Louis Althusser

Louis Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher, born in 1918 in Birmendreis, French Algeria, who studied and later taught philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris for thirty five years. In For Marx and Reading Capital, both published in 1965, he argued for an epistemological break between the young, humanist Marx and the mature, scientific Marx, and developed the concept of overdetermination to describe how multiple social contradictions combine unevenly to produce historical change. His 1970 essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses introduced the influential concept of interpellation, describing how institutions such as schools, churches and the family constitute individuals as subjects who recognize themselves in ideology. Althusser suffered from severe recurring mental illness throughout his life, and in 1980 he killed his wife, the sociologist Helene Rytmann. He was declared unfit to stand trial and spent his final years in psychiatric care, dying in 1990.