# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/louis-althusser
# Generated: 2026-08-31T15:49:34.968Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/louis-althusser"
name: "Louis Althusser"
slug: "louis-althusser"
description: "A philosopher who reshaped how Marxists read Marx, then strangled his wife and vanished into a psychiatric ward. Althusser spent decades inside the French Communist Party arguing that ideology works by making you mistake recognition for truth—then lost three years to a hospital and the final decade to silence."
tagline: "French Marxist philosopher (1918–1990)"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Louis_Althusser_sketch_(8420987781)_(cropped).jpg"
gender: "male"
country:
  name: "France"
  isoCode: "FR"
category:
  name: "Academics"
  slug: "academics"
profileType:
  name: "Academic"
  slug: "academic"
  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1918-10-16"
deathDate: "1990-10-22"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
scores:
  popularity:           59.54
  momentum:             0
  historical:           24.969696
  currentAttention:     0
  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  70
  trendDirection:       "FALLING"
ranks:
  global:   null
  country:  null
  category: null
tags:
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    slug: "academics"
  - name: "Academic"
    slug: "academic"
  - name: "Philosophy"
    slug: "philosophy"
  - name: "Politics"
    slug: "politics"
  - name: "France"
    slug: "france"
  - name: "Europe"
    slug: "europe"
  - name: "20th Century"
    slug: "20th-century"
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    title: "لوى التوسير"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Lui Altüsser"
    type:  "WIKIPEDIA"
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    title: "Louis Althusser"
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    title: "Louis Althusser"
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    title: "Louis Althusser"
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    title: "Louis Althusser"
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    title: "לואי אלתוסר"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Louis Pierre Althusser studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and rose to professor of philosophy there, spending his career as a member and occasional critic of the French Communist Party. He built his arguments against what he saw as threats to Marxism's theoretical foundations: empiricism, humanism, reformism, the cult of personality, the problem of ideology. Often called a structural Marxist, he resisted simple affiliation with French structuralism and later described himself as a social anarchist. His life moved through recurring periods of intense mental illness. In 1980 he strangled his wife, the sociologist Hélène Rytmann. Declared unfit to stand trial by reason of insanity, he was committed to a psychiatric hospital for three years, produced little further academic work, and died in 1990.