Louis Althusser

Louis Althusser was a philosopher whose influential reading of Marx reworked questions of ideology, science, history, and political practice. For Marx argues that Marx's mature critique requires concepts different from those of his early humanist writings. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays includes the essay on ideological state apparatuses, which examines how institutions reproduce social relations through repeated practices and forms of recognition. On the Reproduction of Capitalism Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses expands that argument into a larger account of production and social order. How to Be a Marxist in Philosophy revisits philosophical struggle in an accessible form. For Marx offers the clearest conceptual entrance; the reproduction volume develops the institutional argument, and Lessons on Rousseau shows Althusser reading a major predecessor closely.