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The heyday of Louis Althusser’s influence stretched between the early 1960s, with the publications of For Marx (1965) and Reading Capital (1968), and the early 1970s. Thereafter, Althusserianism precipitously declined with the rise of poststructuralism and anti-Marxist politics, as well as trenchant critiques by fellow Marxists, from Jacques Rancière’s Althusser’s Lessons (1974) to E. P. Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory (1978). The former blamed Althusser’s anti-humanism for the denunciations of the student movement by the intellectual class, while the latter characterized his philosophy as “Stalinism reduced to the paradigm of Theory” (1978: 374). Yet, as Warren Montag notes, “the effect of the repeated efforts… to finish with Althusser once and for all is to defer the desired end and thus paradoxically keep his oeuvre alive” (2013: 2). After Althusser’s death and the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, there was renewed interest in his work. Such interest only grew with...

DOI: 10.1007/s10746-016-9378-4

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