No figure among the western Marxist theoreticians has loomed larger in
the postwar period than Louis Althusser. A rebel against the Catholic
tradition in which he was raised, Althusser studied philosophy and later
joined both the faculty of the Ecole normal superieure and the French
Communist Party in 1948. Viewed as a structuralist Marxist, Althusser
was as much admired for his independence of intellect as he was for his
rigorous defense of Marx. The latter was best illustrated in For Marx
(1965), and Reading Capital (1968). These works, along with Lenin and
Philosophy (1971) had an enormous influence on the New Left of the
1960s and continues to influence modern Marxist scholarship.
This classic work, which to date has sold more than 30,000 copies,
covers the range of Louis Althusser's interests and contributions in
philosophy, economics, psychology, aesthetics, and political science.
Marx, in Althusser's view, was subject in his earlier writings to the
ruling ideology of his day. Thus for Althusser, the interpretation of
Marx involves a repudiation of all efforts to draw from Marx's early
writings a view of Marx as a humanist and historicist.
Lenin and Philosophy also contains Althusser's essay on Lenin's
study of Hegel; a major essay on the state, Ideology and Ideological
State Apparatuses, Freud and Lacan: A letter on Art in Reply to André
Daspre, and Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract. The book opens with a
1968 interview in which Althusser discusses his personal, political, and
intellectual history.
