Louis Althusser eBook Bibliography

Louis Pierre Althusser (1918–1990) was one of the most influ­en­tial Marx­ist philo­soph­ers of the 20th Cen­tury. As they seemed to offer a renewal of Marx­ist thought as well as to render Marx­ism philo­soph­ic­ally respect­able, the claims he advanced in the 1960s about Marx­ist philo­sophy were dis­cussed and debated world­wide. Due to appar­ent reversals in his the­or­et­ical pos­i­tions, to the ill-fated facts of his life, and to the his­tor­ical for­tunes of Marx­ism in the late twen­ti­eth cen­tury, this intense interest in Althusser’s read­ing of Marx did not sur­vive the 1970s. Des­pite the com­par­at­ive indif­fer­ence shown to his work as a whole after these events, the the­ory of ideo­logy Althusser developed within it has been broadly deployed in the social sci­ences and human­it­ies and has provided a found­a­tion for much “post-Marx­ist” philo­sophy. In addi­tion, aspects of Althusser’s pro­ject have served as inspir­a­tion for Ana­lytic Marx­ism as well as for Crit­ical Real­ism. Though this influ­ence is not always expli­cit, Althusser’s work and that of his stu­dents con­tin­ues to inform the research pro­grams of lit­er­ary stud­ies, polit­ical philo­sophy, his­tory, eco­nom­ics, and soci­ology. In addi­tion, his auto­bi­o­graphy has been sub­ject to much crit­ical atten­tion over the last dec­ade. At present, Althusser’s philo­sophy as a whole is under­go­ing a crit­ical ree­valu­ation by schol­ars who have benefited from the antho­lo­giz­a­tion of hard-to-find and pre­vi­ously unpub­lished texts and who have begun to engage with the great mass of writ­ings that remain in his archives.

Author

Sec­ond­ary Lit­er­at­ure