Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Louis Althusser enjoyed virtually unrivalled status as the foremost living Marxist philosopher. Today, he is remembered as the scourge and severest critic of "humanist" or Hegelian Marxism, as the proponent of rigorously scientific socialism and as the theorist who posited a sharp rupture - an epistemological break - between the early and the late Marx. This collection of texts from the period of 1945-1953 turns these interpretations of Althusser on their head. Readers discover that there was a "young Althusser", as well as the "mature Althusser" people are already familiar with. In his Masters thesis, "On Content in the Thought of G.W.F. Hegel" (1947), Althusser developed a position which he was later to attack ferociously: namely, that the revolutionary potential of the Hegelian dialectic could be defended against Hegel's own political convervatism. Althusser is seen wrestling with the spectres of Hegel and of Catholicism in another long text, his letter to Jean Lacroix and, finally, his own "epistemological break" is shown in the piece "On Marxism" from 1953. Other texts included are his critique of Alexander Kojeve (whose interpretation Francis Fukuyama has recently revived), and his attack on the French Church's teachings on women, sex and the family. This collection not only gives an insight into the formation of this major intellectual figure, but should also restore the "unknown Althusser" to the centre of the history of Marxism and of philosophy since World War II. Louis Althusser is the author of "For Marx", "Reading Capital", "Essays in Ideology", and "Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists".
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Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Original Language: French --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Louis Althusser was born in Algeria in 1918 and died in Paris in 1990. Among his other works translated into English are For Marx, Reading Capital, Essays in Ideology, and Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, all from Verso.
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