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Louis Althusser (1918–1990) was a French philosopher who attempted to reconcile Marxism with structuralism. His works influenced Marxist thought in the West.

Althusser was born in Birmandries in French Algeria and was educated in Algiers, Marseilles, and Lyon, where he attended the Lycee du Parc. In 1939 he was admitted to the Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS), the French academy for teachers, but he was conscripted into the French Army. Althusser would later observe how Machiavelli thought conscription helped establish national identity. Althusser was captured and spent five years in a German concentration camp, most of that time in Stalag XA, located in Schleswig. After the war, he entered the ENS.

While at ENS, Althusser suffered from and was treated for clinical depression. In 1948, Althusser joined the Community Party and completed his master’s thesis on the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Althusser became a tutor at ENS and spent his entire academic career there, eventually becoming a professor of philosophy.

Althusser rose to prominence in the mid-1960s through the publication of his works in which he attempts to reinterpret the ideas of philosopher Karl Marx. For Marx (1969) (first published as Pour Marx in 1965 by Francois Maspero, Paris) was a collection of articles that had been previously been published in La Pen and La Nouvelle Critique and was regarded as the seminal text in the school of structuralist Marxism. Althusser viewed Marxism as a revolutionary science. While Marx, in his writings, argued that all aspects of life were dependent on the superstructure of economic production (economic determinism), Althusser believed that the foundations of societies were based on one of three processes: economic practice, politico-legal practice, and ideological practice. In the 1970 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes toward an Investigation,” Althusser (2001) emphasizes the scientific aspects of Marxism, in particular its investigation of how societal structures determine lived experience. These structures determined history, but their importance and relationship to one another varied with circumstances. Therefore, at different times particular practices might be dominant. He also cited the existence of ideological state apparatuses, which include the family, mass media, religious institutions, and education. He suggested that these apparatuses are agents of repression and inevitable. Therefore, it is impossible to escape ideology.

Althusser contended that there were differences between the “young” and the “mature” Marx, that what he called an “epistemological break” had taken place in the 1840s, and that the mature Marx was more “scientific” than he had been as a younger writer. Althusser believed that Marx had been misunderstood because his work had been considered as a whole, rather than as the product of distinct intellectual periods. However, Althusser would later backtrack on the timing of this break in Marx’s work. In his 1969 essay “Preface to Capital Volume One,” Althusser (2001) concedes that the scientific approach is only found in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, which Marx wrote in 1875. Later, in 1976’s “Elements of Self Criticism,” Althusser suggested that this “break” was a process rather than a clearly defined event. Another work in a similar vein was Lire le Capital, a collection of essays by Althusser and some of his students published in 1965, based on a seminar about Marx’s Das Kapital conducted by Althusser at the ENS.

Althusser’s career essentially came to an end in 1980 when he murdered his wife, Helene. He was declared unfit to stand trial and was institutionalized until 1983. During the last years of his life, Athusser wrote two versions of his autobiography, Les Faits (The Facts) and L’Avenir dure Longtemps (The Future Lasts a Long Time), which were published posthumously in 1992 as a single volume: The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir.

Bibliography:

Althusser, Louis. For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster. London: Penguin, 1969.
“Elements of Self-Criticism.” In Essays in Self-Criticism, translated by Grahame Lock, 101–162. London: New Left, 1976.
The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir, edited by Oliver Corpet and Yann Moulier Boutang, translated by Richard Veasey. New York: New Press, 1993.
“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes toward an Investigation.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, 1483–1509. New York: Norton, 2001.
“Preface to Capital Volume One.” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001.
Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Lier le Capital. Paris: François Maspero, 1965.
Elliott, Gregory. Althusser:The Detour of Theory. New York:Verso, 1987.
Ferretter, Luke. Louis Althusser. Routledge Critical Thinkers. London: Routledge, 2006.
Montag,Warren. Louis Althusser. Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Resch, Robert Paul. Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Smith, Steven B. Reading Althusser: An Essay on Structural Marxism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984.