ABSTRACT
Louis Althusser was born in 1918 in Algeria and died in Paris in 1990. Althusser was the leading theoretical antihumanist in Marxism, playing an equivalent role, in effect, to Levi-Strauss, but explicitly within Marxism and as a philosopher. Althusser’s attempt to modify the base-superstructure theorem, to moderate the economism within Marxism, led to the explosion of orthodoxy in other hands, and to the transformation of communism into the reconstruction of the project of radical democracy. Althusser’s interest in social reproduction thus became focused on the institutions which seek to naturalise the status quo: the school, the political party, the trade union, media, the church. In a less significant register, arguably, than in economy or ideology, Althusser also enabled further questioning about the philosophy of science, or the conditions of the creation of knowledge. Perhaps Althusser’s greatest, if unwitting, contribution was his partial and halting exposure of the necessity of interpretation.
