The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings

There can be little doubt that Louis Althusser was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and his influence subsists in many of the concepts currently deployed in disciplines such as cultural studies, social theory and literary criticism.

Yet Althusser was also a leading intellectual in the French Communist Party and a foremost participant in the debates in the human sciences that are marked by the names of Claude L vi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and Georges Canguilhem. His writings were major interventions in a specific political and theoretical conjuncture and it is this aspect of his work that this new collection of previously untranslated texts seeks to reflect.

Consisting of writings from the very height of Althusser's intellectual powers, during the period 1966-67, this book covers, among other things, the critique of L vi-Strauss's structuralism, the theory of discourse and its relationship to psychoanalysis, the place of Ludwig Feuerbach, the tasks of Marxist philosophy, and the famous "humanist controversy."

Author: Louis Althusser
Publisher: Verso
Published: 08/17/2003
Pages: 382
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 8.46h x 5.34w x 1.18d
ISBN13: 9781859844083
ISBN10: 1859844081
BISAC Categories:
- Philosophy | History & Surveys | Modern
- Philosophy | Essays

About the Author
Louis Althusser was born in Algeria in 1918 and died in France in 1990. He taught philosophy for many years at the Ecole Normale Superieur in Paris, and was a leading intellectual in the French Communist Party. His books include For Marx; Reading Capital (with Etienne Balibar); Essays in Ideology; Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx; Machiavelli and Us; and The Spectre of Hegel.