Reading Althusser: Time and the Social Whole

Abstract

The works of Louis Althusser have influenced political and theoretical debates in Europe for several decades but have remained comparatively untouched by American political philosophers and historians. Perhaps because their style is polemical and frequently obscure, or perhaps because they present a political as well as an intellectual challenge, his views have not been as widely nor as deeply discussed as they deserve to be. This essay is a preliminary response to that problem. I shall try to reconstruct elements of Althusser's writings to capture the force of his arguments regarding the Marxist view of the social whole and the concept of historical time with which it is allied. Accordingly, this paper is both an exposition of Althusser's point of view and an Althusserian account of Marx. In it I hope to show some of the political and theoretical implications of his position. According to Althusser the Marxist conception of society did not arise out of a vacuum but developed from a critique of and break from all previous conceptions of the social whole. His analysis of Marx's conception therefore demands an elaboration of the specific difference between Marx and his predecessors, the most important of whom was Hegel. I This demand is what first requires our attention.