Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism (review)

Many might be surprised by the recent appearance of several books on Althusser, whose "structural Marxism" was presumed to have risen and fallen long ago. Likely, many would also feel perfectly content with the silent erosion of our memory of a thinker known best for his provocative and pugilistic rhetoric. Fortunately, a small number of new studies and the English translation of two collections of Althusser's unpublished writings might allow us to reread Althusser as a philosopher and not just an ideologue for the French Communist Party (PCF). Among Althusser's own writings, The Humanist Controversy (1993) sheds further light on Althusser's notorious and oft-misunderstood antihumanism and The Philosophy of the Encounter: The Later Writings, 1978–1987 reveals a breadth and creativity that only his more thoughtful readers would have suspected. Although Althusser's impact upon other disciplines has been significant, he has not received due attention from philosophers, at least not in the Anglophone world. William S. Lewis offers us a philosophical account that concerns primarily the polemical writings, but it conceives them in light of the unpublished works that have been trickling out of the archives since Althusser's death in 1990. Along with Althusser's own words, a recent book by Warren Montag (2003), and a forthcoming book by Caroline Williams on Althusser and Spinoza (2007), Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism contributes to a long needed philosophical conversation about this profoundly original interpreter of Marx and the history of political philosophy.

About two-thirds of Lewis's book is an intellectual historical account of the PCF, its shifting intellectual agenda, and the pressures and inducements it placed upon its intellectuals from 1920–1956. Lewis translates long passages of unpublished PCF documents that would otherwise be entirely unavailable. The historical account documents the party's vacillations with respect to vanguardism and its willingness, more or less eager during different periods, to accept directives from the Soviet Comintern. Lewis tells us that the party enjoyed a swell in membership and activity in times of openness and tolerance, while its ranks diminished in proportion to the increase in dogmatism. As French communist philosophy emerges in tandem with bolshevism, intellectual inquiry was clearly subordinated to articulating and defending Leninist doctrine and downplaying or ignoring the ambiguities and open questions in Marx's and Engels's writings. Moreover, the strong influence of Leninism placed questions of epistemological privilege and the value of theory for practice high on the philosophical agenda.

Lewis's history of the party produces a conceptual thread that helps one to understand Althusser's philosophy as an intervention into long-standing debates about the nature of knowledge with respect to social relations. His presentation of this history comprises a highly readable and lucid account that aptly summarizes and condenses an intellectual tradition, especially with respect to what might broadly be called its politico-epistemological inquiries. Most generally, he identifies a thread of intellectual contest, from the birth of French communism until the 1960s, between Hegelianism and what ultimately became vulgar Stalinist theories of economic determinism. Althusser appears as someone who endeavors to find a third way and to articulate a far more complex, or "overdetermined," account of the relationship between subjectivity and its historical circumstances.

Althusser announces frequently that he is writing as a member of the French communist party trying to transform it "from the inside." Yet either very few of his contemporary readers take this fact seriously, or they are not sufficiently informed of how this shapes his work at the level of concept formation. For this reason, Lewis's book is highly valuable and even necessary for an understanding of Althusser's project. In particular, it situates Althusser's ignominious antihumanism as an alternative to a concept of Marxism as either a spiritual salve for alienation (Hegelianism) or epistemological security in the form of proletarian knowledge (vanguardism). Although Athusserian antihumanism is often criticized...