Althusser’s turn in Marxism and its meaning for the social theory

Abstract

Rehabilitation of Marxist thought present in Althusser’s compilation of the articles titled by catching appeal “For Marx” is carried out in two directions: general – when theoretical line of understanding of the society and history is derived out of Marxism as political ideology; specific – when revealing the “ rational kernel” of Marxist philosophy of history or society, Althusser extracts dialectical contradiction rooted it his methodology of basis and superstructure. The subject of this research is the hermeneutic project of Althusser aimed at new interpretation of the Marxist philosophy of history, as well as elucidation of the “absence” of dialectical turn in Marx’s continuity of Hegel’s philosophy. The object of this article is the new methodology of social research oriented towards finding additional meanings of the principle of overdetermination, which allows Althusser to reconsider the Marxist method of basis and superstructure in a structuralistic way. The essence of its rehabilitation criticism (criticism of elimination of false understanding of Marxist philosophy) consists in the fact that the latter contributed to neglecting the superstructure and led the research to acknowledgement of its nature as a nonexistent phantom, illusion, behind which lies the only true reality resembled by the determinant of economic formations.