ABSTRACT
Before Sartre had even replied to Lévi-Strauss’ criticisms, Althusser had published For Marx (1965), a work which, together with the later volume Reading Capital (1968), far from defending Sartre’s Marxism from the structuralist challenge, completed the move against it, and offered a new interpretation of Marxism from which humanist existentialism and Hegelianism had been resolutely purged, with Sartre’s voluntarism replaced by a more mediated form of economism.1 It is easy to represent Althusser’s intervention purely in terms of structuralism, but to suggest that this was its only significant intellectual context is misleading. If his work needs to be considered in the context of the contemporary politics of the Communist Party, as several commentators have stressed, it also requires reference to work done in the history of the sciences, particularly that of Gaston Bachelard in the history of physics and chemistry, his pupil Georges Canguilhem in the life sciences, and Jean Cavaillès in mathematics. All four, together with Althusser’s pupil, Michel Foucault, worked within an epistemological tradition which was critical of the positivism which, up to that time, had dominated the history of the sciences.2
