ABSTRACT
Louis Althusser acknowledges the determining power of economic conditions ‘in the last instance’, adding — it is not clear how seriously — that this instance ‘never comes’. If there is a way to approach the selection of Readings in this Section, it may be the extent to which each theorist endorses such qualifications of a Marxist tradition which flourished in Eastern and Western Europe before World War I but has been severely discredited whenever the opportunity has arisen to make it the ruling tradition. In the loosest sense, all the Readings below — bar Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's (Reading 4.7) — fall within the category of ‘Western Marxism’, and they at least measure their point of departure from Marx. Attempts to define Western Marxism have a history, beginning in the disputes with Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch by the Comintern in 1923 but becoming more judicious in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Adventures of the Dialectic (1955) and Perry Anderson's Considerations on Western Marxism (1979). Anderson's is the broadest sweep — since he comes at the concept generationally, geographically and intellectually — and includes Louis Althusser and anti-Hegelian Marxists.
