* Ideological State Apparatus, a term used by Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser for how society reshapes the individual in its own image

He left the Communist Party in 1953, but would remain a friend and defender of Althusser for the rest of his life.

In the field of religious studies more generally, Mack is known for popularizing the term " Social Formation ," originally coming from the work of Louis Althusser, as a descriptive category for religion.

What is ultimately important for Althusser are not the subjective beliefs held in the " minds " of human individuals, but rather the material institutions, rituals, and discourses that produce these beliefs.

Nonetheless, such a teleological ( goal-oriented ) reading of Karl Marx, supported by Alexandre Kojève before the Second World War ( 1939 – 45 ), was criticized by Louis Althusser in his discussion of “ random materialism ” ( matérialisme aléatoire ), in which he said that such a teleological reading rendered the proletariat as the subject of history ; therefore, such an interpretation was tainted with Hegelian idealism, with the “ philosophy of the subject ”, that had been in force for five centuries, which he criticized as the “ bourgeois ideology of philosophy ”.

As Althusser himself noted: " " Reply ": because, a few months earlier ( in its January and February numbers of 1972 ), the same journal had published a long critical article by John Lewis ( a British Communist philosopher known for his interventions in political-ideological questions ) under the title: " The Althusser Case ".

Rancière contributed to the influential volume Reading Capital ( though his contribution is not contained in the partial English translation ) before publicly breaking with Althusser over his attitude toward the May 1968 student uprising in Paris ; Rancière felt Althusser's theoretical stance didn't leave enough room for spontaneous popular uprising.

Louis Althusser, for example, defined philosophy as " class struggle in theory ", thus radically separating himself from those who claimed philosophers could adopt a " God's eye view " as a purely neutral judge.

However, the cumulative aspect of progress, both in philosophy and science, is not considered by Althusser as obtained " once for all ": it is always a political struggle against ideology, which endlessly penetrates science and philosophy.

Louis Althusser, for instance, criticized his own early work for theoreticism.

E. P. Thompson famously engaged Althusser in The Poverty of Theory, arguing that Althusser's theory overdetermined history, and left no space for historical revolt by the oppressed.

Michael Sprinker ( 8 February 1950 in Elgin, Illinois – 12 August 1999 ) was a literary critic known for his writings on Louis Althusser, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, among others, as well as for his editorial work at Verso, Cambridge University Press, the New Left Review and The Minnesota Review.

For Althusser, the essay “ is a profoundly ‘ ideological ’ text ”, “ committed to the struggle for Communism ”, but without being Marxist ; “ so it cannot, theoretically, be identified with the later texts which were to define historical materialism ”.

Louis Althusser, the French Structuralist Marxist, criticises Marxist Humanists for not recognising the dichotomy between ' Young Marx ' and ' Mature Marx '.

Of the Marxist Humanist's reliance on the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts Althusser writes, " We do not publish our own drafts, that is, our own mistakes, but we do sometimes publish other people's " ( cited in Gregory Elliot's " introduction: In the Mirror of Machiavelli " an introduction for Althusser's " Machiavelli and us ", p. xi ).

Inspired by the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the thought of Mao Zedong, and in cooperation with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, Bettelheim was opposed to " economism " and to the " primacy of the means of production " of traditional Marxism: against the idea that socialist transformation of social bonds was a necessary effect of the development of the forces of production ( liberating those bonds from them, according to Marxist orthodoxy, since private property dominates them in " bourgeois " society ), he affirmed the necessity for actively and politically transforming social connections.

However, if dialectical materialism was considered by Althusser as a " scientific theory ", this does not mean it was permanently assured of its truth: it is a science, not a prophecy!

Althusser considered its return to a detailed engagement with the work of Marx parallel to the return to Freud initiated by Jacques Lacan in psychoanalysis.

Taking a lead from Brecht's twin attack on bourgeois and socialist humanism, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser coined the term " antihumanism " in an attack against Marxist humanists, whose position he considered a revisionist movement.

Althusser considered " structure " and " social relations " to have primacy over individual consciousness, opposing the philosophy of the subject.

Others, such as Althusser, would claim that the " epistemological break " between the " young Marx " and the " mature Marx " was such that no comparisons could be done between both works, marking a shift to a " scientific theory " of society.

In effect, Althusser stressed that the epistemological break was not an event, which could be chronologically located ( in this or that book of Marx ) and thus definitively separated science from ideology.

However the term " epistemological break " itself is almost never used by Bachelard, but became famous through Louis Althusser.

Thomas S. Kuhn used Bachelard's notion of " epistemological rupture " ( coupure or rupture épistémologique ) as re-interpreted by Alexandre Koyré to develop his theory of paradigm shifts ; Althusser, Georges Canguilhem ( his successor at the Sorbonne ) and Michel Foucault also drew upon Bachelard's epistemology.

Kuhn's and Foucault's notions are both influenced by the French philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard's notion of an " epistemological rupture ", as indeed was Althusser.

Althusser believes Marx's thought to be marked by a radical " epistemological break ".

Indeed, Marx's break with German Idealism involves a new definition of philosophy ; Louis Althusser, founder of " Structural Marxism " in the 1960s, would define it as " class struggle in theory ".

The book seeks to clarify differences between Marx's and Hegel's dialectics, and to more thoroughly demarcate the " break " which Althusser saw between Marx's later writings ( Marxism proper ) and his early, Hegelian work.

However, by the late 1960s, many of Structuralism's basic tenets came under attack from a new wave of predominantly French intellectuals such as the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, the philosopher and social commentator Jacques Derrida, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and the literary critic Roland Barthes.

This strain of thinking has some influence from the Frankfurt School, but especially from the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and others.

To these he added a third ' critical ' dimension which built upon insights from Gramsci and Althusser.

* Louis Althusser ( 1969 ) How to Read Marx's Capital from Marxism Today, October 1969, 302-305.

As Marxism is essentially concerned with the historical process and the possibility of a revolution, that is of superating capitalism, Marxist philosophy, from Marx and Engels to Althusser passing by Lukács, etc., has discussed at lengths the problems of possible historical progress of philosophy and what would that mean.

In addition to linguistic theory, the approach draws from social theory — and contributions from Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu — in order to examine ideologies and power relations involved in discourse.

Drawing, in an unusual combination, from both Freud and Mao Zedong, Althusser used the idea of overdetermination as a way of thinking about the multiple, often opposed, forces active at once in any political situation, without falling into an over-simple idea of these forces being simply " contradictory.

" the representation of dream thoughts in images privileged by their condensation of a number of thoughts in a single image ( condensation ), or by the transference of psychic energy from a particularly potent thought to apparently trivial things ... Althusser overdetermination of a contradiction is the reflection in it of its conditions of existence within the complex whole.

This belief did not prevent him from being regarded with considerable affection by the generation of intellectuals that came to the fore in the 1960s, including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan.

Althusser once wrote to his English translator that " my debt to Canguilhem is incalculable " ( italics in the original, from Economy and Society 27, page 171 ).

As did Louis Althusser, who later defined Marxism and psychoanalysis as " conflictual sciences "; that political factions and revisionism are inherent to Marxist theory and political praxis, because dialectical materialism is the philosophic product of class struggle:

Althusser argues that this amounts to deny progress between modern sciences and ancient sciences, since the cumulative aspect of progress is ignored.

Antihumanists such as Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault and structuralists such as Roland Barthes challenged the possibilities of individual agency and the coherence of the notion of the ' individual ' itself.

However, " Althusser never ceased to put in question the images of communism that Marxist theory and ideology carried on: but he did it in the name of communism itself.

This positivist reading, which mostly based itself on Engels ' latter writings in an attempt to theorize " scientific socialism " ( an expression coined by Engels ) has been challenged by Marxist theorists, such as Lukacs, Gramsci, Althusser or, more recently, Étienne Balibar.

However, this positivist reading, which mostly based itself on Engels ' latter writings in an attempt to theorize " scientific socialism " ( an expression coined by Engels ) has been challenged by Marxist theorists, such as Antonio Gramsci or Althusser.