No figure among the western Marxist theoreticians has loomed larger in the postwar period than Louis Althusser. A rebel against the Catholic tradition in which he was raised, Althusser studied philosophy and later joined both the faculty of the �cole Normale Sup�rieure and the French Communist Party in 1948. Viewed as a structuralist Marxist, Althusser was as much admired for his independence of intellect as he was for his rigorous defense of Marx. The latter was best illustrated in
For Marx (1965), and
Reading Capital (1968). These works, along with
Lenin and Philosophy (1971) had an enormous influence on the New Left of the 1960s and continues to influence modern Marxist scholarship.
This classic work, which to date has sold more than 30, 000 copies, covers the range of Louis Althusser’s interests and contributions in philosophy, economics, psychology, aesthetics, and political science.
Marx, in Althusser’s view, was subject in his earlier writings to the ruling ideology of his day. Thus for Althusser, the interpretation of Marx involves a repudiation of all efforts to draw from Marx’s early writings a view of Marx as a humanist and historicist.
Lenin and Philosophy also contains Althusser’s essay on Lenin’s study of Hegel; a major essay on the state, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Freud and Lacan: A letter on Art in Reply to Andr� Daspre, and Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract. The book opens with a 1968 interview in which Althusser discusses his personal, political, and intellectual history.
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Louis Althusser was born in Algeria in 1918 and died in France in 1990. He taught philosophy for many years at the �cole Normale Sup�rieure in Paris, and was a leading intellectual in the French Communist Party. His books include For Marx; Reading Capital (with Etienne Balibar); Essays in Ideology; Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx; Machiavelli and Us; and The Spectre of Hegel.