Louis Althusser
(born October 16, 1918, Birmandreis, Algeria?died October 22, 1990, near
Paris
, France) was a French philosopher who
attained
international renown in the 1960s for his attempt to fuse
Marxism
and
structuralism
.
Inducted into the French army in 1939, Althusser was captured by German troops in 1940 and spent the remainder of the war in a German
prisoner of war
camp. In 1948 he joined the
French Communist Party
(PCF); in the same year, he was appointed to the faculty of the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, where he taught for nearly three decades and influenced generations of students.
Britannica Quiz
Philosophy 101
In his two major works on the
philosophy
of
Karl Marx
(1818?83),
For Marx
and
Reading Capital
(both published in 1965), Althusser sought to counter the prevalent interpretation of Marxism as an essentially “humanistic” and “individualist” philosophy in which
history
is a goal-directed process aimed at the realization and fulfillment of
human nature
under
communism
. Althusser asserted that this “Hegelian” interpretation overemphasized the early Marx, who had not yet overcome the “ideological”
delusions
of Hegelian philosophy, and neglected the mature Marx of
Capital
(1867) and other works, in which he attempts to develop a new “science” of history focused not on human beings but on the impersonal historical processes of which human beings are the bearers. Borrowing from the work of the French philosophers of
science
Gaston Bachelard (1884?1962) and Georges Canguilhem (1904?95), Althusser characterized the profound difference between Marx’s early philosophical views and his later scientific ones as an “epistemological break.” In a later influential essay, “
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1969), Althusser argued against traditional interpretations of Marx as an inveterate economic determinist by demonstrating the “quasi-autonomous” role accorded to politics, law, and
ideology
in Marx’s later writings.
For Althusser, historical change depended on “objective” factors such as the relationship between forces and relations of production; questions of “consciousness” were always of secondary importance. His emphasis on the historical process over the historical subject in Marx complemented efforts by French structuralists?including
Claude Levi-Strauss
,
Roland Barthes
(1915?80),
Michel Foucault
(1926?84), and
Jacques Lacan
(1901?81)?to vanquish the “subjectivist”
paradigm
of
existential
phenomenology
represented by
Jean-Paul Sartre
(1905?80) and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(1908?61). His writings also rendered an important service to the struggling PCF. By recasting Marxist thought in the
idiom
of the dominant
intellectual
paradigm of structuralism, he was able to convince a new generation of
intellectuals
in
France
and abroad of Marxism’s continued relevance. Ironically, Althusser’s efforts were little appreciated by the leadership of the PCF, which tended to regard any sign of intellectual independence among party members as a threat. In 1974 Althusser felt compelled to write an extended self-criticism for his purported “theoreticist deviation” (“Elements of Self-Criticism”).
In November 1980 Althusser suffered a mental breakdown and strangled to death his wife of some 30 years, Helene Rytmann. Judged unfit to stand trial (he had suffered from manic depression throughout his adult life), he was institutionalized for several years. For some observers the tragic incident symbolized the
obsolescence
of “structuralist Marxism.” Althusser’s confessional autobiography,
The Future Lasts Forever
, was published posthumously in 1992.