Louis Althusser

Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism

Althusser: The Detour of Theory

In the past few years there has been a renewed interest in the work of Louis Althusser, although, in some cases, this interest has been one-sided, focusing mainly on his later writings on aleatory materialism. The three books reviewed in this article, however, offer balanced and insightful overviews of the totality of Althusser's work, placing it in the wider context of Marxist political and theoretical debates and stressing both its originality and strengths, but also its contradictions.