Works by Louis Althusser

Book strip #1

• 

  On Ideology

  by Louis Althusser

  Translated by Ben Brewster

  The publication of For Marx and Reading Capital established Louis Althusser as one of the most influential figures in the Western Marxist tradition. On Ideology charts Althusser’s critique of the t...
• 

  Lessons on Rousseau

  by Louis Althusser

  Althusser delivered these lectures on Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality at the École normale supérieure in Paris in 1972. They are fascinating for two reasons. First, they gave rise...
• 

  Reading Capital

  by Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancière

  Translated by Ben Brewster and David Fernbach

  Originally published in 1965, Reading Capital is a landmark of French thought and radical theory, reconstructing Western Marxism from its foundations. Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosophe...
• 

  Essays on Self-Criticism

  by Louis Althusser

  Essays in Self-Criticism contains all of Louis Althusser's work from the 1970s. It is composed of three texts, each of which in a different way presents elements of self-criticism. The first is Alt...
• 

  On the Reproduction of Capitalism

  by Louis Althusser

  Louis Althusser’s renowned short text "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" radically transformed the concept of the subject, the understanding of the state and even the very frameworks o...
• 

  The Spectre of Hegel

  by Louis Althusser and François Matheron

  Edited by François Matheron

  Translated by G. M. Goshgarian

  Louis Althusser is remembered today as the scourge of humanist Marxism, but that was his later incarnation, an identity formed by years grappling with the intellectual inheritance of Hegel and Ca...
• 

  Machiavelli and Us

  by Louis Althusser and François Matheron

  Introduction by Gregory Elliott

  Edited by François Matheron

  Translated by Gregory Elliott

  “We do not publish our own drafts, that is, our own mistakes, but we do sometimes publish other people’s,” Louis Althusser once observed of Marx’s early writings. Among his own posthumously release...
• 

  Politics and History

  by Louis Althusser

  Translated by Ben Brewster

  In the first two essays of this book, Louis Althusser analyses the work of two of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment – Montesquieu and Rousseau. He shows that although they made considerabl...
• 

  For Marx

  by Louis Althusser

  Translated by Ben Brewster

  This is the work in which Louis Althusser formulated some of his most influential ideas. For Marx, first published in France in 1968, has come to be regarded as the founding text of the school of “...
• 

  The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings

  by Louis Althusser and François Matheron

  Edited by François Matheron

  Translated by G. M. Goshgarian

  There can be little doubt that Louis Althusser was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and his influence subsists in many of the concepts currently deployed in discip...
• 

  Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists

  by Louis Althusser

  Edited by Gregory Elliott

  Intended to contribute, in his own words, to a “left-wing critique of Stalinism that would help put some substance back into the revolutionary project here in the West,” they are the record of a sh...
• 

  Philosophy of the Encounter

  by Louis Althusser

  Edited by Oliver Corpet and François Matheron

  Translated by G. M. Goshgarian

  In the late 1970s and 1980s, Louis Althusser endured a period of intense mental instability during which he murdered his wife and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Spanning this deeply troub...
• 

  The Althusserian Legacy

  by E. Ann Kaplan

  Contributions by Étienne Balibar, Michèle Barrett, Alex Callinicos, Jacques Derrida, Gregory Elliott, Tom Lewis, Alain Lipietz, Rastko Mo?nik, Warren Montag, Stephen Resnick, Peter Schöttler, Maria Turchetto and Richard Wolff

  Edited by E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker

  Louis Althusser remained until his death in 1990 the most controversial of the “master thinkers” who emerged from the turbulent Parisian intellectual scene of the 1960s. The publication of his best...
• 

  On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

  by Étienne Balibar

  Afterword by Louis Althusser

  Introduction by Grahame Lock

  No-one and nothing, not even the Congress of a Communist Party, can abolish the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is the most important conclusion of this book by Étienne Balibar.Balibar spells...