Althusser Louis (1918–90), French Marxist philosopher whose publication in 1965 of two collections of essays, Pour Marx (‘For Marx’) and Lire le Capital (‘Reading Capital’), made him a sensation in French intellectual circles and attracted a large international readership. The English translations of these texts in 1969 and 1970, respectively, helped shape the development of Marxist thought in the English-speaking world throughout the 1970s. Drawing on the work of non-positivist French historians and philosophers of science, especially Bachelard, Althusser proclaimed the existence of an ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s work, occurring in the mid-1840s. What preceded this break was, in Althusser’s view, a prescientific theoretical humanism derived from Feuerbach and ultimately from Hegel. What followed it, Althusser maintained, was a science of history a development as monumental, potentially, as the rise of the new sciences of nature in the seventh century. Althusser argued that the nature and even the existence of this new kind of science had yet to be acknowledged, even by Marx himself. It therefore had to be reconstructed from Marx’s writings, Das Kapital especially, and also discerned in the political practice of Lenin and other like-minded revolutionaries who implicitly understood what Marx intended. Althusser did little, however, to elaborate the content of this new science. Rather, he tirelessly defended it programmatically against rival construals of Marxism. In so doing, he took particular aim at neo-Hegelian and ‘humanistic’ currents in the larger Marxist culture and (implicitly) in the French Communist Party, to which he belonged throughout his adult life.
After 1968, Althusser’s influence in France faded. But he continued to teach at l’École Normale Superieure and to write, making important contributions to political theory and to understandings of ‘ideology’ and related concepts. He also faced increasingly severe bouts of mania and depression. In 1980, in what the French courts deemed an episode of ‘temporary insanity,’ he strangled his wife. Althusser avoided prison, but spent much of the 1980s in mental institutions. During this period he wrote two extraordinary memoirs, L’avenir dure longtemps (‘The Future Lasts Forever’) and Les faits (‘The Facts’), published posthumously in 1992.
See also BACHELARD , FEUERBACH , HEGEL, MARXISM , PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. A.L.