Louis Althusser

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 str…