Abstract
The preoccupations of Althusser’s writing during this early period remain philosophical: the elaboration of conceptions of knowledge, of science and its contrast with ideology, of dialectics, totality and historical causality. These philosophical ideas and themes are, as we have seen, set to work in an attempted periodisation of Marx’s work. This periodisation represents Marx’s work as divided by an ‘epistemological break’ through which a scientific approach to historical analysis emerges from the critical rejection of an earlier historicist and humanist philosophical perspective.
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Notes and References
‘The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism’, in Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, eds, Reading Capital, (London, 1970), ptIII, pp.199–308.
Marx, Capital, vol.III (Moscow, 1971), p.791.
Marx, preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (London, 1971), p.21.
Balibar, Reading Capital, p.214.
Marx, Capital, vol.III, ch.52, pp.885–6.
Reading Capital, p.233.
Ibid, p.223.
Louis Althusser, For Marx (London, 1969), pp.113–4.
See Marx’s preface to the first edition of Capital, vol.I (Harmondsworth, 1976), pp.90–1.
Reading Capital, pp.207, footnote.
Ibid, p.273–308.
Ibid, p.302.
See ch.7 of this book.
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© 1984 Ted Benton
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Benton, T. (1984). The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism. In: The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism. Theoretical Traditions in the Social Sciences. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17548-2_4
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