Louis Althusser

Louis Pierre Althusser (October 16, 1918 - October 23, 1990) was a Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy. He was a leading academic proponent of the French Communist Party and his arguments were a response to multiple threats to the ideological foundations of that socialist project. These included both the threat from an empiricism which was beginning to invade Marxist sociology and economics, and a threat from humanistic and democratic socialist orientations which were beginning to corrode the purity of the European Communist Parties. Althusser is commonly referred to as a structuralist Marxist, although his relationship to other schools of French structuralism is not a simple affiliation.

References

• Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.
• Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists.
• For Marx.
• Reading Capital (with Étienne Balibar).
• The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings.
• Machiavelli and Us.
• The Humanist Controversy and Other Texts.
• Writings on Psychoanalysis.
• The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir.
• Althusser: A Critical Reader (ed. Gregory Elliott).
• Anderson, Perry, Considerations on Western Marxism
• James, Susan, 'Louis Althusser' in Skinner, Q. (ed.) The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences.
• Waters, Malcolm, Modern Sociological Theory, 1994, page 116.