Louis Althusser Quotes on Knowledge
Louis Althusser (1918–1990), the principal French theorist of structural Marxism, developed in For Marx (1965) and Reading Capital (1965, with Étienne Balibar) the doctrine of an "epistemological break" in Marx's intellectual development around 1845 — the moment at which the early humanist Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts gives way to the scientific Marx of The German Ideology and Capital. The corresponding distinction between science and ideology — knowledge as the product of a specific theoretical practice, ideology as the imaginary relation in which subjects live their real conditions of existence — frames the structuralist reorganization of historical materialism that Althusser and his pupils carried through.
Quotes
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Attributed to Louis Althusser:
“Philosophy is, in the last instance, the class struggle in theory.”
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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.