Althusser’s response to John Lewis and the turn to self-criticism
What the Work Is
For a Critique of Theoretical Practice (Spanish: Para una crítica de la práctica teórica) is a Spanish-language volume of texts by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, published in the early 1970s. It brings together his Response to John Lewis (1973) and his self-critical reassessment of his earlier work. It belongs to the period after For Marx and Reading Capital, when Althusser revisited the project that had made him famous: the attempt to establish that Marxist theory rests on its own distinctive, scientific foundations, rather than on philosophical assumptions inherited from earlier thinkers.
What the Book Is About
The work addresses two linked questions. The first is how Marxism should answer humanist readings of history, in particular that of the British Communist John Lewis, who held that “man makes history.” The second is how Althusser himself should judge the positions he had taken in the 1960s. Althusser argued that humanist philosophy, along with empiricism, distorted Marxism by treating history as the work of a human subject or essence, rather than as a process with its own structure in which class struggle is decisive.
The book also revisits the idea of theory as a practice — a form of production with its own raw materials, instruments, and products — which had been central to his earlier writing. In his self-criticism, Althusser re-examines this notion and the weight he had placed on it, and he reconsiders the relation between science, ideology, and politics.
Key Ideas and Themes
One central concept is that of theoretical practice, which Althusser had developed earlier. Theory is not the mere contemplation of a given object, nor the simple generalization of observations. It is a transformative activity that works on existing concepts and representations, reworking them into new, more adequate knowledge. In the self-critical part of the book, however, he acknowledges that his earlier stress on this idea had a “theoreticist” tendency, and he stresses that philosophy must be tied to politics and class struggle.
Closely tied to this is the distinction between science and ideology. Ideology, in his usage, is not simply falsehood or error; it is a system of representations that shapes how people experience and understand their world. Science, by contrast, is the product of theoretical practice carried out according to its own protocols. The critique of theoretical practice is therefore also a critique of the ideological preconceptions that can masquerade as scientific theory.
A third theme is the rejection of humanism and empiricism as foundations for Marxist theory. In the response to Lewis, Althusser opposes the idea that “man” or the human subject is the maker of history, and he defends the thesis that history is a process without a subject, driven by class struggle. Empiricism, the view that knowledge derives from experience or observation, is for him a principal threat to Marxism’s theoretical integrity, since it makes the specific work of theoretical production disappear from view.
Finally, the work reflects Althusser’s broader effort to give Marxism a rigorous philosophical grounding. The critique of theoretical practice was, for him, a way of defending and clarifying what he took to be the scientific core of Marxist thought, while revising the way he had previously defined philosophy.
Structure and Approach
The volume combines a polemical response to a particular opponent with a self-critical reassessment, rather than offering a systematic treatise. Its approach is conceptual and argumentative: Althusser proceeds by distinguishing terms, exposing the assumptions hidden in ordinary ways of thinking about history and knowledge, and proposing a vocabulary — practice, ideology, science, class struggle — through which the problems can be reformulated. The style is dense and abstract, and it presupposes some familiarity with Marxist and philosophical terminology.
Significance and Influence
For a Critique of Theoretical Practice is significant chiefly as a record of Althusser’s revision of the theoretical program that he had developed in For Marx and Reading Capital, both published in 1965. The ideas discussed here — the concept of theoretical practice, the science/ideology distinction, and the critique of empiricism and humanism — were central to the structuralist Marxism associated with his name and to the intense debates those works provoked in French intellectual circles and beyond. The text thus marks an important stage in the development of one of the most discussed bodies of Marxist philosophy in the postwar period.
Louis Pierre Althusser was born on 16 October 1918 in Birmendreïs, near Algiers, in French Algeria, to a pied-noir petit-bourgeois family from Alsace. His father, Charles-Joseph Althusser, was a lieutenant in the French army and a bank clerk; his mother, Lucienne Marthe Berger, was a devout Catholic and worked as a schoolteacher. In 1930, the family moved to Marseille, where his father became director of the Compagnie Algérienne bank branch. Althusser excelled at the Lycée Saint-Charles and joined a scout group. In 1936, he moved to Lyon to study at the Lycée du Parc, where he was influenced by Catholic professors, joined the Jeunesse Étudiante Chrétienne, and wanted to be a Trappist. After two years of khâgne under Jean Guitton, he was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure in July 1939, but his attendance was deferred when he was drafted into the French Army in September 1939. Captured by the Germans in Vannes in June 1940, he was held in a prisoner-of-war camp in Schleswig-Holstein for the remaining five years of the war, where he was first assigned to hard labour and later to the infirmary. He resumed his studies at the ENS in 1945 to prepare for the agrégation. In 1946, he met Hélène Rytmann, a Jewish former French Resistance member. That same year he began a close friendship with Jacques Martin, a translator of Hegel and Hesse, who influenced his interest in Jean Cavaillès, Georges Canguilhem, and Hegel. Althusser’s 1947 DES thesis was “On Content in the Thought of G. W. F. Hegel,” written under Gaston Bachelard’s supervision.
In 1948, Althusser became a tutor at the ENS and joined the French Communist Party in October 1948. He was active in the “Peace Movement” section and kept his Catholic beliefs for a few years. In 1949, he published an article in L’Évangile captif on the historic situation of Catholicism. Initially afraid of joining the party because of ENS’s opposition to communists, he did so when he became a tutor, and he created at ENS the Cercle Politzer, a Marxist study group. In the early 1950s, he distanced himself from his youthful political and philosophical ideals and from Hegel. Starting in 1948, he studied and lectured on the history of philosophy, giving his first lecture on Plato in 1949. In 1949–1950, he lectured on René Descartes and wrote a thesis titled “Politics and Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century” and a small study on Rousseau’s “Second Discourse,” presented to Jean Hyppolite and Vladimir Jankélévitch in 1950 but rejected. His first book was Montesquieu, la politique et l’histoire in 1959. From 1953 to 1960, he did not often publish on Marxist themes.
Althusser resumed his Marxist-related publications in 1960, translating, editing, and publishing a collection directed by Hyppolite about Ludwig Feuerbach’s works. This spurred him to write “On the Young Marx: Theoretical Questions” (1961), published in La Pensée, the first in a series of articles later collected in For Marx. In 1964, he published “Freud and Lacan” in La Nouvelle Critique. He conducted a series of seminars at the ENS: “On the Young Marx” (1961–1962), “The Origins of Structuralism” (1962–1963), “Lacan and Psychoanalysis” (1963–1964), and “Reading Capital” (1964–1965). For Marx and Reading Capital, both published in 1965, brought him international fame. He supported a structuralist view of Marx’s work, influenced by Cavaillès and Canguilhem, affirming that Marx laid the “cornerstones” of a new science. He defended what he called “theoretical anti-humanism” as an alternative to Stalinism and Marxist humanism. At the end of 1966, he published an unsigned article titled “On the Cultural Revolution.”
In January 1966, at a conference of communist philosophers in Choisy-le-Roi, Roger Garaudy read an indictment opposing “theoretical anti-humanism.” In March, at Argenteuil, the theses of Garaudy and Althusser were examined by the PCF Central Committee, chaired by Louis Aragon. The Party kept Garaudy’s position as official, and Lucien Sève supported the party’s decision. General secretary Waldeck Rochet said that “Communism without humanism would not be Communism.” Althusser was not publicly censured nor expelled, but the party’s support of Garaudy reduced his influence. In 1966, he published “On the ‘Social Contract'” and “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract” in Cahiers pour l’Analyse. In 1967, he wrote “The Historical Task of Marxist Philosophy,” submitted to Voprossi Filosofii but not accepted; it was published a year later in a Hungarian journal. In 1967–1968, he and his students organized an ENS course titled “Philosophy Course for Scientists,” interrupted by May 1968. In February 1968, he presented “Lenin and Philosophy” at the French Society of Philosophy.
During May 1968, Althusser was hospitalized because of a depressive breakdown and was absent from the Latin Quarter. His initial silence was criticized by protesters who wrote on walls: “Of what use is Althusser?” He was ambivalent, criticizing the movement as an “ideological revolt of the mass” while also calling it “the most significant event in Western history since the Resistance and the victory over Nazism.” The Maoist journal La Cause du peuple called him a revisionist, and he was condemned by former students, mainly Jacques Rancière. He then went through a phase of “self-criticism” resulting in Essays in Self-criticism (1974). In 1969, he started an unfinished work released in 1995 as Sur la reproduction, from which he developed “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” published in La Pensée in 1970. In the same year, he wrote “Marxism and Class Struggle” as the foreword to Marta Harnecker’s The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism. By this time, he was very popular in Latin America. At the turn from the 1960s to the 1970s, For Marx was translated into English in 1969 and Reading Capital in 1970.
In the early 1970s, the PCF was in a period of internal conflicts against the backdrop of Eurocommunism. Althusser participated in the public debate “Communists, Intellectuals and Culture” in 1973. He and his supporters contested the party’s decision to abandon the notion of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” during its twenty-second congress in 1976, which he saw as “a new opportunistic version of Marxist Humanism.” In a lecture to the Union of Communist Students, he criticized the form of the decision. This struggle resulted in the debacle of the “Union of the Left” and an open letter by Althusser and five other intellectuals asking for “a real political discussion in the PCF.” That same year, he published articles in Le Monde titled “What Must Change in the Party,” expanded and reprinted in 1978 as Ce qui ne peut plus durer dans le parti communiste. Between 1977 and 1978, he mainly elaborated texts criticizing Eurocommunism and the PCF. “Marx in his Limits” (1978) argued there was no Marxist theory of the state; it was published in 1994. The Italian Communist newspaper Il manifesto allowed him to develop new ideas at a 1977 Venice conference on “Power and Opposition in Post-Revolutionary Societies,” resulting in “The Crisis of Marxism” and “Marxism as a ‘finite’ theory.” The former was published as “Marxism Today” in the 1978 Italian Enciclopedia Europea; the latter was included in Discutere lo Stato, where he criticized the notion of “government party” and defended a revolutionary party “out of state.”
During the 1970s, Althusser’s institutional roles at the ENS increased, and he edited and published works in the series Théorie with François Maspero, including “Response to John Lewis” (1973). In 1975, he concluded his Doctorat d’État at the University of Picardie. In 1976, he married Hélène Rytmann. In 1976, he compiled essays written between 1964 and 1975 to publish Positions. He gave a conference titled “The Transformation of Philosophy” in Granada and Madrid in March 1976, and a lecture in Catalonia titled “Quelques questions de la crise de la théorie marxiste et du mouvement communiste international,” in which he outlined empiricism as the main enemy of class struggle. He worked between 1975 and 1976 on “Machiavel et nous,” based on a 1972 lecture, and wrote “Machiavelli’s Solitude” (1977). In Spring 1976, requested by Léon Chertok for the International Symposium on the Unconscious at Tbilisi, he drafted “The Discovery of Dr. Freud.” After criticism from Jacques Nassif and Roudinesco, he wrote “On Marx and Freud” by December. He could not attend the 1979 event and asked Chertok to replace the texts, but Chertok published the first without his consent, becoming a public “affair” in 1984.
After the PCF and the left were defeated in the French legislative elections of 1978, Althusser’s bouts of depression became more severe and frequent. In March 1980, he interrupted the dissolution session of the École Freudienne de Paris and, “in the name of the analysts,” called Lacan a “beautiful and pitiful harlequin.” Later, he underwent a hiatal hernia-removal surgery. According to Althusser, the operation caused his physical and mental state to deteriorate; he developed a persecution complex and suicidal thoughts. He later recalled wanting to destroy his books and notes, burn the École Normale, and “suppress Hélène herself.” After the surgery, in May, he was hospitalized for most of the summer in a Parisian clinic. In early October he was sent home. He and Rytmann spent most of their time locked in their ENS apartment. In the fall of 1980, his psychiatrist René Diatkine, who was also treating Rytmann, recommended hospitalization, but the couple refused.
On 16 November 1980, Althusser strangled Rytmann in their ENS room. He reported the murder to the doctor in residence, who contacted psychiatric institutions. He was hospitalized at the Sainte-Anne hospital, and a psychiatric examination was conducted. Due to his mental state, he was deemed not to understand the charges or the process. The psychiatric assessment concluded he should not be criminally charged, based on article 64 of the French Penal Code. The report said Althusser killed Rytmann in the course of an acute crisis of melancholy, without realizing it, and that the “wife-murder by manual strangulation was committed without any additional violence, in the course of [an] iatrogenic hallucinatory episode complicated by melancholic depression.” He lost his civil rights, was entrusted to a representative of the law, and was forbidden to sign any documents. In February 1981, the court ruled him mentally irresponsible, so he could not be prosecuted and was not charged. A warrant of confinement was issued by the Paris police prefecture; the Ministry of National Education mandated his retirement from the ENS; and the ENS requested his family and friends to clear out his apartment. In June, he was transferred to the L’Eau-Vive clinic at Soisy-sur-Seine.
The murder of Rytmann attracted much media attention, and there were several requests to treat Althusser as an ordinary criminal. The newspaper Minute, journalist Dominique Jamet, and Minister of Justice Alain Peyrefitte were among those who accused Althusser of having “privileges” because he was Communist. Roudinesco wrote that from this point of view, Althusser was three times a criminal: first, the philosopher had legitimated the current of thought judged responsible for the Gulag; second, he praised the Chinese Cultural Revolution as an alternative to both capitalism and Stalinism; and finally because he had, it was said, corrupted the elite of French youth by introducing the cult of a criminal ideology into one of the best French institutions. Philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff claimed Althusser taught his students to perceive crimes positively, as akin to a revolution. Five years after the murder, a critique by Le Monde‘s Claude Sarraute had a great impact on Althusser. She compared his case to that of Issei Sagawa, who killed and cannibalized a woman in France but whose psychiatric diagnosis absolved him. Sarraute criticized the fact that, when prestigious names are involved, a lot is written about
