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 Louis Althusser 1918-1990 - Algerian-French social philosopher.

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Louis Althusser

Source: PhilosophyPages.com Author: Garth Kemerling

Questions of 

Althusser offered a structuralist re-interpretation of the later work of Marx.

Reading

Pour Marx (For Marx) (1965)

Lénin et la philosophie (Lenin and Philosophy) (1969)

Lire le Capital (Reading Capital) (1970)

Elements d'autocritique (Essays in Self-Criticism) (1974) 

Also see ELC, Andy Blunden, EMSF, and BIO.

Writing available on the net

Commentaries

Quotations

“I shall not evade the most burning issue: it seems to me that either the whole logic of ‘supersession’ must be rejected, or we must give up any attempt to explain how the proud and generous Russian people bore Stalin’s crimes and repression with such resignation; how the Bolshevik Party could tolerate them; not to speak of the final question — how a Communist leader could have ordered them.” For Marx

Social organization is determined wholly by ideological consequences expressed in economic and political power, enforced in home and family as well as in the workplace. The differential roles to which individuals are assigned in a society, he argued, are clearly signified not only by the presence of particular notions in its cultural paradigms, but even more dramatically by the absence of others.