ABSTRACT

In this and the next chapter we remain in Paris. Lévi-Strauss began to develop his main ideas in the 1940s, Althusser’s most influential work involved a collaborative seminar held in the early 1960s devoted to his Reading Capital or, rather, explaining Althusser’s way of reading capital. The considerable standing that the seminar won for him in Parisian intellectual life was soon lost when, perhaps compromised by his position as almost the official philosopher of the French Communist Party, which did not like revolutionary movements that it did not control, Althusser failed to make a strong public and supportive response to ‘the events’ of May 1968. These ‘events’ were short lived (lasting only a few days, though obviously casting a very long historical shadow), and revolutionary activity was curtailed, but their occurrence, and the disappointment with the Marxist response, as epitomised by the Communist Party, ensured that there was a commitment to developing intellectual opposition to capitalism, but doing so by means of providing a non-Marxist critical way of thinking.