Transcript
In the international renaissance of Marxist theory in the 1960s and early 1970s, few projects generated as much excitement, or aroused such controversy, as the ‘return to Marx’ conducted by the French philosopher Louis Althusser. One of the most ambitious and influential enterprises in the postwar history of Marxism, Althusser’s systematic reconstruction of ‘dialectical and historical materialism’ from within the French Communist Party (PCF) was heralded as a renewal of Marxism in some quarters, dismissed as a specimen of Stalinism in others. Today, more than twenty years after the publication of his major works, For Marx and Reading ‘Capital’ (1965), and amid the profound contemporary crisis of Marxism, Althusser is the victim, rather than the beneficiary, of philosophical fashion and political circumstance – a symbol for many of an era of vain, or at any rate disappointed, hopes, to be interred alongside them.
