Ricardo — Marx // Foucault — Althusser

Abstract

Louis Althusser is arguably the one philosopher who, qua philosopher, not only detected a fundamental rupture between philosophy and theory in Marx’s work but emphatically took the side of theory (see Althusser, 2005, p. 14). Indeed, it was this rupture between Marx’s ‘early’ humanist critique of Hegelianism and his ‘mature’ critique of political economy that led Althusser to grant Marx’s project the dignity of theoretical discovery equal only to Thales’s mathematics, Galileo’s physics and Freud’s psychoanalysis (see Althusser, 1991; 2005, p. 14). Moreover, as one of only four existing epistemological breaks, this rupture marked, for Althusser, a break not only with philosophy but also with ideology. However, the two breaks — the distancing from philosophy and the break with ideology — are not symmetrical: while theory is precisely a break with ideology, philosophy remains an ambiguous notion for Althusser, both an external, ideological haven for theory at moments of its internal impotence (see Althusser, 1990) and a punctual political intervention at those same moments (see Althusser, 1971; 1990).