Althusser, Louis

Althusser, Louis (1918-1990), French philosopher, the most influential Marxist theoretician in the West during the 1970s. Born in Birmandreis, Algeria, Althusser's brilliant academic career in Paris led him to a professorship at the École Normale Supérieure. The last years of his life were, however, marked by increasing mental instability, culminating in the killing of his wife.

International attention came to Althusser with the publication in 1965 of Pour Marx (For Marx, 1969) followed, again in 1965, by Lire le Capitale (Reading Capital, 1970). In these works he challenged the prevailing interpretation of Marxism, which involved humanist and Hegelian themes largely derived from Marx's early writings. In its place, Althusser proposed a structuralist reading of Marxism. For him, society consisted in a hierarchy of structures distinct from one another, each with its relative autonomy, though determined by economic considerations in the last instance. History was, therefore, a process without a subject. Human beings were mere supports or effects of the structures contained in society. This, in turn, implied an antihumanist reading of Marx in that Althusser rejected any idea of a universal human nature.

While undoubtedly fruitful in offering a sophisticated and nonreductionist version of Marxist historical materialism, Althusser's ideas are also open to criticism for being too theoretical, and pretending to a scientific basis they do not possess.