Louis Althusser Quotes on Knowledge
Louis Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher and a teacher at the Ecole Normale Superieure for nearly thirty years. This page collects quotes attributed to Louis Althusser on the topic of knowledge, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
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.