Louis Althusser Quotes
Louis Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher and a teacher at the Ecole Normale Superieure for nearly thirty years. His For Marx and Reading Capital, the latter co-written with his students, proposed a structuralist reading of Marx that rejected the early Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts in favor of the mature Marx of Capital. The quotes below are attributed to Louis Althusser, organized by topic.
Browse Louis Althusser by topic
Louis Althusser on God
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“the religious ISA (the system of the different churches),”
"Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"
Louis Althusser on Knowledge
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“Like every ' intellectual ', a philosophy teacher is a petty bourgeois . When he opens his mouth, it is petty-bourgeois ideology that speaks: its resources and ruses are infinite.”
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“You know what Lenin says about ' intellectuals '. Individually certain of them may (politically) be declared revolutionaries, and courageous ones. But as a mass, they remain 'incorrigibly' petty-bourgeois in ideology .”
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“To become 'ideologists of the working class' ( Lenin ), 'organic intellectuals' of the proletariat ( Gramsci ), intellectuals have to carry out a radical revolution in their ideas: a long, painful and difficult re-education. An endless external and internal struggle.”
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“Class instinct is subjective and spontaneous. ... To arrive at proletarian class positions, the class instinct of proletarians only needs to be educated ; the class instinct of the petty bourgeoisie , and hence of intellectuals, has, on the contrary, to be revolutionized .”
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“The sciences we are familiar with have been installed in a number of great 'continents'. Before Marx , two such continents had been opened up to scientific knowledge: the continent of Mathematics and the continent of Physics. The first by the Greeks ( Thales ), the second by Galileo . Marx opened up a third continent to scientific knowledge: the continent of History .”
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“The number-one philosophical battle therefore takes place on the frontier between the scientific and the ideological . There the idealist philosophies which exploit the sciences struggle against the materialist philosophies which serve the sciences.”
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“To be a Communist is to be a partisan and artisan of Marxism-Leninist philosophy: of dialectical materialism.”
Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon -
“Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon”
To be a Communist is to be a partisan and artisan of Marxism-Leninist philosophy: of dialectical materialism.
Louis Althusser on Politics
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Attributed to Louis Althusser:
“Ideology has no history.”
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“Ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects.”
p. 117 -
Attributed to Louis Althusser:
“There is no practice except by and in an ideology.”
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Attributed to Louis Althusser:
“Philosophy is, in the last instance, the class struggle in theory.”
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Attributed to Louis Althusser:
“The lonely hour of the last instance never comes.”
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Attributed to Louis Althusser:
“Marx's true discovery is the discovery of history as a process without a subject.”
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“The reproduction of labour power thus reveals as its sine qua non not only the reproduction of its ‘skills’ but also the reproduction of its subjection to the ruling ideology. ... It is in the forms and under the forms of ideological subjection that provision is made for the reproduction of the skills of labour power .”
p. 89 -
“The proletariat must seize state power in order to destroy the existing bourgeois state apparatus and, in a first phase, replace it with a quite different, proletarian, state apparatus, then in later phases set in motion a radical process, that of the destruction of the state.”
p. 95 -
“the political ISA (the political system, including the different parties),”
"Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"