The humanist controversy and other writings (1966-67)

Abstract

There can be little doubt that Louis Althusser was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century and his work lives on in many of the concepts currently deployed in disciplines such as cultural studies, social theory and literary criticism. Louis Althusser wasn't just an academic, he was also a leading intellectual in the French Communist Party in the 1960s and 1970s and a foremost participant in the debates in the human sciences that are marked by the names of Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and Georges Canguilham. Louis Althusser's writings were major interventions in a specific political and theoretical conjuncture and it is this that this new collection of previously untranslated texts - the third, after The Spectre of Hegel and Machiavelli and Us - seeks to reflect. Writing at the very height of his intellectual powers, during the period 1966-67, Althusser covers the critique of Levi-Strauss's structuralism, the theory of discourse and its relationship to psychoanalysis, the tasks of Marxist philosophy, and the famous 'quarrel about humanism'.

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