of modern physics by Galileo, the other that of Greek mathematics, and the third, that of Marx’s founding of the science of Historical Materialism out of Classical Political Economy. Each of these foundings is marked by what Althusser terms an “epistemological break,” or a period when ideological concepts are replaced by scientific ones. Any similarity here to Kuhnian ideas about revolutionary and normal science is not surprising. Both Canguilhem and Bachelard, from whom Althusser drew inspiration for his theory, were part of a dialogue that took in the work of Alexander Koyré on scientific revolutions, a thinker from whom Kuhn, in turn, drew his inspiration.

Althusser’s debt to the tradition of French historical epistemology in this account of knowledge production and philosophy of science should now be evident. However, this epistemology’s Marxian and Spinozistic elements may be less pronounced. The vocabulary adopted above to express this theory, however, gestures to both influences. For Althusser, Marx’s founding of the science of history is crucial not only to politics (as will be addressed below) but also to understanding all of human activity, including scientific activity. That there is a circular logic to this epistemological theory, Althusser readily admits, for it is only the science of Historical Materialism that allows us to understand scientific practice in general. Althusser, though, is comfortable with this circularity. This is because, insofar as this understanding of scientific practice in general allows us to understand how individual sciences produce their knowledge, Historical Materialism is a science that functions like any other.

For Althusser, the concept that helps to produce this understanding of scientific practices is that of the “mode of production.” With it, he argues, Marx supplied theorists with an idea sufficient to comprehend the way in which we materially produce our selves, our environments, our knowledges, and our histories. Indeed, this concept makes it possible to analyze all of our activities in their specificity and to understand them in their relation to the totality of which they are a part. As it must be if we are to make sense of scientific practice as one aspect of the total mode of production, much more than the activity of economic production must be included in this totality of productive practices. Added by Althusser to these two aspects of the mode of production are those of ideological, political, and philosophical production, among others.

In each of the practices that together comprise, at any given time, a specific mode of production, some form or forms of labor uses the existing means of production to transform existing materials into new products. According to Althusser, this realization is Marx’s basic insight. In scientific production, for example, thinkers use existing theories to transform existing concepts into new, scientific concepts. However, and this is where Althusser’s Spinozism becomes apparent and also where he breaks with economistic understandings of Marx, it is not the case that the analysis of any one mode of production within the totality of productive practices is capable of generating an understanding of the way in which all rest of the productive processes are causally determined. Rather, and in line with the parallelism attributed by Leibniz to Spinoza, as each productive process transforms a unique material (concepts in science, goods in economics, social relations in politics), each process can only be understood in terms of its unique causal structure. In addition, and again also in a way similar to Spinoza’s account of substance as seen from different aspects, each productive process is understood to stand in relation to and play a part of a complexly structured whole, none of which is reducible to being the simple or essential cause of the others.

That Althusser regards most, if not all, human activity as consisting of material processes of production and reproduction can be used as a key to understanding other parts of his philosophy. These include his thoughts on the structure of the social and political world, the historical process, and philosophy. As philosophy is closely related to science and because it is charged with a task that allows the production of knowledge about the other socio-economic practices to be generated, it is probably best to start with Althusser’s understanding of philosophy as a material practice of production before proceeding to a discussion of how Althusser understands the other practices listed above.

According to Althusser, most activity labeled “philosophy” is really a type of ideological production. By this, he means to say that most philosophy reproduces, in highly abstract form, notions about the world whose effect is to sustain existing socio-economic relations. As such, philosophy merely reflects the background values, attitudes, and ideas that allow the socio-economic world to function. However, for Althusser, genuine philosophy functions as a “Theory of theoretical practice” (1965b). In this mode, it works to provide an aid to scientific practice by distinguishing between ideological concepts and scientific ones as well as by clarifying and rendering consistent the scientific concepts that enable a science to transforms existing ideas into scientific knowledge.

For Althusser, it is not necessary that this process of distinction and clarification be accomplished before a specific theoretical practice can generate scientific knowledge. In fact, scientific activity often proceeds without a clear understanding of the concepts that allow it to produce its knowledge. Indeed, Althusser maintained that this was Marx’s lot when he was writing Capital : scientific knowledge of the capitalist economic system was being produced, but Marx did not possess a full awareness of the concepts allowing this production. According to this definition of philosophy as the Theory of theoretical practice, Althusser’s re-reading of Capital and other texts was philosophical insofar as it was able to name and distinguish the concepts that allowed Marx’s scientific analysis of history to proceed.

The latent concepts rendered explicit by the practice of symptomatic reading were said by Althusser to constitute the theory of Dialectical Materialism, or what is the same thing, Marx’s philosophy. With these concepts made explicit, Althusser believed that Marxist science, or Historical Materialism, could employ them in order to achieve better analyses of specific modes of production and better understandings of the opportunities that specific modes of production presented for political change. Some of these concepts have already been articulated in the discussion of the mode of production above, but without being named. To label these concepts and then to add some more, the idea that each individual productive process or element stands in relation to and plays a part of a complexly structured whole, none of which is reducible to being the simple or essential cause of the others, is what Althusser terms the idea of “structural causality.” This concept, in turn, is closely related to the idea of “overdetermination” or the theory that every element in the total productive process constituting a historical moment is determined by all the others.

Another Marxist philosophical concept that allows the historical materialist scientist to understand the logic of a specific mode of production is that of “contradiction.” This is the idea that, at any given period, multiple, concrete and definite practices take place within a mode of production. Among and within these specific practices, there may or may not be tensions. To take an example from Marx’s chapter on “Primitive Accumulation” in Capital V.I , at the same time as peasants holdings were being expropriated in the late 15 th and early 16 th centuries by a nascent bourgeoisie, the church and the aristocracy were passing laws against this appropriation. Any isolable element of the total structure, be it a person, a social class, an institution, or the state, in some way reflects and embodies these practices and these antagonisms and as such each is said to be “overdetermined.” Further, Althusser specifies that the development of productive practices within a specific mode of production is often “uneven” in addition to possibly being antagonistic. This means, for instance, that some economic elements within a whole may be more or less capitalistic while others simultaneously operate according to socialist norms. Thus, the development within a mode of production of the practices specific to it is not necessarily homogenous or linear.

Added to the Marxian concepts of structural causality, contradiction, uneven development, and overdetermination is that of the “structure in dominance.” This concept designates that major element in a structural whole that tends to organize all of the other practices. In much of the contemporary world and inasmuch as it tends to organize the production of moral values, scientific knowledge, the family, art, etc. this structure is the economic practice of commodity production and consumption. However, in another era and in other places, it may be the production and dissemination of religious beliefs and practices that dominates and organizes the socio-economic structure.

With this understanding of the elements that compose any socio-economic structure and their relations made explicit, something can now be said about the social and political philosophies that follow from it. First, with the idea that human individuals are merely one of the sites at which the contradictory productive forces that characterize an era are enacted, Althusser signals that the primary object of social philosophy is not the human individual. Second, with the idea that the state produced by political activity is merely one productive process among others, Althusser signals that the primary element in political philosophy is not the state. Though both states and individuals are important elements of the socio-economic whole, nothing philosophical is learned by examining the essence of the individual or the way in which justice is embodied by the state.

As Althusser understands them, whatever conceptions we have of the nature of human beings or about the proper function of the state are historically generated and serve to reproduce existing social relations. In other words, they are ideological. Apart from the necessity of human beings to engage in productive relations with other human beings and with their environment in order to produce their means of subsistence, there is no human nature or essence. This is the core of Althusser’s “anti-humanist” position. Further, though some order must exist in order to allow for the production and reproduction of social life, there is no essential or best form that this order must take. This is not to say that human beings do not conceive of or strive for the best order for social life or that they do not believe that they are essentially free or equal and deserving of rights. It also does not mean that all of our ideas are homogenous and that heterogeneous ideas about what is best cannot exist side by side in the same system without leading to conflict (though they sometimes do). However, the science of Historical Materialism has revealed the desire for such orders to be historically generated along with the ideas about human nature that justify them.

This account of the ideological role of our conceptions of human nature and of the best political arrangement shows Althusser to differ little from interpretations of Marx which hold that political ideologies are the product of and serve existing economic relations. However, and as was detailed above, Althusser rejects the simple understanding of causality offered by this model in which economic practices order consciousness and our cultural practices. He also rejects the philosophy of history that often accompanies this model. This philosophy has it that certain economic practices not only generate corresponding cultural practices, but that there is a pattern to economic development in which each economic order inexorably leads to its own demise and replacement by a different economic system. In this understanding of history, feudalism must lead to capitalism and capitalism to socialism. Althusser, however, argues against the idea that history has a subject (such as the economy or human agency) and that history has a goal (such as communism or human freedom). History, for Althusser, is a process without a subject. There are patterns and orders to historical life and there is historical change. However, there is no necessity to any of these transformations and history does not necessarily progress. Transformations do occur. However, they do so only when the contradictions and levels of development inherent in a mode of production allow for such change.

4. Revisions (1966–78)

From the time of its initial dissemination, Althusser’s re-reading of Marx was met by almost equal amounts of enthusiasm and castigation. For every reader who found in his prose an explanation of Marx’s philosophy and science that rendered Marx philosophically respectable and offered renewed hope for Marxist theory, there were critics who judged his work to be idealist, Stalinist, dogmatist, or excessively structuralist, among myriad other charges. Though many of the initial reactions were contradictory and evidenced misunderstandings of what Althusser was up to, compelling criticisms were also offered. One was that Althusser was only able to offer his reading by ignoring much of what Marx actually wrote about his logic and about the concepts important to his analysis. Another criticism, and one voiced to Althusser by leaders of the French Communist Party, was that Althusser’s reading of Marx offered little on the relationship between Marxist theory and Marxist political practice.

It took a long time before Althusser explicitly addressed the charge that he had ignored much of what Marx had to say about his own logic and concepts. However, buffeted by these criticisms and with a sense that there were idealist or “theoreticist” tendencies in his reading of Marx and that the relationship between theory and practice was indeed under-developed, Althusser set out during the late 1960s and 1970s to correct and revise his take on the relationships among philosophy, science, ideology, and politics. To some readers, these revisions represented a politically motivated betrayal of his theoretical accomplishments. For others, they simply revealed his project as a whole to be untenable and self-contradictory. Some recent critics, however, have argued that these revisions are consistent with and necessary to the development of what they view to be the overall goal of Althusser’s work: the development of a materialist political philosophy adequate for political practice.

Althusser’s initial revisions to his understanding of the social structure and knowledge production were informed by a renewed attention to the works of Lenin and by a seminar he convened at the ENS in 1967 for leading scientists and interested students. This course resulted in a series of papers, gathered together as Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (1967a), in which Althusser began rethinking the relations among philosophy, science, ideology, and politics. Though this revision was later to be made more explicit, one of the most striking aspects of these papers was Althusser’s abandonment of the Spinozistic claim that the different levels of theoretical practice were autonomous. He now maintained that there was no criterion sufficient to demarcate scientific from ideological concepts and that all theoretical concepts are marked by ideology. This did not mean, however, that any concept was as good as any other. Scientists, through their work on the material real, tended to generate better understandings of things than were available intuitively. Further, he argued that philosophy still had a role to play in the clarification of scientific concepts. This is the case because, no matter how much work scientists do to understand the material real and to generate better concepts, they must always employ ideological concepts to frame their investigations and its results. Marxist philosophers, he maintained, could be useful to scientists by pointing out, from the standpoint of politics and by the method of historical critique, where and how some of the concepts scientists employed were ideological. The result of this intervention of philosophy into politics would not be “truer” concepts, but ideas that were more “correct” or “right” in both the normative and positive senses of these words.

Parallel to this move, and motivated by the need to provide the link between philosophical theory and political practice that was largely missing from his classic work, Althusser now argued that philosophy had a useful role to play between politics and science. Political practice, Althusser maintained, was mostly motivated by ideological understandings of what the good is and how to accomplish it. Though he did not argue that there was a way to leave ideology behind and to reveal the good in itself, he did maintain that science could help to correct ideological thinking about political means and ends. Social science in particular could do so by showing how certain goals were impossible or misguided given present socio-economic relations and by suggesting that, at a certain time and in a certain place, other means and other ends might be more fruitfully adopted and pursued. As scientific knowledge does not speak directly to the public or to politicians, Althusser assigned materialist philosophers the job of communicating scientific knowledge of the material real, its conditions, and its possibilities to politicians and the public. If this communication is successful, Althusser maintained, one should not expect all political activity to be successful. Instead, one should expect a modest shift from an idealist ideology to one that is materialist and more scientific and which has a better chance of realizing its goals.

During the 1970s, Althusser continued the revisions begun in 1967 and elaborated other Marxian ideas he believed to be underdeveloped. Perhaps the best known of the new conceptual formulations resulting from these efforts is that of “ideological interpellation.” This account of how a human being becomes a self-conscious subject was published in an essay titled “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970). It was excerpted from a larger essay titled “On the Reproduction of Capitalism.” This work analyzed the necessary relationship between state and subject such that a given economic mode of production might subsist. It includes not only an analysis of the state and its legal and educational systems but also of the psychological relationship which exists between subject and state as ideology. This narrative of subjectification was intended to help advance Althusser’s argument that regimes or states are able to maintain control by reproducing subjects who believe that their position within the social structure is a natural one. Ideology, or the background ideas that we possess about the way in which the world must function and of how we function within it is, in this account, understood to be always present. Specific socio-economic structures, however, require particular ideologies. These ideologies are instantiated by institutions or “Ideological State Apparatuses” like family, schools, church, etc., which provide the developing subject with categories in which she can recognize herself. Inasmuch as a person does so and embraces the practices associated with those institutions, she has been successfully “hailed” or “interpellated” and recognized herself as that subject who does those kinds of things. As the effect of these recognitions is to continue existing social relations, Althusser argued that a Dictatorship of the Proletariat is necessary so that Ideological State Apparatuses productive of the bourgeois subject can be replaced with those productive of proletarian or communist subjects.

Althusser’s engagement with aesthetic theory was not nearly so consistent as those with philosophy of science and social philosophy. However, dramaturgical speculations from the early 1960s were crucial to the development of his method of symptomatic reading and forays into the criticism of visual art beginning in the mid-1960s likewise proved of decisive importance for the development of his theory of ideology. In particular, Althusser’s Brechtian musings on aesthetics provide partial answers to the question of how criticism of ideological notions of the real as well as the development of revolutionary strategy is possible. Althusser does not argue that art provides a glimpse of actual social conditions unfiltered by ideology. Indeed, he argues that art mostly reproduces ideology. Further, there is no formal way to distinguish between a work of art and other cultural productions like advertising. A person can “sees herself” in a pick-up truck advertisement as easily as a subject can mis-recognize herself as the subject of a drama. However, some art, that which Althusser deems “authentic” (1996a), troubles a subject’s usual relationship between herself and the world. This habitual relation is one where the world is always seen to conform to and to confirm the subject’s view of “the way things are”. Authentic art though makes felt or known the distance between the real world and a subject’s habitual ideological view of it. In this moment, the space for criticism, investigation, and, perhaps, the possibility for acting to change the world is inaugurated.

In 1978 and as a response to what he saw, yet again, as the theoretical and political misdirection of the Communist movement, Althusser authored a piece, “Marx in his Limits,” which was intended to separate the good from the bad in Marx’s philosophy. In his classic work (1960–65), Althusser had tried to accomplish this goal by separating out ideological concepts and by bringing forth the scientific ones. However, in “Marx in his Limits,” he now argued that such a method of separation cannot work because—within Marx’s writings and throughout his oeuvre—both good and bad, materialist and idealist concepts, are hopelessly intermixed and many are underdeveloped.

Inasmuch as Althusser admits in this piece that Marx never fully abandoned Hegel’s logic, the concept of human alienation, or the idea that history has a goal, the inventory Althusser offers can be seen as an assenting response to the charge that he had ignored Marx’s explicit statements in order to imagine for Marx a consistent and “true” philosophy. Althusser does not give up on the task of articulating a better Marxist philosophy, however. Instead, he argues that there is another, “materialist” criterion that allows us to see the limits of Marx’s thinking and to recognize those points in his work where Marx was unable to transcend his bourgeois background and his education in German Idealism. This criterion is that of the practical success or failure of Marx’s concepts as each has been employed in the history of Marxist movements. When we have made this inventory and grouped together the successful concepts, what we are left with is a materialist Marxism, a Marxism which endorses the scientific method as the best way for understanding ourselves and our potential but that also understands that this method is fallible. Remaining also is a Marxism which does not subscribe to any philosophy of history and which certainly does not maintain that capitalism will inevitably lead to communism. This Marxism has no system of interrelated concepts that guarantee a scientific analysis. Further, it possesses no worked-out theory of the relations between economic structures and cultural structures but for that limited knowledge which scientific practice provides. Finally, this Marxism has given up the dream of analyzing the whole of culture and its movement from the outside; it realizes that one thinks inside and about the culture one inhabits in order to possibly effect and change that culture.

After being interrupted by ill health and by the events following from the murder of his wife, in 1982 Althusser returned to the question of what was essential to Marx’s philosophy and expanded the scope of this inquiry to include speculation about the metaphysics that must underlie it. Freed by his ignoble status from the task of influencing the direction of the Communist movement, the texts associated with this project and gathered together in the book Philosophy of the Encounter differ tremendously in subject matter, style, and method from his other writings. Whether these texts represent a continuation of, or even the key to his philosophy or whether they are an aberration is presently being debated in the secondary literature. However, as there is strong textural and archival evidence that many of the ideas explicitly expressed in these works had been gestating for a long time, the contention that these writings are of a piece with his earlier work seems to be gaining ground.

The principal thesis of Althusser’s last philosophical writings is that there exists an “underground” or little recognized tradition in the history of philosophy. Variously labeled a “materialism of the encounter” or “aleatory materialism,” the method which he uses to articulate this philosophy is to simply comment upon works by philosophers who exemplify this current and to point out where, how, and to what extent they do so. In addition to Marx, the philosophers that he cites as being part of this underground tradition include Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Derrida. From these readings in the history of philosophy, Althusser aims to suggest that this tradition exists and that it is both philosophically fecund and viable. He also wishes to return to and bolster the thesis he first ventured in the late 1960s that there are really only two positions in philosophy: materialism and idealism. As he understood it, the two tendencies are always in a war of opposition with the one functioning to reinforce the status quo and the other to possibly overcome it.

Perhaps because it functions in opposition to the idealist tendency in philosophy, aleatory materialism is marked almost as much by its rejections as it is by the positive claims it contains about the world and about history. As Marx is included within this tradition, it is not surprising that many of these rejections are also attributed to him during the course of Althusser’s earlier work. These include a dismissal of what Althusser calls “the principle of Reason,” or the idea that the universe or history has an origin or an end. With this prohibition, Althusser means to exclude from this tradition not only the usual suspects in the rationalist tradition, but also mechanical and dialectical materialisms with their logics of determination. Also dismissed, he maintains, is the myth that somehow philosophy and philosophers are autonomous, that they see the world from outside and objectively. Though there is an objective world, philosophy does not have knowledge of this world as its object for there is no way for it to ground itself and the material it thinks with and through arises historically. Philosophy is therefore not a science or the Science of sciences and it produces no universal Truth. Rather, the truths it produces are contingent and are offered in opposition to other competing truths. If philosophy does have an object, it is the void, or that which is not yet but which could be.

That the philosophy of the encounter lacks an object does not mean that it lacks positive propositions. However, given the epistemological status attributed to philosophy by Althusser, these metaphysical propositions or “theses” are true only insofar as they have explanatory or practical value. First among them, following Democritus, is the thesis that matter is all that exists. Second is the thesis that chance or the aleatory is at the origin of all worlds. That the patterns which constitute and define these worlds can be known, described, and predicted according to certain laws or reasons is also true. However, the fact that these worlds ever came to be organized in these patterns is aleatory and the patterns themselves can only ever be known immanently. Third, new worlds and new orders themselves arise out of chance encounters between pre-existing material elements. Whether or not such orders emerge is contingent: they do not have to occur. When material elements collide, they either “take” and a new order is founded, or they do not and the old world continues.

To Althusser, the propositions which have explanatory value at the level of ontology and cosmology also have value at the level of political philosophy. After first citing Rousseau and Hobbes as example of philosophers who recognized that the origin and continued existence of political orders is contingent, Althusser turns to Machiavelli and Marx for his principal examples of how aleatory materialism functions in the political realm. The anti-teleological, scientistic, and anti-humanist, Marxist philosophy developed by Althusser over the course of his career works well with the materialist metaphysics recounted above. In this understanding of Marxist philosophy, societies and subjects are seen as patterns of activity that behave in predictable ways. Though scientists may study and describe these orders in their specificity, it does not at first appear that philosophy can do much except to categorize these interactions at the most general level. However, citing Marx’s work again and taking inspiration from Machiavelli’s project of installing “a new prince in a new principality,” Althusser argues that the materialist philosopher may accomplish somewhat more than this with her descriptions, critiques, and predictions. This is because, by examining a political order not from the perspective of its necessity but with an awareness of its contingency, this philosopher may be able think the possibility of its transformation. If chance smiles on her, if someone listens and if effects occur, then elements might recombine and a new political might take hold. This is, to be sure, a very limited and unpredictable power attributed to the philosopher. However, it is also the only one that Althusser in his late works argues is adequate for political practice and that does not, like idealism, merely serve to reproduce existing relations.

The following list owes much to the comprehensive bibliography of Althusser’s work compiled by Gregory Elliott in Althusser: The Detour of Theory , New York: Verso, 2006 [1987].

(1940–45) Journal de captivité (Stalag XA 1940–45) , (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1992)
(1946) “L’internationale des bons sentiments”, in Ecrits Philosophiques et Politiques I (Paris: Stock/IMEC 1994), 35–57; tr. as “The International of Decent Feelings,” by G.M. Goshgarian in The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings (London, NY: Verso, 1997).
(1947) “Du contenu dans la pensée de G.W.F. Hegel” in Ecrits Philosophiques et Politiques I (Paris: Stock/IMEC 1994), 59–238; tr. as “On Content in the Thought of G.W.F. Hegel,” by G.M. Goshgarian in The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings (London, NY: Verso, 1997).
(1950) “Le retour à Hegel. Dernier mot du révisionisme universitaire,” La Nouvelle Critique 20 (1950); tr. as “The Return of Hegel: The Latest Word in Academic Revisionism,” by G.M. Goshgarian in The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings (London, NY: Verso, 1997).
(1953a) “À propos du marxisme,” Revue de l’enseignement philosophique , 3:4 (1953): 15–19; tr. as “On Marxism,” by G.M. Goshgarian in The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings (London, NY: Verso, 1997).
(1953b) “Note sur le matérialisme dialectique,” Revue de l’enseignement philosophique , 3:5 (1953): 11–17; tr. as “On Marxism,” by G.M. Goshgarian in The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings (London, NY: Verso, 1997).
(1958) Montesquieu, la politique et l’histoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959); tr. as “Montesquieu: Politics and History” by Ben Brewster, in Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx , (London: Verso, 2007).
(1960) “Les ‘Manifestes philosophiqes’ de Feuerbach,” La Nouvelle Critique 121 (1960): 32–38; tr. as “Feuerbach’s Philosophical Manifestoes” by Ben Brewster in Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Verso, 2005).
(1961) “Sur le jeune Marx (Questions de théorie),” La Pensée 96 (1961):3–26; tr. as “On the Young Marx: Theoretical Questions,” by Ben Brewster in For Marx (London: Verso 2005).
(1962) “Contradiction et surdetermination (Notes pour un recherche),” La Pensée 106 (1962): 3–22; tr. as “Contradiction and Overdetermination: Notes for an Investigation” by Ben Brewster in For Marx (London: Verso 2005).
(1963a) “Marxisme et humanisme” Cahiers de l’Institut des Sciences Économique Appliquées 20 (1964): 109–133; tr. as “Marxism and Humanism” by Ben Brewster in For Marx (London: Verso 2005).
(1963b) “Sur la dialectique matérialiste (De l’inégalité des origines),” La Pensée 110 (1963): 5–46; tr. as “On the Materialist Dialectic: On the Unevenness of Origins,” by Ben Brewster in For Marx (London: Verso 2005).
(1964) “Freud et Lacan,” La Nouvelle Critique 161–162 (1964–1965): 88–108; tr. as “Freud and Lacan” by Ben Brewster in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review, 2002.
(1965a) Lire le Capital, Tome 1 & 2 , with Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Rancière (Paris: Maspero, coll. “Théorie”); tr. by Ben Brewster as Reading Capital with the contributions of Establet, Macherey, and Rancière omitted (London: Verso 2016)
(1965b) “Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation” tr. by James Kavanaugh, in Gregory Elliott ed. Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (London: Verso, 1990).
(1966a) “Lettre sur la connaissance de l’art (réponse à André Daspre) (In Ecrits philosophiques et politiques, Tome II, edited by François Matheron, 559–68. Ecrits philosophiques et politiques. Paris: Stock IMEC, 1995.
(1966b) “Sur la genèse,” Décalages 1(2) (2013). J. Smith (trans.), 2012, “On Genesis”, Décalages 1 (2).
(1966c) “Sur Lévi-Strauss,” in Écrits philosophiques et politiques , Tome 2 (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1997), 417–432; tr. by G.M. Goshgarian in The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings (London: Verso 2003).
(1967a) Philosophie et philosophie spontanée des savants (1967) , (Maspero, coll. “Théorie”, 1974); tr. Warren Montag as “Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists,” in Gregory Elliott ed. Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (London: Verso, 1990).
(1967b) “La tâche historique de la philosophie marxiste” tr. by G.M. Goshgarian as “The Historical Task of Marxist Philosophy” in in The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings (London: Verso 2003).
(1968a) “Lenine et la Philosophie,” Bulleting de la Société de Philosophie 4 (1968): 127–181; tr. as “Lenin and Philosophy” by Ben Brewster in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review 2002).
(1968c) “Sur le rapport de Marx à Hegel,” in Jacques l’Hondt ed. Hegel et la pensée moderne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), 85–111; tr. as “Marx’s Relation to Hegel” by Ben Brewster in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review 2002).
(1969b) Ideologie et appareils idéologiques d’État (notes pour une recherche) La Pensée 151 (1970): 3–38; tr. as “Ideology and Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation” by Ben Brewster in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review 2002).
(1969c) On The Reproduction Of Capitalism: Ideology And Ideological State Apparatuses , tr. G. M. Goshgarian (London & New York: Verso 2013).
(1972a) Élements d’autocritique (Paris: Hachette coll. “Analyse”, 1974); tr. as “Elements of Self-Criticism” by Grahame Lock in Essays in Self-Criticism (New Left Books, London, 1976).
(1973) “Livre sur l’imperialisme” tr. As “Book on Imperialism” by G.M. Goshgarian in History and Imperialism (Cambridge, UK and Medford, MA: Polity Press, 202
(1975) “Est-il simple d’être marxiste en philosophie? (Soutenance d’Amiens)” La Pensée 183 (1975): 3–31; tr. as “Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?” by Grahame Locke in Essays in Self-Criticism (New Left Books, London, 1976).
(1976a) 22éme Congrés (Paris: Maspero, 1977); tr. as “On the Twenty-Second Congress of the French Communist Party” by Ben Brewster in New Left Review 104 (1977): 3–22.
(1976b) Etre marxiste en philsophie (Paris: Presses universitaires de France 2016) tr. as How to Be a Marxist in Philosophy, by G.M. Goshgarian (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
(1976c) “La transformation de la philosophie,” Sur la philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 139–178; tr. as “The Transformation of Philosophy” by Thomas E. Lewis in Gregory Elliott ed. Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (London: Verso, 1990).
(1977a) “Avant-propos du livre de G. Duménil, ‘Le concept de loi économique dans ‘Le Capital’”, in Solitude de Machiavel et autres textes , ed. Yves Sintomer (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 245–266.
(1977b) “Enfin la crise du marxisme!” in Pouvoir et opposition dans les sociétés post-révolutionnaires (Le Seuil, coll. “Combats”, 1978), 242–253.
(1977c) “Solitude de Machiavel” in Solitude de Machiavel et autres texts (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 311–324; tr. as “Machiavell’s Solitude” by Ben Brewster in Machiavelli and Us (London: Verso, 1999).
(1977d) Les vâches noires: interview imaginaire (le malaise du XXIIe congrès) ce qui ne va pas camarades! , ed. by G. M. Goshgarian (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2016).
(1978a) “Ce qui ne peut plus durer dans le Parti Communiste,” (Paris: François Maspero 1978).
(1978b) “Marx dans ses limites,” in Écrits philosophiques et politiques , Tome 1 (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1994), 357–524.
(1978c) “Le marxisme aujourd’hui,” in Solitude de Machiavel et autres texts (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 292–310; tr. as “Marxism Today” by James H. Kavanaugh in Gregory Elliott ed. Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (London: Verso, 1990).
(1978d) Que Faire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2018) tr. as What Is to Be Done? , by G. M. Goshgarian (Cambridge [U.K.]: Polity, 2020).
(1980) Initiation à la philosophie pour les non-philosophes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013) tr. as Philosophy for Non-Philosophers , by G.M. Goshgarian (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).
(1982) “Sur la pensée Marxiste,” in Future anterieur, Sur Althusser. Passages (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993), 11–29; and “Le courant souterrain du matérialisme de la rencontre,”in Écrits philosophiques et politiques , Tome 1 (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1994), 583–594; and ‘Notes sur les Thèses sur Feuerbach,’ Magazine Littéraire , 324 (1994): 38–42; extracts translated as “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter” by G.M. Goshgarian in Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings 1978–1987 (London: Verso, 2006).
(1984–1987a) “Lettres de Louis Althusser à Fernanda Navarro,” (1984), Sur la philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 89–138; tr. as “Letters from Louis Althusser to Fernanda Navarro” by G.M. Goshgarian in Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings 1978–1987 (London: Verso, 2006).
(1984–1987a) “Philosophie et marxisme: entretiens avec Fernanda Navarra (1984–1987)” in Sur la philosophie (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 13–79.
(1985) “L’avenir dure longtemps,” in L’avenir dure longtemps, suivi de Les Faits (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1992), 7–279; tr. as “The Future Lasts Forever” by Richard Veasey in The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir (New York: New Press, 1993).
Althusser, Louis, et al ., 1993. Sur Althusser: Passages , Paris: Éditions l’Harmattan.
Atkinson, D., 1984. “The Anatomy of Knowledge: Althusser’s Epistemology and its Consequences,” Philosophical Papers , 13: 1–19.
Balibar, Étienne, 1974. “Sur la dialectique historique. Quelques remarques critiques à propos de Lire le Capital,” in: Cinq études du matérialisme historique , Paris: François Maspero: 203–245.
Badiou, Alain, 2009. “Louis Althusser,” in Pocket Pantheon: figures of postwar philosophy (David Macey trans.), London: Verso: 54–90.
–––, 2012. “The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism”, in The Adventures of French Philosophy , Bruno Bosteels (trans.), London: Verso:
Balibar, Étienne, 1991. Écrits pour Althusser , Paris: Éditions la Découverte.
–––, 1994. “Althusser’s object,” Social Text , 39: 157–188.
Baltas, Aristide, 1993. “ Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays , by Louis Althusser,” Philosophy of Science , 60(4): 647–658.
Bargu, Banu, 2015. “Althusser’s Materialist Theater: Ideology and Its Aporias,” Differences , 26(3): 81–106.
Bargu, Banu, and William S Lewis, 2020. “Disjecta Membra: Althusser’s Aestethics Reconsidered.” Filozofski Vestnik , 41(1): 7–59.
Benton, Ted, 1984. The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism: Althusser and his Influence , London: McMillan.
Bidet, Jacques, 1997. “La Lecture du Capital par Louis Althusser,” in P. Raymond (ed.), Althusser Philosophe , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Boer, Roland, 2007. Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology (Historical Materialism Book Series), New York: Brill Academic.
Bourdin, Jean-Claude, 2000. “The Uncertain Materialism of Louis Althusser,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal , 22(1): 271–287.
Bourgeois, Bernard, 1997. “Althusser et Hegel” in P. Raymond (ed.), Althusser Philosophe , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 87–104.
Breton, Stanislas, 1997. “Althusser et la religion,” in P. Raymond (ed.), Althusser Philosophe , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 155–166.
Bruschi, Fabio, 2020. Le matérialisme politique de Louis Althusser, Paris: Mimesis.
Callinicos, Alex, 1976. Althusser’s Marxism (London: Pluto Press).
Carmichael, Thomas, 2022. “‘[A]Nother Kind of Rain’: Aesthetic Ontology and Contagious Imaginations in Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism.” Historical Materialism 1: 1–28.
Cavazzini, André, 2015. “Althusser/Bachelard: Une Coupure et Ses Enjeux,” Revue Synthèse (Philosophie et mathématique), 136(1-2): 117–33.
Crézégut, Anthony, 2016. “Althusser, Étrange Lecteur de Gramsci. Lire «Le Marxisme N’est Pas Un Historicisme»: 1965–2015,” Décalages, 2(1). [ Crézégut 2016 available online ]
Dupuis-Déri, F., 2015. “La banalité du mâle. Louis Althusser a tué sa conjointe, Hélène Rytmann-Legotien, qui voulait le quitter,” Nouvelles Questions Féministes , 34(1): 84–101.
Erdem, Erdinç, 2019. “Althusser’s Relation to Hegel: French Hegelianism, Marxism, and Aleatory Materialism.” Rethinking Marxism 31(3): 380–401.
Ekici, Ekrim, Jörk Nowak, and Freider Otto Wolf (eds.), 2015. Althusser – Die Reproduktion des Marxismus , Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot.
Elliot, Gregory, 2006 [1987]. Althusser: The Detour of Theory , New York: Verso.
––– (ed.), 1994. Althusser: A critical Reader , Oxford: Blackwell.
Geerlandt, Robert, 1978. Garaudy et Althusser: le débate sur l’humanisme dans le Parti Communiste Français et son Enjeu , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Gillot, Pascale, 2009. Althusser et la psychanalyse , Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
Goshgarian, G.M., 2003. “Introduction,” In The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings , London: Verso, xi–lxii.
–––, 2006. “Translator’s Introduction,” in Louis Althusser: Philosophy of the Encounter (Later Writings 1978–1987), London: Verso, xiii–l
–––, 2015a. “A Marxist in Philosophy,” Diacritics , 43(2): 24–46.
–––, 2015b. “Philosophie et révolution. Althusser sans le théoricisme ,” Période , February 19, 2015.
Hardy, N., 2014. “Wolff, Althusser, and Hegel: Outlining an Aleatory Materialist Epistemology,” Rethinking Marxism , 26(4): 454–71.
Hamza, Agon, 2011. Louis Althusser , Kosovo: Kolektivi Materializmi Dialektik.
Harnecker, Marta, 1994. “Althusser and the Theoretical Anti-Humanism of Marx,” Nature, Society, and Thought , 7 (3): 325–329.
Lazarus, Sylvain (ed.), 1993. Politique et Philosophie dans l’oeuvre de Louis Althusser , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Lewis, William S., 2005. Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism , Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Lewis, William S., 2022. Concrete Critical Theory: Althusser’s Marxism , Leiden: Brill.
Lindner, Kolja, 2007. “Lire le Capital: Althusser et l’impasse du tournant politiciste,” Contretemps , 20: 71–81.
Lindner, Urs, 2011. “Repenser la «coupure épistémologigue» lire Marx avec et Contre Althusser,” Actuel Marx , 1 (49): 121–139
Macey, David, 1994. “Thinking With Borrowed Concepts: Althusser and Lacan,” in Gregory Elliott (ed.), Althusser: a Critical Reader , Oxford: Blackwell, 142–158.
Macherey, Pierre, 2002. “Althusser et le jeune Marx,” Actuel-Marx , 31: 159–175.
Malabou, Catherine, 2016. “Où va le matérialisme ? Althusser/Darwin,” Lignes , 51: 3–51.
Matheron, François, 1998. “The Recurrence of the Void in Louis Althusser,” Rethinking Marxism , 10(3): 22–27.
Matheron, François, 2004. “Louis Althusser, or, the Impure Purity of the Concept,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal , 25(1): 137–159.
–––, 2005. “‘des problèmes qu’il faudra bien appeler d’un autre nom et peut-être politique’: Althusser et l’instabilité de la politique,” Multitudes , 22: 21–35.
Montag, Warren, 1998. “Althusser’s Nominalism: Structure and Singularity (1962–66),” Rethinking Marxism , 10(3): 64–73.
–––, 2002. Louis Althusser , New York: Palgrave.
–––, 2005a. “Politics: Transcendent or Immanent?: A response to Miguel Vatter’s ‘Machiavelli after Marx’,” Theory and Event , 7(4); doi: 10.1353/tae.2005.0052
–––, 2009. Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy’s Perpetual War , Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Moreau, Pierre-François, 1997. “Althusser et Spinoza,” in P. Raymond (ed.), Althusser Philosophe , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 75–86.
Morfino, Vitorrio, 2005. “An Althusserian Lexicon,” translated by Jason Smith, Borderlands e-journal , 4(2).
Morfino, Vittorio, 2022. “The Prince between Gramsci and Althusser” in Machiavelli Then and Now: History, Politics, Literature, ed. by Prasanta Chakravarty and Sukanta Chaudhuri, 296–315. Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press.
Moulier-Boutang, Yann, 1992. Louis Althusser: Une Biographie (Tome I: La Formation du mythe, 1918–1956) , Paris: Bernard Grasset.
Negri, Antonio, 2000. The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics , New York: University of Minnesota Press.
O’Boyle, B., and T. McDonough, 2016. “Critical Realism and the Althusserian Legacy,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour , 46(2): 143–164.
Patton, Paul, 1978. “Althusser’s Epistemology: The Limits of the Theory of Theoretical Practice,” Radical Philosophy , 19: 8–18.
Pfeifer, Geoff., 2015. The New Materialism: Althusser, Badiou, Zizek , London: Routledge.
Pippa, Stefano., 2020. “A Heap of Splinters On the Floor.” SoftPower 7(1):125–44.
Pippa, Stefano., 2019. Althusser and Contingenc y, Milan: Mimesis.
O’Hagan, Timothy, 1982. “Althusser: How to be a Marxist in Philosophy,” in G. H. R. Parkinson (ed.), Marx and Marxisms , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 243–264.
Rancière, Jacques, 2011. Althusser’s Lesson , Emiliano Battista (trans.), Continuum, 2011
Raymond, Pierre, 1997. “Le matérialisme d’Althusser,” in P. Raymond (ed.), Althusser Philosophe , Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 167–179; trans. by Ted Stolze, 2015, “Althusser’s Materialism,” Historical Materialism , 23(2): 176–88.
Resch, Robert Paul, 1992. Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory , Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rodríguez Arriagada, Marcelo, and Starcenbaum, Marcelo, 2017. Lecturas de Althusser En América Santiago de Chile : Doble Ciencia.
Romé, Natalia, 2021. For Theory: Althusser and the Politics of Time . Lanham (Md.): Rowman & Littlefield.
Roudinesco, Elisabeth, 2008. Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida , New York: Columbia University Press.
Sanchez Estop, Juan Domingo, and Louis Althusser, 2022. Althusser et Spinoza, détours et retours: avec trois textes inédits de Louis Althusser sur Spinoza . Brussels: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles
Sève, Lucien, 1997. “Althusser et la dialectique,” in P. Raymond (ed.), Althusser Philosophe, Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 105–136.
–––, 2004. Penser avec Marx aujourd’hui , Paris: La Dispute.
Sotiris, Panagiotis, 2020. A Philosophy for Communism: Rethinking Althusser. A Philosophy for Communism . Leiden: Brill.
Sprinker, Michael, 1995. “The Legacies of Althusser,” Yale French Studies , 88: 201–225.
Suchtig, Wal, 2004. “Althusser’s Late Thinking About Materialism,” Historical Materialism , 12(1): 3–70.
Thomas, Peter, 2002. “Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza,” Historical Materialism , 10(3): 71–113.
Thomas, Peter, Gal Kirn, Sara Farris, and Katja Diefenbach (eds.), 2012. Encountering Althusser: politics and materialism in contemporary radical thought , London: Continuum.
Thomas, Paul, 2008. Marxism and scientific socialism: from Engels to Althusser , London: Routledge.
Thompson, E. P., 1978. “The Poverty of Theory, or an Orrery of Errors,” The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays , London: Merlin.
Tosel, André, 2005. “Les aléas du matérialisme aléatoire dans la dernière philo de Louis Althusser,” in E. Kouvelakis, et al . (eds.), Sartre, Lukács, Althusser: des Marxistes en philosophie , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 169–196
Vatter, Miguel, 2004. “Machiavelli After Marx: the Self-Overcoming of Marxism in the Late Althusser,” Theory and Event 7(4).
Viparelli, I., 2015, “Althusser. La nécessité du « tournant » ontologique,” I. Pinto (trans.), Cahiers du GRM , 8 (December).
Williams, Caroline, 2001. Contemporary French Philosophy: Modernity and the Persistence of the Subject , London, Athlone.
Wolf, Frieder Otto, 2008. “Reproduktion und Ideologie bei Louis Althusser. Eine aktualisierende Annäherung”, in Frieder O. Wolf and Gerd Peter (eds.), Welt ist Arbeit. Im Kampf um die neue Ordnung , Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 41–54.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

Louis Althusser Archive , at marxists.org.

Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

Info about mirror sites

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

radical philosophy archive series 1, 1972-2016

Althusser’s epistemology.

Paul Patton
anti-humanism
Baruch Spinoza
epistemology
essays in self-criticism
historical materialism
historical materialism as the science of history
historical process
Louis Althusser
marxism as science
production of knowledge
Structuralism
theory of theoretical practice

‘Let us say that public positions must always be judged against the system of positions actually held and against the effects they produce’ – Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (p115)

Introduction

The settling of accounts with ‘Althusserianism’ has been on the order of the day for some time now. The recent publication of Essays in Self-Criticism, however, makes available for the first time to English readers the author’s own judgements on his earlier work (1). His view has not changed much since 1969, when the initial rectification was published as a foreword to the Italian edition of Reading Capital . What was then an ‘error’ in the conception of philosophy has now become a ‘deviation’. The change in terms reflects the further development of the metaphor (2) of philosophy as a field of battle: the class struggle in theory. It was a deviation, though, from a line which is never straight; an ‘error’ in a field of theory for which truth is undefined. Overall, the view with respect to his earlier texts is that, while their argumentation may have been deviant, the positions they took up were and are correct. The ‘Elements of Self-Criticism’, then, contain more than an element of self-justification. Nevertheless, they are useful as a point of departure for reflection on those earlier essays.

The fundamental position was that of combatting certain theoretically and politically dangerous tendencies within marxism, with the aim of restoring its political power and status, such that it might regain its political effectiveness. Althusser sums it up as follows: ‘I wanted to defend Marxism against the real dangers of bourgeois ideology: it was necessary to stress its revolutionary new character; it was therefore necessary to ‘prove’ that there is an antagonism between Marxism and bourgeois ideology…’ ( ESC , p105). The grounds on which he undertood this defence and this ‘proof’ were epistemological ones. Althusser sought to establish the novelty of historical materialism by defending it as a science, in the strongest sense of the word. Marx’s achievement was compared to that of Galileo, who ‘opened up the continent of physics to science’. Insofar as the proof of this radical novelty was undertaken on the basis of a proposed theory of the difference between science and ideology, Althusser’s marxist philosophy undertook the primary task of an epistemology: the elaboration of concepts and theses which would permit the demarcation of science from other kinds of theoretical discourse. Dialectical materialism, then, was thought to be the philosophical theory within which the scientific character of historical materialism could be demonstrated.

Althusser’s marxist philosophy, however, was no ordinary epistemology, but an ‘historical epistemology’, or ‘theory of science and of the history of science’ ( RC , p145). The defence of historical materialism as a science also rested upon certain historical claims about the beginnings of all sciences, about the epistemological break which marked the emergence of historical materialism itself. Conversely, the understanding of the new science founded by Marx, the science of history, and of the mechanism of the birth of the new science, pointed towards ‘the concepts of a general theory of the history of the sciences’ ( RC , p153). Hence the development of this marxist philosophy was thought to lead towards ‘a revolution in the traditional concept of the history of the sciences’ ( RC , p44); a revolution embodied in dialectical materialism itself, and made possible by the existence of historical materialism.

Structural Marxism and Its Critique

Open Access
First Online: 13 June 2023

Cite this chapter

You have full access to this open access chapter

Matti Kortesoja 2

1843 Accesses

This chapter contends with the discursive turn in which images of social structure and social change shifted from anatomical conceptual metaphors to relational thinking that captures social structure as a complex articulation of interlinked ideological, political, and economic instances. The examination begins with one of the most influential takes in the so-called return to Marx, addressing the Althusserian theory of ideology, which discourse theorists have accused of ‘yoking together’ a totality in connection with the larger structure of society in ideological terms. In fact, Althusser and his colleagues studied ideology’s practical application as a discursive interpellation of subjects. When discourse theory ultimately prevailed, it had adapted this part of the theory of ideology, while the concept of the capitalist mode of production has been excised from sociological discussions. Informed by awareness of ‘the spectre of Marx(ism)’, where social sciences are haunted by the ghostly notions of class-struggle and bourgeois ideology, this chapter turns attention to the less famous modes-of-production controversy in French new economic anthropology, which drew ethnographers’ gaze to class, ethnicity, and gender issues.

You have full access to this open access chapter, Download chapter PDF

Althusser, Louis
Hegemonic Struggle
New Economic Anthropology
Modes of Production

Althusser’s Theory of Ideology

In the 1950s, Althusser was teaching political philosophy, and he published his first monograph, Montesquieu: Politics and History , as the decade neared its end. Footnote 1 He held his first seminar on Marx in 1961–62, enfolding his students in his Marxian journey by considering Marx’s own path. Althusser had begun his 1960 article ‘On the Young Marx’ by citing a The German Ideology passage in which Marx states that the neo-Hegelians had not abandoned the bourgeois philosophy, meaning that their ideas were still situated in connection with idealism. Althusser claimed that with that manuscript, from 1845, Marx extricated himself from the realm of German ideology. These contributions demonstrate that Althusser was oriented philosophically to ‘anti-humanism’. So was the philosopher he had tutored earlier, Foucault, who later speculated that ‘man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (1966/ 2002 , 422). Marxist humanists, in turn, countered anti-humanism by claiming that Marxism is the most developed form of humanism in that it reveals the alienated conditions of capitalist relations of production in which men have to live their lives.

For Althusser, Marx broke from idealism not by way of inversion of the Hegelian dialectics but epistemologically, inventing a new problematic (1966/ 1969 ). This ushered in an area of study different from what came before Marx. In reference to the work of his former supervisor, Althusser called the rupture marked by Marx’s deviation from Hegel an epistemological break. Nevertheless, Althusser did not identify this break, from ideology to science, as sudden. He pinpointed it as starting with The German Ideology and reaching completion with Capital . For the intervening span of time in which Marx considered the relations of production to be constitutive of the entire structure of society in relation to the class struggle, Althusser used the term ‘historical materialism’. Portraying the passage wherein Marx calls for setting Hegel back on his feet as only a caricature, Footnote 2 Althusser opined that ‘mature Marx’ did not cleave to the Hegelian framework of concepts: rather than simply turn those concepts inside-out, Marx superseded Hegel’s approach completely with new concepts given shape in his critique of classical political economy, which followed his criticism of Hegelian philosophy.

In 1964, the discussion in Althusser’s seminar series focused on Marx’s Capital , and the following year saw minor publishing house Maspero print his Pour Marx and Lire le Capital in its ‘Theory’ series. These books were intended for a small audience, but their combined sales came to exceed a hundred thousand copies. Althusser and the members of his reading group, including Étienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, Roger Establet, and Jacques Rancière, all co-authors of Reading Capital , became well known virtually overnight. Furthermore, the influence of their analyses extended to internal critique of the PCF and opposition to Marxist humanists in the realm of politics and philosophy. Although Althusser was a member of the communist party, his reading of Marx was a critical one with regard to communist ideology. Footnote 3

In Reading Capital , Althusser and his colleagues paid attention to sometimes ambiguous concepts that Marx himself had left undefined. They approached this project by virtue of a ‘symptomatic reading’, conducted in a manner akin to that of a psychoanalyst examining patients’ speech utterances. In this practice, the analyst pays attention to what is absent from the patient’s speech—i.e., what the patient does not say explicitly. Marx analysed the treatises of classical political economy to make it explicit that, with their economic categories, they neglected the appropriation of surplus value of labour. Characteristic of the classical political economists’ approach was a failure to address the value of labour in relation to capitalist exploitation, which was explicitly identified but never discussed. It was evident to the classical political economists but not defined as a problem in classical political economy. Althusser found this symptomatic of bourgeois ideology.

In the context of Althusser’s 1962–63 lectures in structuralist philosophy, he invited Lacan, whose work had been rejected institutionally, to teach at the École normale supérieure, or ENS. Lacan’s seminars would become major events there. Although Althusser never participated in those seminars, psychoanalysis entered Marxist discussion with the printing of Althusser’s article ‘Freud and Lacan’ in a journal of the French Communist Party. Althusser drew a parallel here, stating that Marx had founded a new science of the capitalist mode of production while citing Lacan’s characterisation of Freud as the founder of a science of the unconscious (Althusser 1971 , 198). Footnote 4 Althusser presented the object of psychoanalysis as ‘the unconscious’, which is formed in the course of ‘the humanization of the small biological creature’ in a human child (p. 205). From the perspective of a former prisoner of war, Althusser went on to state in the following sentences (pp. 205–206):

psycho-analysis is concerned with […] a war which is continually declared in each of its sons, who, projected, deformed and rejected, are required, each by himself in solitude and against death, to take the long forced march which makes mammiferous larvae into human children, masculine or feminine subjects .

This passage creates an evocative image that links becoming a subject with a war that many survive at least superficially while others are wounded deeply such that they never recover from the struggle at all. For him, psychoanalysis does not revolve around a biologically or psychologically fixed essence of gendered human beings or around some culture or society wherein individuals are alienated as its subjects; it has to do with ‘the aleatory abyss of the human-sexual itself’ (p. 206). He referred to the contingency of subjectivity that will emerge out of the corporeal human beings. While Althusser never denied the importance of the psychoanalytical theory of the transition from the mirror stage to a speaking subject, he disagreed with the psychoanalytical reading of ideology, wherein early childhood determines unconscious processes in the subject’s becoming.

As elaborated upon in Althusser’s most famous essay in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays , ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ ( 1971 ), the titular apparatus (the ISA) operates by ideological means and establishes the subjects of ideology ( Subiectum , for ‘throw under’). This emphasis on ideological mechanisms opened abstract theory to empirical analysis. Schools, churches, families, law, politics, trade unions, media, and culture all reproduce bourgeois ideology that has to penetrate both the workers and the capitalists, along with the civil servants and indeed all the ideologists themselves (Althusser 1971 , 133, 143). The state apparatus, in turn, functions primarily through repression. In the end, none of the classes can be hegemonic without obtaining consent through the ISAs. Where Althusser was writing, in France, the capitalist social formation of the day was made up of numerous ISAs, with the education-oriented ISA reproducing class relations wherein most people graduate to farming and other realms of labour while only a small elite continue their studies. In contrast, he found the pre-capitalist social formation to feature only one dominant ISA, the religious state apparatus of the Catholic Church, against which the French Revolution reacted in accordance with the ideas of the Enlightenment, including the iconic liberty, equality, and fraternity as symbols of the democratic and republican state (pp. 142–157).

According to Althusser, each specific ideology has a history of its own. Ideology in general, however, has no history; it is like the unconscious, which is eternal. In other words, ‘ideology has no history’ (pp. 159–176). Ideology is an ‘imaginary relationship of individuals to their real [material] conditions of existence’; i.e., without the social relations of production and class relations, ideology is not expressive. It also has a material existence: the thoughts or expressions from which ideologies seem to be composed are not transcendental in any spiritual sense. Rather, they all have material substance through the ISAs (see pp. 162–170). Moreover, people are born as subjects of the ideology. After all, they have been expected, and they are called by a certain name from the day of their birth. In a passage I alluded to earlier on, Althusser says, on p. 174, in one of his most cited statements:

[I]deology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’

At this point, an individual who identifies with the ideological call of an authority is already subject to the ideology wherein he or she is ‘hailed’. Althusser articulated the above-mentioned idea that ideology is an ‘imaginary relationship’ of individuals to ‘the real conditions of existence’—that is, to the material relations of production and reproduction ( 1971 , 162). He thus indicated that the social relations are real, not purely imaginary or symbolic, that they exist independently from our thoughts and yet we can conceptualise them only by means of language that materialises in practice (see Marx 1857/ 1973 , 101; see also Hall 1985 , 103–105). In this respect, Althusser speaks about the symbolic and overdetermined character of all social relations.

According to colleagues of Althusser, such as Balibar (1965/ 1970 ) and Nicos Poulantzas (1968/ 1975 ), the Marxist approach can be criticised by pointing to the dominant role of politics and ideology in preceding epochs. After all, people do not live only from the economic basis. In Capital , Marx had given the critics a rather terse reply, however, that ‘it is the mode [of production] in which they gained a livelihood that explains why here politics, and there Catholicism [as an ideology], played the chief part’ (Marx 1867/ 1909 , Note 42). Althusser talks about ‘the economic’, which determines ‘in the last instance’ which of the other instances, such as the ideological and political, are dominant at the time in question. For Reading Capital , Balibar (1965/ 1970 , 212–213) homed in on the importance of the concept of the mode of production, which is ‘doubly articulated’ by a combinatory relation ‘between the forces and relations of production’. In this respect, a social formation can comprise two or more modes of production (see also Poulantzas 1968/ 1975 , 14–15). This leads to the question of the articulation of modes of production and the ways in which pre-capitalist modes can combine with the capitalist relations of production.

Interestingly, Althusser’s philosophical rigour led to ethnographic fieldwork being carried out in Africa in times of decolonisation and capitalist neo-colonialism. Among the outputs were the French-language works of Godelier, Meillassoux, Terray, and Rey—or the articulation school of economic anthropology.

Patriarchs, Peasants, and Articulation of Modes of Production

New economic anthropologists criticised American ‘dependency theorists’ such as Andre Gunder Frank, for whom the underdevelopment in Latin America was due to the uneven flow of commodities from periphery to core. In addition, they criticised modernisation theorists, for whom there was only one global capitalist world-system, a notion prominent in the work of world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein. In contrast to the sociological thinking of modernisation theorists, who considered developing countries to be at a stage of transition to the capitalist mode of production, French new economic anthropologists’ empirical fieldwork in postcolonial Africa showed that the Third World was not following the same path at all. Moreover, the debate on modes of production also affected the class struggle through influence on the formation of class alliances and socialist strategies in practice, especially in Latin America.

For his ‘Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America’, featured as the first paper in Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory , Laclau ( 1977 ) proceeded from the ‘restricted’ concept of the mode of production (see Wolpe 1980 , 6–15). According to Laclau, the mode of production consists of articulation of the possession of the means of production, which is the pivotal element—a form of appropriation of the surplus—and the development of the division of labour and productive forces. Laclau began his introduction to the concept of articulation by bringing up the discussion of the articulation of modes of production, in which connection he criticised dependency theory and the sociology of development. Laclau also challenged the conception of capitalism as a singular world system. Laclau posited that the relations of production in Latin America comprised feudal elements just as much. Footnote 5

In France, the new approach to economic anthropology was devoted to describing the pre-capitalist social formations in a conjuncture where the non-capitalist forms articulated with capitalism. From this relational standpoint, the scholars were interested in the articulation of the pre-capitalistic forms of production with the colonial and capitalist forms and in the effects of these on the relevant developing countries. The claim that two or more modes can coincide and articulate with one another at the same time is a departure both from Marx’s explanations and from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology and the more liberal tradition of economic anthropology (see Clammer 1975 ; see also Copans and Seddon 1978 ). In line with elaboration on their predecessors’ arguments, the new economic anthropologists concluded that the growth of the capitalist world-system takes place through its boundary regions, which requires that the pre-capitalist social formations articulate with capitalism. At this point, I shall briefly outline the main ideas surrounding the controversy on what was dubbed the articulation of modes of production in the structural-Marxist line of thought, populated with the elements of gender, ethnicity and class struggle (see Raatgever 1985 ; see also van Binsbergen and Geschiere 1985 ).

Godelier (1973/ 1977 ) refined the Althusserian framework with the premise of anthropological fieldwork for uncovering the pre-capitalist social formations as a part of the social structure articulated in line with new logic. He posited that the structure of pre-capitalist social formations is based on kinship relations that enable the exploitation of descendants. For this reason, Godelier did not accord a dominant position to the economic as determining the position of all other instances in a pre-capitalist social formation. Rather, the economic is not discernible from other instances. Accordingly, the empirical problem here is to describe the connections among labourers, non-labourers, and instruments of labour in domestic communities wherein livelihood is organised around descent groups. In this respect, reproduction of productive forces and relations of production take place because of kinship relations refining a domestic or lineage-based mode of production, which differs fundamentally from the capitalist mode of production.

The exponents of new economic anthropology concluded that the structure of society is arranged around kinship relations. For instance, in 1964, Meillassoux (see 1975/ 1981 ) empirically described a patrilineal system among the Guro people of the Ivory Coast. The elders of the villages exercise direct control over labour power because of social reproduction. Community members worked in communally owned fields to produce goods that were then appropriated by their elders. In these circumstances, production is not based on possessing means of production or holding private land. Instead, the village elders benefited from restrictions in access to circulation and exchange of goods, especially, used for marital payments. By establishing a family, younger men produce dependants and eventually can acquire the status of an elder. Hence, the non-productive members of Guro society maintained patriarchal dominance relative to the productive members by controlling the circulation and exchange of not only goods but also women.

After studying the people neighbouring the Guro, Dida, Terray revisited Meillassoux’s ethnographic study five years after it was empirically conducted. Applying Althusserian categories that Godelier had introduced to the field, Terray (1969/ 1972 ) paid specific attention to means of production and forms of co-operation (such as hunting with nets) that require more teamwork than agriculture does. Hence, Terray found, unlike Meillassoux, that more than one mode of production may be exercised in distributing the means of labour and organising the ways of co-operating. With his corresponding description of the ‘self-subsistence economy’ of the Guro, Terray drew a distinction between two modes of production: The first mode dominates in a lineage-based system involving simple co-operation in agriculture, along with fishing, gathering, and animal husbandry. The second is visible in a ‘tribe-village system’, which he considered a more complex and egalitarian way of organising the social relations of production and distributing the productive forces used for hunting.

Various new economic anthropologists have argued with one another about the range of social relations necessary for characterising the articulation of modes of production in pre-capitalist social formations. Rey’s take on the matter was that patrilineal groups as seen among the Guro formed from relations of production that indicate an exploitative relationship between the producers (peasants) and non-producers (the proprietors), which other economic anthropologists did not consider a class relationship. Taking issue with Rey’s understanding, Meillassoux responded with a claim that no one group takes advantage of another within a domestic mode of production per se, since both women and young men can achieve the status of an elder in the course of time. Hence, he reasoned, exploitation takes place only through the ‘articulation of modes of production’, because of a domestic mode that cannot exist as such without capitalism (1975/ 1981 , 87). In the domestic mode of production, however, village elders’ control over the productive members differs from the use of ‘free labour’ within a capitalist system, wherein the workers possess their labour power used as a commodity exchanged for wages.

With reference to class struggle, Rey, however, insisted that in the domestic mode of production, the exploitation of productive members of Guro society is specifically due to the appropriation of their labour. In Rey’s work with the matrilineal groups living in the French Congo, for instance, the exploitation of surplus labour, for which the elders were not paying, was apparent through the subordination of young men who cannot become village elders, to whom they provide free labour. In this polygamous system, men become elders only outside their local residence or by accident without a guarantee of ever getting married. In addition, they offer marital payments increasingly in the form of money for the elders. Consequently, young men are pushed to sell their labour to proprietors of the land in exchange for wages, which puts an inexpensive labour force at the disposal of nearby plantation owners.

In early modern Europe, feudalism both protected and resisted capital as the transition to capitalism unfolded. Some pre-capitalist social formations seem to display resistance, at least to revolts (e.g., the Arab Spring), that crystallise amid ongoing neo-colonisation. Rey’s treatment in ‘Class Alliances’ presents the articulation of the feudalist and capitalist modes of production as commencing with the class alliance between capitalists and proprietors. Marx described the latter more than a century earlier in the context of land rent as a feudalist form of appropriating surplus labour from the serfs. The claim by which Rey countered Marx’s argument is that the ‘ground rent is a relation of distribution […] of another mode of production with which capitalism is articulated’ (Rey 1973/ 1982 , 31). Hence, the feudal form of ground rent taking over peasants’ surplus labour exists also within a capitalist system. This articulation between two systems benefits both the capitalists and the land-owners, who can co-exist in a class alliance for an extended time.

Although the entrenchment of these relations depends on specific historical circumstances, it shows a tendency to impoverish peasants who are tied to land they do not possess themselves. Rey’s work on what he called the articulation of modes of production depicts the transition from one mode of production to another as occurring through a class drama played out on the stage of ideological and political instances, which are not cast as static states of being. The first phase of the articulation sees alliance of non-producers (land-owners and capitalists) activated against direct producers (the peasants) dispossessed of their land and instruments of labour in a phenomenon that protects both the capitalist and pre-capitalist social formations (pp. 21, 27). After this phase, capitalism takes root in the pre-capitalist social formation and the peasants must provide their labour outside their domestic communities. This move creates conditions analogous to the prevailing situation in many developing countries (p. 52). Moreover, elimination of the pre-capitalist modes of production requires a process of capitalist neo-colonisation to take place, rooted in extra-economic coercion and violence. The final phase, visible in the most developed countries, such as the United States, involves capitalist markets completing the destruction of peasant production, whereupon developing countries have no other option than to provide low-cost labour and raw materials. Rey’s key point is that the transition from one mode of production to another is not set in advance. It goes beyond the economic base in the social forming of ideological and political instances that influence uneven, contingent and economic development. In this context, the concept of articulation is a tool intended for understanding the connections between/among multiple modes of production.

At the core of the controversy was articulation of social relations between the capitalist and pre-capitalist modes. The parties in this debate regarded the social formations in developing countries as the articulation of the subordinated and pre-capitalist mode(s) of production under the dominance of capitalism, where capitalism has destroyed feudalism yet other forms of production persist in postcolonial territories. In this context, the concept of articulation gained currency for historical transformations with reference to contradictions and struggle. For example, the idea behind Rey’s use of the term ‘articulation of modes of production’ is that one or more subordinate modes of production can exist alongside capitalism in the long term. The three stages outlined in ‘Class Alliances’, then, can be conceived of as eras rather more than moments: exchange and interaction between two modes of production may continue for quite some time before one mode becomes subordinated and transition to another takes place. The defeat of the initial mode too is not an event but a phase. In Rey’s work, each of these stages of articulation has a corresponding set of class alliances. These involve situational specifics and flesh-and-blood people, so the outcome of the struggle is not guaranteed in advance.

Ideology, Politics, and the Struggle for Hegemony

Formerly Althusserian sociologists Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, counted as Althusser’s main critics, argued that notions such as ‘mode of production’ and ‘structural causality’ should be abandoned in favour of the post-Marxist discourse-theory approach. With their criticism of the articulation of the modes of production, Hindess and Hirst ( 1977 ) reasoned that it considers structural causality as an effect of the whole in its parts—that is, in a manner similar to that in which the idealists used the term ‘expressive causality’, for which Althusser himself had criticised both Marxist humanists and economists. In place of the allegedly teleological and essentialist explanations wherein, with a focus on the mode of production, society is conceived of as a totality of the economic and class contradictions, they embraced an alternative in which this complexity boils down to ‘a single structure of social relations’, a social formation as an object of discourse. What is at stake in this argument is an attempt to contest the effort to appropriate the whole structure of society for a model that construes the social relations and various instances of the social formations on the foundation of the mode(s) of production, not as discursive formations. This contestation points to a shift toward a conceptual metaphor of social action that spotlights language and its structures (e.g., discourses). These scholars sought an alternative to the metaphors related to the articulation of modes of production.

Either the articulation of ‘relations’ and ‘forces’ of production is conceived in terms of the connection between social relations and the forms in which their conditions of existence are realised or it must be conceived in terms of some kind of necessity in which the character of one object of discourse, the ‘relations’ or the ‘forces’, is deducible from the concept of the other. (Hindess and Hirst 1977 , 55)

Thus, armed with critique that rejects models of articulating different instances within the social formation, sociologists took issue with Althusserians’ claim that the social relations of production determine any social formation in the last instance through assignment of the dominant role to the mode of production. For Laclau, as one political theoretician of articulation who took issue with Althusser’s views, the latter’s most important contribution was to consider ideology in practice as an interpellation of the subjects (Laclau 1977 , 101–102). Decisively, this part of the Althusserian paradigm ended up adapted to the agenda of discourse theory. It has prevailed, while the concept of the mode of production has been excised from social-scientific discussion. Footnote 6

Although Althusserianism was a ‘dead end’ for many, it sparked a paradigm shift in cultural studies. Footnote 7 Spawned via the structural-Marxist paradigm, the institutionalisation of cultural studies in Britain was set in political and intellectual conditions impelled by the ‘New Left’, with which activists, educators, and literary critics alike were associated. Among the key names associated with the New Left are Hall, Williams, and Richard Hoggart, in addition to Thompson, who was among Althusser’s main critics (see Dworkin 1997 ; Hall 1980a , 1980b ). Footnote 8 While Marxist humanists conceived of culture as an expressive totality, wherein each part expresses the essence of the whole (i.e., idealism), Althusser conceptualised the structure of society as a social formation of specific practices articulated in relation to one another. From a structuralist viewpoint, people live and make sense of their conditions of existence by means of the categories through which their experience has affected the unconscious structures. Althusser considered subjects of ideology and their interpellation, class struggle, and relations of production in relation to the capitalist mode of production.

In the 1970s, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) applied the Althusserian paradigm alongside the notions of hegemony and resistance, in addition to semiology and psychoanalysis, in an attempt to bridge the gap between the structural-Marxist categories and the linguistic paradigm, wherein the subjects are constituted through language and ideology. A problem with this constellation and others, such as ‘screen theory’, was the notion of the universal subject (Hall 1980a , 69–70). In the mid-1970s, one of the groups at CCCS, who focused on theories of language and ideology, turned to Foucault’s work insisting on historical specificity pertaining to language and subjectivity (see Hall et al. 1980 , 186–209). In this respect, in their studies of popular culture they recognised that abstract theories of ideology and language lie across a gulf from the subjectivities of individuals. After the pioneering work done at CCCS, cultural studies and the discourse theory of the 1990s saw the concept of discourse eclipsing the notions of culture and ideology, in addition to that of language as a system of differences. Consequently, the catch-all term ‘discourse’ entered the vocabulary of the social sciences and humanities in a manner that disavowed its roots in structural linguistics, Marxist political philosophy, and psychoanalysis. All three were downgraded to nearly inconsequential components that reside outside social theory (see Sawyer 2002 ).

By the 1990s, a focus on pluralism, relativism, and individualism had entirely unseated the causal relations, class struggle, and alleged economic determinism. The ‘culturalist’ paradigm took off at the turn of the 1960s, when the New Left began a renewal of socialism in Britain, with a strong tradition in literary criticism and social history (Dworkin 1997 ). They defined ‘culture’ as meanings and values that have arisen from the historical conditions and social relations through which people relate to the conditions of their existence, along with the cultural traditions and practices wherein their ways of seeing have been expressed and materialised (Hall et al. 1980 , 63, 66). These thinkers referred to the ideas and cultural practices that organise individuals’ thoughts and action as composing ‘a whole way of life’. From this perspective, their emphasis was on people’s cultural activities that make their history. Culturalists analysed the long-term social and cultural changes in post-war British society in terms of the history of the working class, the Industrial Revolution, and consumer capitalism, in addition to the mass media and popular culture, which had become the main tools for communication in the era of advanced consumer capitalism.

Strivings for theory-informed political practice in Marxism had already stepped forth from the economic realm upon publication of the cultural- and political-hegemony-related transcripts in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks , written in 1929–35 and released in 1948–51 (the first edition in English was printed in 1971). Footnote 9 Lenin was among the politicians from whose thinking Gramsci drew in his practical endeavours. He employed Lenin’s idea of hegemony specifically when taking part in a debate on the workers’ movement (with which he became involved in city-level politics in Turin). Likewise, in ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’, from 1926, Gramsci ( 1978 , 443) uses the notion of hegemony as applied by Lenin to examine

the question of the hegemony of the proletariat: i.e. of the social basis of the proletarian dictatorship and of the workers’ State. The proletariat can become the leading and the dominant class to the extent that it succeeds in creating a system of class alliances which allows it to mobilize the majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois State […], this means to the extent that it succeeds in gaining the consent of the broad peasant masses.

In this respect, hegemony refers to the domination of one class over another—that is, ‘the proletariat hegemony over the bourgeoisie’. In the context of this passage, the task for the progressive Italian working class is to organise a revolutionary mass movement against the state in a country with uneven division of the masses between the agricultural ‘peasant’ south and the industrialised ‘bourgeois’ north. For the hegemony of the bourgeoisie to be contested, a class alliance with the peasants is necessary if the working class are to be able to overcome the state apparatus. At this point, Gramsci relies on an idea of political action according to which it is possible to influence the course of history in relation to the prevailing circumstances of the day.

With the passage from Selections from the Political Writings (1921–1926) ( 1978 ), Gramsci was not yet able to proceed beyond dialectical materialism, wherein antagonistic production relations constitute the categories for all social actors, not least the classes. In other words, the actors’ identity articulates in a fixed manner such that the classes derive their politics and ideology strictly from the economic foundation. With the material in Selections from the Prison Notebooks , hegemony had become a concrete and historically specific moment (Gramsci 1971/ 1999 , 204–205). Hegemony is constituted in accordance with the prevailing ‘relation of forces’ at the level of the material forces of production and in relation to the social and political organisation of social actors as classes. Before a class can become hegemonic, however, the people must be aware of their unity. Their awareness can lead to a sense of solidarity extending beyond the narrow ‘economic-corporative’ interests within, for example, the confines of a labour union. Therefore, no social relation or law of the economic guarantees a ‘collective will’ as opposed to individuals’ will and class consciousness.

Prison Notebooks presents hegemony that arises in a ‘war of position’. It emerges at the fronts of civil society by way of prolonged sieges to articulate the subordinate groups into a dominant historical bloc. This strategy pointed the way to a new lesson for the workers’ movement. It also deviated sharply from the more traditional orientation toward a revolutionary ‘war of manoeuvre’ against the ‘bourgeois’ state and its ideological apparatus (prosecuted through blitzkrieg to occupy the latter’s territory). The struggle for hegemony opens a space for intellectual and moral reforms that enable articulating a wide range of contradictions to alter power relations. In this manner, the creation of hegemony builds on actors’ ability to articulate their worldview such that it contains elements that would appear to be real in the people’s day-to-day life. This commonly shared understanding is ‘common sense’ (i.e., senso commune ), by means of which the dispersed and fragmented ideological elements can articulate into unity with no a priori attachment to classes.

In this Gramscian expression of historical materialism, the term ‘practice’ refers to the social and political action through which Marxist philosophy emerges from a practical social activity as a theoretical practice and self-reflective political action—a ‘philosophy of praxis’. In Gramsci’s (1971/ 1999 , 190–195) account, the aim for hegemony is to build consent constituted via the ‘ethico-political’ cultural sphere through the agency of ‘organic intellectuals’ doing epistemic work in educating the people, organising them, and leading them to form a ‘historical bloc’ ( en bloc , a whole) by considering political action with respect to the social whole. He wrote of a conservative Italy in which ideological forces such as Catholicism organised the ‘national-popular’ cultural sphere in a way that left no space for its political rearticulation until the rise of Fascism. Only then did the contradictions of this social formation fuse in a revolutionary rupture. Accordingly, ideologies offer material for hegemonic struggles, which inform political articulations for purposes of achieving consent. A thoroughly Gramscian emphasis on political action is evident in the associated theoretical developments of political articulation. Footnote 10

Althusser and his colleagues drew an analytical distinction between ‘mode of production’ and ‘social formation’, where the former is a theoretical abstraction and the latter is a ‘complexly structured totality’ with multiple levels—the economic, the political, and the ideological—which overdetermine one another. Instead of foregrounding the capitalist mode of production as determining all relations or, alternatively, reducing ideologies and politics to superstructure, their articulation leans toward a process of creating the relations in practice at the level of empirically ascertainable social formation in the fashion presented in new economic anthropology. In the literature on the articulation of modes of production, new economic anthropologists such as Terray, Meillassoux, Rey, and Balibar argued that the capitalist mode of production does not evolve mechanistically or evolutionarily from the pre-capitalist forms, nor does it necessarily dissolve or transcend them. Instead, they gain structure in relation to each other, with the concept of articulation coming in here to signify their relationality.

A century after Marx’s Capital , the return to Marx directed discussion toward the framework within which the notion of articulation is to be applied. Althusserian social science focused initially on the articulation of modes of production and their economic mechanisms and then on social action as language related to ideology, politics, and the struggle for hegemony. This move also marked a departure from a conception of society as a fully articulated whole that gives meaning to its every instance by means of a ‘necessary correspondence’ with the economic. It simultaneously entailed greater attention to other concerns—not least gender, ‘race’, and ethnicity issues—with structures similar to those found in language, all considered via the notion of discourse. In a fully articulated system of differences, there would be no open discursive field for political articulations of ‘the social’. Structures do not come out of nowhere, though; people not only appropriate and adopt them, becoming their subjects, but act in multiple ways, including opposition and resistance.

Born in 1918 in Algeria, Althusser was a member of the French Communist Party (PCF) who, through his teaching, may have had greater influence on the generation of French intellectuals than any other philosopher did. He taught philosophy for decades at the École normale supérieure (ENS), in Paris, where the studentship he had begun in 1939 was interrupted by the draft. From the French army, he was captured by German troops as a prisoner of war. After World War II, Althusser began his studies ( agrégation ) in philosophy proper, writing his thesis on Hegel, under the supervision of Gaston Bachelard. In 1948, Althusser took up a teaching position at ENS, where he would work for over three decades, and it was in the same year that he joined the PCF, on the recommendation of his colleague Jean-Toussaint Desanti.

Althusser’s ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ in For Marx (1965/ 1969 ) begins with the following words pertaining to Hegel, from Marx (alluding to Marx’s 1873 ‘Afterword to the Second German Edition’, from Capital ’s Vol. 1): ‘With him [Hegel] it [dialectic] is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell’.

In May 1968, revolutionary sentiments broke through in Paris, with 10 million people joining a general strike that left the French government on the brink of collapse. This led to new elections. Althusserian vocabulary influenced many of the student rioters but still had to adapt and adjust to a new politico-historical conjuncture. Simultaneously, reformers tried to establish socialism with a human face in Czechoslovakia, in contrast against the prevailing communist Soviet model, but the result was another forceful defeat by Soviet forces: the Prague Spring fell in the very territory that had birthed its alliance. Later after these events, Euro-communism displaced Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism within the communist parties of France, Italy, and Spain. In addition, the contradictions in advanced capitalism—with antagonism and social inequality evident amid unprecedented social mobility, economic prosperity, and well-being—prompted emancipatory movements and the rise of various countercultures. The PCF was among the leading parties in France at the time, and Althusser struggled against both communist-Soviet-brand Marxism’s and bourgeois Marxist humanism’s interpretations in theory and practice alike.

Lacan’s ‘return to Freud’ appeared in the ‘Rome Discourse’ (i.e., ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, from 1953). It influenced psychiatry in both theory and practice. Arguing against the ego-psychological and neurobiological leanings of psychoanalysis, Lacan made explicit Freud’s psychoanalytic idea that our innermost being is structured socially by the discourse of the other—that is, the symbolic order wherein the symbolic function of language is seen as constitutive of the ‘split subject’. In this connection, the human mind or psyche is constituted in relation to language and culture. The International Psychoanalytic Association expelled Lacan for, above all, his theoretical break from Freudian tradition and his unorthodox psychoanalytical practice (Dosse 1991/ 1997 , 95, 104).

Laclau’s conception of the articulation of modes of production, however, diverged from the structural-Marxist approach: in the essay, he states that their starting point is ‘the economic, political and ideological instances, which are present in all modes of production and whose articulation constitutes the specificity of that mode’ ( 1977 , 72–73). In short, he asked why there are only these instances and not others, while also posing the question of how the specific instances’ articulation occurs in practice.

A major line of critique of Althusserianism involves abstract theory that builds on the distinction between Marxist science and philosophy. Here, the philosopher’s central task is to prevent ideology from penetrating the scientific practice. Formally, the distinction is the same as in dialectical materialism (‘Diamat’), which was an orthodox Marxist doctrine in the communist movement. An illustrative example is the polemic work The Poverty of Theory (1978/ 1995 ), in which historian E.P. Thompson criticises Althusserians (such as a younger Hindess and Hirst) by way of a vulgarism from Marx and Engels’s characterisation of anarchists—‘all of them are Geschichtenscheissenschlopff , unhistorical shit’ (p. 145). The criticism was levelled at structural-Marxist theory. Indeed, Althusser himself would retrospectively admit, in his Essays in Self-Criticism (1974/ 1976 , 127) that in the mid-1960s ‘our “flirt” with structuralist terminology obviously went beyond acceptable limits’. Even though Althusser’s political and theoretical concern lay with ideological practices and class struggle, which were highly topical in the mid-1970s, Althusserianism went out of fashion. Even his most zealous disciples rejected him. For example, Rancière dubbed the Althusserian philosophy elitist.

Althusser suffered from mental-health problems and was hospitalised numerous times. In addition, several of his disciples, among them Poulantzas and Michel Pêcheux, committed suicide. Eventually, in 1980, Althusser strangled his wife, Hélène Rytmann-Althusser, receiving compulsory treatment for psychosis after her death and thereby avoiding a jail sentence. His writing continued in the next decade, with these pieces seeing the light of day after his death, in 1990. The attention to aleatory materialism ( alea refers to the rolling of dice) is characteristic of Althusser’s posthumously published works (see Lahtinen 1997/ 2009 ).

Hall (1932–2014) was the first editor-in-chief of New Left Review (with tenure from 1960), an academic journal for the Left’s contemporary theoretical and political debate. Hall became one of the leading Marxist intellectuals in Britain’s New Left movement. In 1969, he started serving as acting director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. A decade later, Hall took up a chair as a professor of sociology without holding a doctorate. He taught Open University courses until his retirement, in 1998. Hall is famous for his interdisciplinary cultural-studies work, in areas such as youth, postcolonial, and media and communication research.

Antonio Gramsci, born in 1891, was a linguist, political journalist, and incarcerated leader of the Communist Party in Italy who maintained opposition to Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime until his death, in 1937.

In the 1920s, as at the time of The Communist Manifesto in 1848, it seemed plausible that the socialist revolution of the proletariat would bring hegemony on behalf of which Gramsci was fighting. However, such a proletarian hegemony never arrived. In its stead, Gramsci had to face a historical conjuncture wherein right-wing populism gained its moment in the form of Fascism. The lesson to be learnt from this disillusionment was that history does not follow theory of class struggle. Instead, the outcomes of such struggles are rather unpredictable and contingent on other historical events. Gramsci saw this first-hand, experiencing it in both theory and practice. He developed the political role of an organic intellectual (i.e., the communist party), from which he exerted a profound influence on Marxist philosophy, its critique, and the politics of the New Left. Among the latter political theorists, it was Laclau who drew on Gramsci’s work to take another look at a Marxist theory of ideology and class struggle in terms of discourse theory.

Althusser, Louis ([1965] 1969). For Marx . Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Allen Lane.

Google Scholar

Althusser, Louis (1971). Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays . Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books.

Althusser, Louis ([1974] 1976). Essays in Self-Criticism . Trans. Graeme Lock. London: New Left Books.

Althusser, Louis; Étienne Balibar ([1965] 1970). Reading Capital . Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books.

Clammer, John (1975). Economic Anthropology and the Sociology of Development: ‘Liberal’ Anthropology and Its French Critics. In Tony Barnett, David Booth, and Ivar Oxaal (eds), Beyond the Sociology of Development: Economy and Society in Latin America and Africa . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 208–228.

Copans, Jean; David Seddon (1978). Marxism and Anthropology: A Preliminary Survey. In David Seddon (ed.), Relations of Production: Marxist Approaches to Economic Anthropology . London: Frank Cass, 1–46.

Dosse, François ([1991] 1997). History of Structuralism: The Rising Sign, 1945–1966 . Trans. Deborah Glassman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Dworkin, Dennis (1997 ). Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies . Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.

Book Google Scholar

Foucault, Michel ([1966] 2002). The Order of Things : An Archaeology of the Human Sciences . London: Routledge.

Godelier, Maurice ([1973] 1977). Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology . Trans. Robert Brain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gramsci, Antonio ([1971] 1999). Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci . Trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Gramsci, Antonio (1978). Selections from the Political Writings (1921–1926) . Trans. Quintin Hoare (ed.). London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Hall, Stuart (1980a). Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms. Media, Culture & Society 2(1): 57–72.

Article Google Scholar

Hall, Stuart (1980b). Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured. In Dominance in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism . Paris: UNESCO, 305–345.

Hall, Stuart (1985). Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post Structuralist Debates. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2(2): 91–114.

Hall, Stuart; Dorothy Hobson; Andrew Lowe; Paul Willis (eds) (1980). Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies , 1972–79. London: Hutchinson.

Hindess, Barry; Paul Hirst (1977). Mode of Production and Social Formation: An Auto-Critique of ‘Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production’ . London: Macmillan.

Laclau, Ernesto (1977 ). Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism . London: Verso.

Lahtinen, Mikko ([1997] 2009). Politics and Philosophy: Niccolò Machiavelli and Louis Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism . Trans. Gareth Griffiths and Kristina Kölhi. Leiden: Brill.

Marx, Karl ([1857] 1973). Introduction. In Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy . Trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Books & New Left Review, 81–111.

Marx, Karl ([1867] 1909). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1: The Process of Capitalist Production . Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr.

Meillassoux, Claude ([1975] 1981). Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Poulantzas, Nicos ([1968] 1975). Political Power and Social Classes . Trans. Timothy O’Hagan. London: New Left Books & Sheed and Ward.

Raatgever, Reini (1985). Analytic Tools, Intellectual Weapons: The Discussion among French Marxist Anthropologists about the Identification of Modes of Production in Africa. In Wim van Binsbergen and Peter Geschiere (eds), Old Modes of Production and Capitalist Encroachment: Anthropological Explorations in Africa . London: Kegan Paul, 290–330.

Rey, Pierre-Philippe ([1973] 1982). Class Alliances. Trans. James F. Becker. International Journal of Sociology 12(2): 1–120.

Sawyer, Keith (2002). A Discourse on Discourse: An Archeological History of an Intellectual Concept. Cultural Studies 16(3): 433–456.

Terray, Emmanuel ([1969] 1972). Marxism and ‘Primitive’ Societies . Trans. Mary Klopper. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Thompson, Edward ([1978] 1995). The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays . London: Merlin Press.

van Binsbergen, Wim; Peter Geschiere (1985). Marxist Theory and Anthropological Practice: The Application of French Marxist Anthropology in Field-work. In Wim van Binsbergen and Peter Geschiere (eds), Old Modes of Production and Capitalist Encroachment: Anthropological Explorations in Africa . London: Kegan Paul, 235–289.

Wolpe, Harold (1980). Introduction. In The Articulation of Modes of Production: Essays from Economy and Society . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1–43.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

Matti Kortesoja

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Kortesoja, M. (2023). Structural Marxism and Its Critique. In: Power of Articulation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33077-3_4

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33077-3_4

Published : 13 June 2023

Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-031-33076-6

Online ISBN : 978-3-031-33077-3

eBook Packages : Literature, Cultural and Media Studies Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Althusser’s theory of ideology

On the Reproduction of Capitalism:

The work of Louis Althusser has proven controversial in the International Socialist tradition, as well as throughout Marxist thought worldwide. In recent years, a revival of interest in his work has taken place. In the past decade, Althusser’s late work Philosophy of the Encounter was translated and published, as well as significant discussions of his work. These include the second edition of Gregory Elliott’s standard study, important books by Warren Montag and Mikko Lahtinen, the lengthy collection titled Encountering Althusser , and the ongoing publications of the journal Décalages. 1 The recent translation of the entirety of the manuscript On the Reproduction of Capitalism , from which the famous essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” was extracted, is an occasion to review some of Althusser’s ideas in the hopes of determining whether his work has made legitimate contributions to the struggle for socialism from below.

On the Reproduction of Capitalism is a relatively late work of Althusser’s, inspired by the mass uprising of workers and students in 1968. 2 Committed to his membership in the French Communist Party (PCF), Althusser accepted its conservative response to the movement and refused to support the strikes or demonstrations. For this reason, many of Althusser’s students, who had previously viewed his ideas as a vital new development in revolutionary politics, bitterly rejected him. He had garnered a reputation as an oppositional, radical figure among Communists and the Left more broadly, but was unable to act beyond the dictates of the party bureaucrats.

Why was Althusser unable to break from the PCF? This practical perspective is even more peculiar when we are aware that he fought a lifelong struggle against the party’s leadership and its dominant outlook. 3 Nonetheless, he remained committed to this organization because it was a mass working-class party. While his membership in the PCF is often claimed as evidence that he was a doctrinaire Stalinist, Althusser actually hoped to drastically change the party from within, to render it a legitimate organ of the working-class masses that formed its base of support. He believed that abandoning the party would lead to isolation from the working class, and for this reason he felt that a renewed revolutionary Marxist outlook needed to be built through an oppositional role within it. As Ian Birchall writes, “Alignment with the working class could not be envisaged other than in terms of the organisations which, for better or worse, continued to hold the loyalty of the majority of conscious and active workers.” 4 While Birchall himself disagreed with this analysis, it was a widely held belief among French revolutionaries of this generation.

Historically, this turned out to be impossible. Althusser greatly underestimated the degree of bureaucratization that had taken hold, his perspectives remained marginal, and the party lost its once-great support in the French working class. While this was a serious error, he is still to be credited with articulating perspectives that he hoped could win predominance in a political institution supported by the French labor movement.

Althusser believed that the best hope for the resuscitation of the party was represented by the ideas and practices championed by Mao Zedong and his adherents. 5 He argued that the Soviet Union had experienced a “Stalinist deviation” rooted in economism. 6 His interest in Mao, however, was fairly superficial, and his ideas can be assessed on their own merits. While he remained limited by his inheritance of Stalin’s notion of socialism in one country and his failure to fully consider the criticisms of Stalinism made by Leon Trotsky and his tradition, Althusser’s theory of ideology remains useful.

In On the Reproduction of Capitalism , Althusser attempts to register in theory what he had been unable to support in practice: that is, the new revolutionary potential that had suddenly appeared in French culture. Despite Althusser’s commitment to the masses, his writing style is often quite difficult and many of his works draw considerably on the epistemology of science. On the Reproduction of Capitalism is one on his most accessible books, and has more immediate political consequences. For this reason, it is a good choice for someone unacquainted with his project to develop an initial familiarity. Althusser believed that Marxism was widely distorted by false interpretations that depended on humanism and economism. According to Althusser, both Stalinist orthodoxy and the philosophy of Western Marxism believed that Marx conveyed insight into human species-being and the overcoming of human alienation through a historical process of economic development. He argued Marx himself had broken from the humanism of his early work, developing a scientific understanding of history only in his mature writings. Following from this, Althusser claimed that an understanding of the Russian Revolution that depended on Hegelian dialectics misunderstood Lenin’s real insight into revolutionary practice. 7

Marx and Lenin, Althusser argued, understood history as overdetermined by a complex and multiple series of social and political factors, without an underlying humanist or economic guarantee for change. The revolution could only be the product of multiple interrelated social conflicts, rather than an overcoming of one basic contradiction in human experience. In his view, while the mode of production is determining of society, it can never be analyzed in isolation. While he intended his theory to explain and develop a revolutionary outlook, his rejection of humanism created the sense that agency was illusory. Without a theory of human alienation, his approach risked positing the eternity of capitalism. His work in the wake of 1968 was meant to remedy this and to explain cultural struggles in terms of a new understanding of ideology.

Althusser’s theory of ideology An essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” was extracted from this book and has been widely distributed, anthologized, and translated. 8 In it, Althusser argues for a materialist understanding of ideology. Rather than considering ideology as mistaken ideas about the world, for him ideology is essentially practical. “Ideology does not exist in the ‘world of ideas’ conceived as a ‘spiritual world,’” he writes. “Ideology exists in institutions and the practices specific to them. We are even tempted to say, more precisely: ideology exists in apparatuses and the practices specific to them.”

Althusser delineates a number of these apparatuses, most prominently the church, the school, trade unions, and the family. These social institutions have the capacity to not only inculcate a worldview that is conducive to bourgeois domination, but also enforce these beliefs by means of a series of rituals, habits, and customs, which are more or less compulsory. Because acquiescence to the ruling ideology is bound up in practical obedience, rather than intellectual orthodoxy, Althusser insists that “ideology has a material existence.”

In Althusser’s view, these ideological apparatuses can properly be described as belonging to the state, even if they appear formally separate from it. He argues that the state actually has two components: a repressive state apparatus, which includes the army, the police, and the courts, and enforces class domination directly, and the ideological state apparatuses (ISA), which maintain complicity and identification with class society. Controversially, Althusser argues that the domestic sphere of family life is included in the domain of the state, because it functions to maintain and develop an ideology that will maintain psychological adherence to and participation in class society. It is probably not coincidental that his theory was elaborated from the French context, where a strong centralized state has always overseen education as well as ecclesiastical functions. In this context, it seems rational to view the church and the school system as ideological state apparatuses. In the political culture of the United States, this seems more counterintuitive, because there is such a long history of anti-state tendencies, particularly on the right. So the immediate reaction is to find Althusser’s theory peculiar or even simply wrong, prima facie . This may be one reason why his thought has not been as influential in the United States as it has been in Europe or in South America. A strong post-Althusserian tendency in North American thought has only appeared very recently, with the work of people like Warren Montag.

It may seem that Althusser’s theory applies better to nations with very strong bureaucratic states, and greatly limited in its explanatory power if we apply it to the United States or to other situations in which state power is constrained and localized. Strictly speaking, however, Althusser’s argument is that the public/private distinction with regard to power and class domination is an idealist effect of bourgeois law that a Marxist perspective cannot accept. For him, a private school system, an independent church authority, privately owned media, or even the family, all operate as functions of the state regardless of their apparently private-sector status.

From his point of view, even homeschooling operates as an extension of the state. How is this possible? According to his argument, the state is not a discrete institution or bureaucratic entity but rather an ensemble of all practices that maintain the potential for the reproduction of relations of production. This means that the most paranoid Tea Partier, the angriest secessionist libertarian, or the most die-hard Randian is actually a servant of the state who extend its power ideologically and perhaps even its repressive force insofar as they can function as part of an armed paramilitary militia. This is a very counterintuitive thesis to North Americans, but it might have validity. For example, Fox News, which is certainly private media, nothing like public television, and maintains a strongly “oppositional” status toward the Democratic Party, but functions nonetheless as a clear organ of state propaganda, even more so than state-owned media in other countries. Or, one can consider variousreligious groupings , such as evangelicals, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which are also independent yet simultaneously act as an adjunct to state initiatives.

Althusser argues that ideology has a profound relationship with subjective experience. He writes, “ all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects. ” What he means by this is that the practices and beliefs inherent to ideology produce a sense of identity. Our conscious experience of the world and sense of individual personhood is always bound up in effects of the social institutions that have raised and educated us. Furthermore, it is in the nature of ideology to conceal this basically artificial and imposed nature. Rather than viewing our immediate experiences as conditioned, they appear to be “free” or obvious interpretations of the world. Althusser’s point is not that an obscure veil of appearance inevitably conceals the real world. Rather, he argues that this mediated experience of the world is constructed according to a rational purpose, that is, to “ ensure the reproduction of the relations of production .” In his analysis, ideology is basically tasked with “knotting together of superstructure and base.” It is the cultural necessity that maintains the durability of a mode of production. This leads to ambiguity on the question of ideology outside capitalism. Althusser believed that ideology was a basic aspect of subjective experience, thereby persisting even in a post-capitalist society. However, because his theory and description of ideology are rooted in capitalism, it is very unclear in his work which aspects of ideology are contained in the capitalist mode of production, in contrast to a more general conceptual claim.

Althusser is often charged with holding an elitist perspective. Some commentators believe that this way of conceiving of ideology effectively prevents agency for ordinary people, because they are inevitably deluded and controlled by the ideological state apparatuses. For example, Kevin B. Anderson writes that Althusser’s theory is incapable of registering the existence of “a rebellious individual subject whose rebellion touches off wide support within an entire subjected group,” for example, someone like Rosa Parks. 9 However, Althusser states very clearly that the ISAs are not permanent or stable; their ability to produce ideological practices is always limited and threatened by a basic contradiction: class struggle. In fact, Althusser’s entire project is rooted in the recognition and advocacy of organized struggle against oppression and exploitation, and the means by which class struggle appears in less economically based forms of oppression and subject formation. Jeanne Theoharis has shown that Rosa Parks’s rebellion was not the product of a spontaneous individual moment of freedom, but the consequence of an entire conscious mass movement. 10 This can be understood in Althusserian terms as the appearance of class struggle in ideology. Effects of class struggle appear within ideology, and class struggle presents the possibility of a complete overthrow of bourgeois ideology. In an appendix to On the Reproduction of Capitalism , Althusser responds to the criticism of his work that it is merely descriptive and “functionalist”; that his analysis tends to make everything explained and reified by apparatuses. In response, Althusser insists that his entire theory depends on the primacy of class struggle. In fact, there would be no need for ISAs at all if resistance and struggle were not always present and in need of pacification.

Althusser’s point is that the economy is fundamentally structured by exploitation, and this exploitation always produces conflict. Ideology is a second-order formation that strives to ensure the continuation of the capitalist mode of production and continuing working-class adherence to a system that oppresses them. However, he argues that ideology cannot maintain an unbroken domination, because it is produced by apparatuses that are enmeshed in material class society. Because these apparatuses are bound up in labor, they cannot be fully owned and controlled by the capitalist state, and they are not fully reconcilable into a consistent social whole. As a result, ideology carries with it proletarian values, as well as bourgeois domination. The proletarian elements that have been distorted in capitalist ideology can be strengthened and clarified to the degree that eventually the entire edifice can be overthrown in a revolutionary process. But because individual experience is always constituted by ideology, this process of liberation must always take place as part of a commitment to working-class activity, not as a personal break with delusion and conformity.

Terry Eagleton defended the value of Althusser’s insight by clarifying that his advocacy of theory over experience depends on this recognition of working-class theory. 11 His argument was not that academic intellectuals had a superior insight; in fact, his theory of ideology presupposes that academic Marxism is in the grips of a particularly complex and advanced form of bourgeois ideology, in need of disruption by contact with working-class activity.

Althusser argues that the basic contradictions and irrationalities of the capitalist system will also interfere with the ability of ideology to fully capture a convincing experience of the world. These inherent contradictions produce “ ideological sub-formations .” He argues that it was exactly these contradictions and sub-formations that characterized the eruption of discontent and insurrection by French workers and students in May 1968. In the later stages of the Russian Revolution, insists Althusser, Vladimir Lenin understood this basic framework, and that is why he was so interested in reforming education and social institutions under the rubric of the cultural revolution. 12

For Althusser, class struggle takes place within ideology, and Marxist science can discern this process. He argues that the capacity to understand ideology from a scientific point of view is also a product of class struggle and the historical achievement of the workers’ movement. Many of Althusser’s readers have not understood that many of his most difficult writings are actually an attempt to introduce the effect of the workers’ movement into the academic philosophy of science (which necessarily involves difficult, specialized terminology), not an effort to dictate workers’ activity from above. Althusser says this explicitly: “The characteristic task of Marxist philosophy is to represent, in theory, the proletarian class position.”

Althusser’s work has proven enormously influential over the past half-century. Why have his ideas proven so inspirational? One striking effect of his analyses is the emphasis on the necessity of cultural norms in order to reproduce capitalist social relations. A consequence of this is that Althusser posits the family as a basic ideological state apparatus and a site of the reproduction of productive relations. While he does not flesh out the gendered aspects of this understanding of the family, the obvious result of this insight is the beginnings of social reproduction theory. It is by no means accidental that Lise Vogel and Martha E. Gimenez, two of the feminist thinkers who have contributed the most to social reproduction theory, describe Althusser as a decisive figure. Both Vogel and Gimenez credit Althusser’s innovations with stimulating her ability to rethink gendered work within the capitalist economy. 13 Judith Butler has also made use of Althusser’s theory of ideological state apparatuses in order to better understand the means by which oppressed groups are given social identities. 14 His work is of great value for understanding mechanisms of oppression by means that avoid reductionism while never forgetting the determining role of relations of production. 15

Althusser’s emphasis on the necessity of ideology in reproducing productive relations is tied to another controversial innovation. Deemphasizing the more deterministic role allotted to productive forces in the “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, he argued that relations of production must be considered primary. This anticipates and affects the perspective of contemporary historians described as political Marxists, whose outlook has sparked such stimulating recent debate in the International Socialist tradition. 16 From a somewhat different point of view, Gilbert Achcar applied Althusser’s approach to history and revolution in his study of the causes and nature of the Arab uprisings of 2011–2013. 17

By all means, and according to most contemporary studies, Althusser’s polemics read as extraordinarily tendentious in certain aspects. For example, he collapses together all “humanists” into one revisionist camp, he rejects Hegelian dialectics completely, and he posits a sharp, absolute break between the early and mature work of Marx. 18 Many of the European thinkers who were deeply marked by his insights came to reject his positions on one or more of these issues. On all of these matters, Althusser had a worthwhile point to make, although he drastically overstated it: He saw humanism as a means of avoiding the radical nature of class struggle, and his notion of a break in Marx’s thought in 1845 is a useful heuristic for understanding a serious change in method. He did not read many of the more serious exponents of Hegelian Marxist humanism, such as Georg Lukács, very well, and as a result some of his criticisms are unconvincing.

However, the reader must be aware that when Althusser speaks of humanism, he almost always has in mind his own struggle within the PCF and the opportunist definition of humanism disseminated by Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, and Roger Garaudy, the Stalinist theorist of the PCF. 19 He hastily assimilates this into quite heterogeneous currents, which can make his perspective appear more unique and aberrant than it ought to. Althusser intended his writings as theoretical interventions in his own conjuncture, and as a result some of his statements, taken out of context, can produce a brittle, hyperbolic schema, easily dismissed. Patient reconstruction of his argument can reveal deeper insights than might initially appear; we owe it to the rigor of our tradition to read him more charitably than he himself did his opponents.

Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987 (ed. François Matheron and Oliver Corpet, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, London: Verso, 2006), Gregory Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory ( Louis Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism (trans. Gareth Griffiths and Kristina Köhli, Chicago: Haymarket, 2011), Warren Montag, Louis Althusser (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Katja Diefenbach, Sara R. Farris, Gal Kirn, and Peter D. Thomas, eds., Encountering Althusser: Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), Mikko Lahtinen, Politics and Philosophy: Niccolò Machiavelli and Louis Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism, trans. Gareth Griffiths and Kristina Köhli (Chicago: Haymarket, 2011), Warren Montag, Althusser and His Contemporaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), Warren Montag (ed.), Décalages: An Althusser Studies Journal, 1:1-3 (2013).
On this event, see Daniel Singer, Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013).
See Gregory Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory (Chicago: Haymarket, 2009), 22–23.
Ian H. Birchall, Sartre against Stalinism (Oxford: Berghahn, 2004), 155.
Anonymous (attributed to Louis Althusser), “On the Cultural Revolution,” Décalages 1:1 (trans. Jason E. Smith, 2013).
Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1976), 92.
Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Verso, 2005).
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation),” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays , trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 85–125.
Kevin B. Anderson, “The Althusserian Cul-de-Sac,” Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture 13, no. 1–2 (2014). http://logosjournal.com/2014/anderson-2/ .
Marlene Martin, “Fight Jim Crow,” Review of Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks , International Socialist Review: Quarterly Journal of Revolutionary Marxism 91 (2013), 136–141.
Terry Eagleton, “Lenin in the Postmodern Age,” in Lenin Reloaded , ed. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, 42–58), 45–46.
On this period of Lenin’s thought, see Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013), 186–187. Martha E. Gimenez, “Capitalism and the Oppression of Women: Marx Revisited,” Science and Society 69:1, 2005, 13.
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 104.
Althusser struggled with mental illness throughout his life, and murdered his wife, Hélène Rytmann, in 1980. This is both a devastating tragedy and a horrific crime. However, his work needs to be judged on its own merits, and his personal action has not diminished the usefulness of his ideas for many other thinkers and activists.
Jonah Birch and Paul Heideman, “In Defense of Political Marxism,” International Socialist Review 90, (July–August 2013). Neil Davidson, “Is There Anything to Defend in Political Marxism?,” International Socialist Review 91 (Winter 2013–14).
Gilbert Achcar, The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprisings, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (Berkeley: University of California, 2013), 114–117.
Elliott, Althusser , 58, 66.
This is clear in his remarks on humanism in On the Reproduction of Capitalism , 139.

Search form

"A sense of hope and the possibility for solidarity"

Sapronov and the russian revolution, disability and the soviet union: advances and retreats, the critical communism of antonio labriola, austerity, neoliberalism, and the indian working class, the legacy of louis althusser, standing up to the zionist backlash against bds, legacies of colonialism in africa, austerity, neoliberalism, and the indian working class, "a sense of hope and the possibility of solidarity", islamic fundamentalism, the arab spring, and the left, knocking down straw figures, have the democrats evolved, giving voice to the syrian revolution, from “waste people” to “white trash”, defending our right to criticize israel.

Politics & Social Sciences

Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery

Amazon Prime includes:

Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.

Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access

Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.

Buy new: .savingPriceOverride { color:#CC0C39!important; font-weight: 300!important; } .reinventMobileHeaderPrice { font-weight: 400; } #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPriceSavingsPercentageMargin, #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPricePriceToPayMargin { margin-right: 4px; } $29.95 $ 29 . 95 FREE delivery Wednesday, May 22 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35 Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com

Return this item for free.

Free returns are available for the shipping address you chose. You can return the item for any reason in new and unused condition: no shipping charges

Go to your orders and start the return
Select the return method

Save with Used - Good .savingPriceOverride { color:#CC0C39!important; font-weight: 300!important; } .reinventMobileHeaderPrice { font-weight: 400; } #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPriceSavingsPercentageMargin, #apex_offerDisplay_mobile_feature_div .reinventPricePriceToPayMargin { margin-right: 4px; } $14.99 $ 14 . 99 FREE delivery Thursday, May 23 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35 Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Bob's Treasure Trove

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

To view this video download Flash Player

Essays on Self-Criticism Paperback – June 2, 2016

Purchase options and add-ons.

Print length 240 pages
Language English
Publication date June 2, 2016
Dimensions 5.25 x 0.6 x 8.75 inches
ISBN-10 1786632004
ISBN-13 978-1786632005
See all details

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Verso Books (June 2, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1786632004
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1786632005
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 0.6 x 8.75 inches
#8,882 in Political Philosophy (Books)

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

No customer reviews

Amazon Newsletter
About Amazon
Accessibility
Sustainability
Press Center
Investor Relations
Amazon Devices
Amazon Science
Sell on Amazon
Sell apps on Amazon
Supply to Amazon
Protect & Build Your Brand
Become an Affiliate
Become a Delivery Driver
Start a Package Delivery Business
Advertise Your Products
Self-Publish with Us
Become an Amazon Hub Partner
› See More Ways to Make Money
Amazon Visa
Amazon Store Card
Amazon Secured Card
Amazon Business Card
Shop with Points
Credit Card Marketplace
Reload Your Balance
Amazon Currency Converter
Your Account
Your Orders
Shipping Rates & Policies
Amazon Prime
Returns & Replacements
Manage Your Content and Devices
Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
Conditions of Use
Privacy Notice
Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
Your Ads Privacy Choices

COMMENTS

Essays in self-criticism : Althusser, Louis : Free Download, Borrow
Essays in self-criticism by Althusser, Louis. Publication date 1976 Topics Althusser, Louis, Communist self-criticism, Dialectical ... Remark on the category "Process without a subject or goal(s)"--Elements of self-criticism: On the evolution of the young Marx.--Is it simple to be a Marxist in philosophy? "Something new" Notes. Contains pencil ...
Essays in Self-criticism
ISBN. 978-0391006188. Essays in Self-criticism ( French: Eléments d'autocritique) is one of the chief works of the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, first published in 1974. [1] An English translation by Grahame Lock was published in 1976.
Essays in Self-Criticism by Louis Althusser
The book is a good collection of some articles of Althusser, most prominently "Reply to John Lewis" & "Essays in Self-Criticism" (c.f. title). "Reply to John Lewis" is really brilliant in laying out the theoretical anti-humanist position in opposition to the thesis 1. "It is man who makes history."
Essays in self-criticism: Althusser, Louis: 9780391006188: Amazon.com
Contains all Lous Althusser's work published to date (1976) in the 70's. Three texts translated by Grahame Locke. Read more. Previous page. Print length. 224 pages. Language. English. Publisher. Humanities Press. Publication date. January 1, 1976. ISBN-10. 0391006185. ISBN-13. 978-0391006188. See all details.
Louis Althusser
Another criticism, and one voiced to Althusser by leaders of the French Communist Party, was that Althusser's reading of Marx offered little on the relationship between Marxist theory and Marxist political practice. ... 1974); tr. as "Elements of Self-Criticism" by Grahame Lock in Essays in Self-Criticism (New Left Books, London, 1976 ...
Better Read Than Dead: Althusser and the Fetish of Ideology
As Althusser observes, in his Essays in Self-Criticism (trans. Grahame Locke [London: New Left Books, 1976]), theory/science emerges from its ideological prehistory ... Reading "Capital," and in Essays in Self-Criticism) in fact privileges both a rhetoric and a politics of reading; this masking or elision per-sists, despite the prominence he ...
Louis Althusser, Essays in self-criticism
Essays in the history of materialism. Georgiĭ Valentinovich Plekhanov - 1934 - New York,: H. Fertig. Edited by Paul Henri Thiry Holbach, Helvétius, Karl Marx & Ralph Fox. Louis Althusser. Luke Ferretter - 2006 - New York: Routledge. John Dewey and the question of artful criticism. Scott R. Stroud - 2011 - Philosophy and Rhetoric 44 (1):27-51.
Self-criticism and Revision
The year 1967 marks the beginning of a period of self-critical activity in which Althusser takes his distance from some, though not all, of the concepts and theses of his essays of the early and mid — sixties. In the course of these self-criticisms, new theoretical positions emerge. As we shall see, these 'new' positions sometimes are ...
Essays in Self-criticism
Essays in Self-criticism. Louis Althusser. NLB, 1976 - Communist self-criticism - 224 pages. From inside the book . Contents. ... Other editions - View all. Essays in Self-criticism Louis Althusser Snippet view - 1976. Essays on Self-Criticism Louis Althusser No preview available - 2016. Common terms and phrases.
Essays in Self-criticism
The 'Two Marxisms' Revisited: Humanism, Structuralism and Realism in Marxist Social Theory. S. Creaven. Philosophy, Political Science. 2015. Abstract The ontological and analytical status of Marxian social theory has been a matter of fierce controversy since Marx's death, both within and without Marxist circles.
Essays in Self-Criticism
5. It may even explain the fact that a recent collection of Trotskyist essays against Althusser resurrects Karl Korsch and Georg Lukàcs as sources for its theoretical critique (Contre Althusser, J.-M. Vincent and others; 10/18, 1974). 6. Rancière, La Leçon d'Althusser, p. 11. 7.
Althusser's epistemology
The recent publication of Essays in Self-Criticism, however, makes available for the first time to English readers the author's own judgements on his earlier work (1). His view has not changed much since 1969, when the initial rectification was published as a foreword to the Italian edition of Reading Capital .
Althusser and the Overdetermined Self
Abstract. In this paper Althusser's concept of overdetermination is examined from two distinct but related perspectives. The first is the more empirical aspect. Althusser uses this concept to explain the relation between the Marxist "base" and "superstructure.". While Althusser has made a novel and perhaps even profound contribution to ...
Essays on Self-Criticism by Louis Althusser: 9781786632005
Essays on Self-Criticism By Louis Althusser By Louis Althusser. Best Seller. Category: Philosophy. Paperback $29.95. Jun 02, 2016 | ISBN 9781786632005 Buy. Paperback $29.95. Jun 02, 2016 | ISBN 9781786632005 . Add to Cart. Buy from Other Retailers:
Essays in Self-criticism
Essays in Self-criticism Louis Althusser Snippet view - 1976. Essays on Self-Criticism Louis Althusser No preview available - 2016. Bibliographic information. Title: Essays in Self-criticism: Author: Louis Althusser: Publisher: NLB, 1976: ISBN: 0902308874, 9780902308879: Length: 224 pages : Export Citation:
The Sublime Absolute: Althusser, Žižek, and the Critique ...
Louis Althusser, A Reply to John Lewis, in Essays on Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock, (NLB, London, 1976), 60. Google Scholar Raymond Aron argues that Althusser has constructed an "imaginary Marxism," see Raymond Aron, Marxismes imaginaries: d'une sainte familie à l'autre (Gallimard, Paris, 1970). On this note, Althusser writes ...
Structural Marxism and Its Critique
The criticism was levelled at structural-Marxist theory. Indeed, Althusser himself would retrospectively admit, in his Essays in Self-Criticism (1974/1976, 127) that in the mid-1960s 'our "flirt" with structuralist terminology obviously went beyond acceptable limits'. Even though Althusser's political and theoretical concern lay with ...
Essays on Self-Criticism
Essays in Self-criticism Louis Althusser Snippet view - 1976. Essays in Self-criticism Louis Althusser Snippet view - 1976. Bibliographic information. Title: Essays on Self-Criticism: Author: Louis Althusser: Publisher: Verso Books, 2016: ISBN: 1786632004, 9781786632005:
Louis Althusser Criticism
Essays and criticism on Louis Althusser - Criticism. ... Althusser's self-clarifications are simultaneously clarifications of many of the fundamental theoretical problems which all Marxist ...
Althusser's theory of ideology
Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1976), 92. Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Verso, 2005). Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)," Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 85-125.
Amazon.com: Essays in Self-Criticism: 9780902308879: Althusser, Louis
Contains all Lous Althusser's work published to date (1976) in the 70's. Three texts translated by Grahame Locke. Read more. Previous page. Print length. 248 pages. Language. French. Publisher. Humanities Press. Publication date. January 1, 1976. ISBN-10. 0902308874. ISBN-13. 978-0902308879. See all details.
Essays on Self-Criticism: Althusser, Louis: 9781786632005: Amazon.com
Contains all Lous Althusser's work published to date (1976) in the 70's. Three texts translated by Grahame Locke. Read more. Previous page. Print length. 240 pages. Language. English. Publication date. June 2, 2016. Dimensions. 5.25 x 0.6 x 8.75 inches. ISBN-10. 1786632004. ISBN-13. 978-1786632005.
Louis Althusser Critical Essays
Louis Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher who had a strong following as a serious and intellectual interpreter of Marxism. A troubled personal life overshadowed his intellectual ...