 Cover of the first edition | |
| Author | William S. Lewis |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Louis Althusser |
| Publisher | Lexington Books |
Publication date | 2005 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 238 |
| ISBN | 0-7391-1307-0 |
Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism is a 2005 book about the French philosopher Louis Althusser by William S. Lewis. The book received positive reviews. Lewis was complimented for his inclusion of translated documents of the French Communist Party.
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Lewis discusses the French philosopher Louis Althusser, his interpretation of the philosopher Karl Marx, and his relationship with the French Communist Party. He examines works of Althusser such as For Marx (1965), Reading Capital (1965), and Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1968). He also discusses the work of other French philosophers, such as Henri Lefebvre, Alexandre Kojève, Georges Politzer, Jean Hyppolite, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and René Maublanc, and the relationship between Marxism and epistemology. [1]
Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism was published in 2005 by Lexington Books. [2]
Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism received positive reviews from Hasana Sharp in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy and Panagiotis Sotiris in Historical Materialism , [3] [4] and a mixed review from Bruce Baugh in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. [5] It was also reviewed by Chamsy el-Ojeili in Thesis Eleven and the economist Richard D. Wolff in Science & Society . [6] [7] In Borderlands E-Journal: New Spaces in the Humanities, David McInerney reviewed the book and interviewed Lewis about it. [8] [9]
Sharp considered the book a welcome addition to the literature on Althusser, noting that Lewis translated documents from the French Communist Party "that would otherwise be entirely unavailable." She complimented Lewis for his treatment of Althusser's philosophy and its relevance to "long-standing debates" about knowledge, but disagreed with his view that Althusser's description of philosophy and science was "excessively rationalist and conventionalist", observing that it was "really an affirmation of a criticism levied by others". [3]
Sotiris credited Lewis with providing a "balanced and insightful" assessment of Althusser. He endorsed Lewis's view that Althusser's work was "a response to the crisis of French Marxism" and an effort to intervene in both the theoretical debate and the political orientation of the French Communist Party. He also complimented Lewis for his treatment of Lefebvre and Merleau-Ponty, crediting him with showing "their inadequacy to theorise social totality and their distance from Marx’s original formulations." However, he expressed disagreement with Lewis's view of Althusser's stance on epistemology, and his view that Althusser’s work can be used "to refute the epistemological primacy of the proletariat." [4]
Baugh considered Lewis's account of the intellectual development of the French Communist Party "clear and mostly unobjectionable", though he also considered it largely unoriginal. He complimented Lewis for his inclusion of translations of excerpts from PCF publications and from the work of Maublanc. However, he criticized his discussion of French Marxist thought in the period prior to 1956, arguing that Lewis established a "a false alternative between Stalinist French Marxism ... and humanist Marxism" in order to present an overly-favorable view of Althusser and overstate his importance to French Marxism. He also criticized Lewis's treatment of Lefebvre, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Kojève, and Hyppolite. [5]
Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interest and he wrote on perception, art, politics, religion, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, language, nature, and history. He was the lead editor of Les Temps modernes, the leftist magazine he established with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945.
Louis Pierre Althusser was an Algerian-born French Marxist philosopher who studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy.
Critique of Dialectical Reason is a 1960 book by the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in which the author further develops the existentialist Marxism he first expounded in his essay Search for a Method (1957). Critique of Dialectical Reason and Search for a Method were written as a common manuscript, with Sartre intending the former to logically precede the latter. Critique of Dialectical Reason was Sartre's second large-scale philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943) having been the first. The book has been seen by some as an abandonment of Sartre's original existentialism, while others have seen it as a continuation and elaboration of his earlier work. It was translated into English by Alan Sheridan-Smith.
Reading Capital is a 1965 book about the philosopher Karl Marx's Das Kapital by the philosophers Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, and Jacques Rancière, the sociologist Roger Establet, and the critic Pierre Macherey. The book was first published in France by François Maspero. An abridged English translation was published in 1970, and an unabridged translation in 2015. The book was influential among intellectuals.
Alexandre Kojève was a Russian-born French philosopher and statesman whose philosophical seminars had an immense influence on 20th-century French philosophy, particularly via his integration of Hegelian concepts into twentieth-century continental philosophy. As a statesman in the French government, he was instrumental in the formation of the European Union.
Phenomenology of Perception is a 1945 book about perception by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in which the author expounds his thesis of "the primacy of perception". The work established Merleau-Ponty as the pre-eminent philosopher of the body, and is considered a major statement of French existentialism.
Trần Đức Thảo was a Vietnamese philosopher. His work attempted to unite phenomenology with Marxist philosophy. His work had some currency in France in the 1950s and 1960s, and was cited favorably by Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and Louis Althusser.
Warren Montag is a professor of English at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. He is known primarily for his work on twentieth-century French theory, especially Althusser and his circle, as well as his studies of the philosophers Spinoza, Locke, and Hobbes.
20th-century French philosophy is a strand of contemporary philosophy generally associated with post-World War II French thinkers, although it is directly influenced by previous philosophical movements.
John Russon is a Canadian philosopher, working primarily in the tradition of Continental Philosophy. In 2006, he was named Presidential Distinguished Professor at the University of Guelph, and in 2011 he was the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute's Canadian Lecturer to India.
This is a list of articles in continental philosophy.
For Marx is a 1965 book by the philosopher Louis Althusser, a leading theoretician of the French Communist Party (PCF), in which the author reinterprets the work of the philosopher Karl Marx, proposing an epistemological break between the young, Hegelian Marx, and the old Marx, the author of Das Kapital (1867–1883). The book, first published in France by François Maspero, established Althusser's reputation. The texts presented in For Marx are theoretical interventions in a definite conjuncture, particularly aiming at the definition of the lines to be pursued by the PCF after Stalin's years in the Soviet Union. Althusser's position is of theoretical antihumanism, and is against the teleology of history. Althusser defends that history is a process without subject and with an open end, but that has determinations that can be theorized by the science of history as constructed by Marx in his mature work, Das Kapital. Society is then conceptualized as a complex whole articulated in dominance by the economy where several social practices co-exist with a relative autonomy, introducing the concept overdetermination to characterize the levels of effectivity.
Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and Dissolution is a work about Marxism by the political philosopher Leszek Kołakowski. Its three volumes in English are The Founders, The Golden Age, and The Breakdown. It was first published in Polish in Paris in 1976, with the English translation appearing in 1978. In 2005, Main Currents of Marxism was republished in a one volume edition, with a new preface and epilogue by Kołakowski. The work was intended to be a "handbook" on Marxism by Kołakowski, who was once an orthodox Marxist but ultimately rejected Marxism. Despite his critical stand toward Marxism, Kołakowski endorsed the philosopher György Lukács's interpretation of the philosopher Karl Marx.
Marxist humanism is an international body of thought and political action rooted in a humanist interpretation of the works of Karl Marx. It is an investigation into "what human nature consists of and what sort of society would be most conducive to human thriving" from a critical perspective rooted in Marxist philosophy. Marxist humanists argue that Marx himself was concerned with investigating similar questions.
John Lewis was a British Unitarian minister and Marxist philosopher and author of many works on philosophy, anthropology, and religion.
The correct place of Karl Marx's early writings within his system as a whole has been a matter of great controversy. Some believe there is a break in Marx's development that divides his thought into two periods: the "Young Marx" is said to be a thinker who deals with the problem of alienation, while the "Mature Marx" is said to aspire to a scientific socialism.
Post-Marxism is a perspective in critical social theory which radically reinterprets Marxism, countering its association with economism, historical determinism, anti-humanism, and class reductionism, whilst remaining committed to the construction of socialism. Most notably, post-Marxists are anti-essentialist, rejecting the primacy of class struggle, and instead focus on building radical democracy. Post-Marxism can be considered a synthesis of post-structuralist frameworks and neo-Marxist analysis, in response to the decline of the New Left after the protests of 1968.
Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works in philosophy that are strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory, or works written by Marxists. Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew from various sources, and the official philosophy in the Soviet Union, which enforced a rigid reading of Marx called dialectical materialism, in particular during the 1930s. Marxist philosophy is not a strictly defined sub-field of philosophy, because the diverse influence of Marxist theory has extended into fields as varied as aesthetics, ethics, ontology, epistemology, social philosophy, political philosophy, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of history. The key characteristics of Marxism in philosophy are its materialism and its commitment to political practice as the end goal of all thought. The theory is also about the struggles of the proletariat and their reprimand of the bourgeoisie.
Western Marxism is a current of Marxist theory that arose from Western and Central Europe in the aftermath of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the ascent of Leninism. The term denotes a loose collection of theorists who advanced an interpretation of Marxism distinct from classical and Orthodox Marxism and the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union.
John O'Neill was a Canadian sociologist, phenomenologist, and social theorist known for his writings on critical social theory, philosophy, political economy, literary theory, psychoanalysis, and mass culture. O’Neill was the author, editor, and translator of over 30 books and hundreds of articles, many of which have been translated into French, German, Japanese, and Mandarin. O’Neill's work focuses on the notion of corporeal knowledge and embodiment as mediated by familial relationships and social welfare. O’Neill was Distinguished Professor of Sociology at York University (Emeritus), where he also co-founded the Programme in Social and Political Thought in 1972.