Throughout the course of the twentieth century communism has
enjoyed direct competition with all other governmental and economic
systems. Often, communist countries produced their own special
brand of party intellectual. These figures rightly occupied their
place within their own national context and within the context of
the International. Some communist intellectuals, through the high
level of erudition exhibited in their writing, have received a
wider reception, despite their direct linkage to party politics
e.g. Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, and, Victor Serge are good
examples. After 1956, when Kruschev exposed Stalin's atrocities to
the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
and, as a result, to the entire world, Marxist philosophy was
widely discredited. It had been assumed that Stalin's excesses were
somehow encouraged or supported through Marx's thought. When, in
the mid 1960s, Louis Althusser first offered his re-readings of
Marx's philosophy it, and communist political practice, were in
ruin. However Althusser was in a unique cultural and historical
position. Thinking and writing concomitant with the structuralists
and poststructuralists in France and also having access to certain
theoretical tools while, simultaneously, committing himself
entirely to Marxist thought-Althusser was, conceivably the last of
his tradition. He was a Marxist philosopher who, unlike Sartre at
the end of his life, did not abandon communism to, for instance
existentialism. In Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French
Marxism William Lewis gives readers a striking example of
intellectual biography and critical theory. His approach,
considering the work and life of Althusser within French Marxism
and French intellectual culture, fills a void in contemporary
scholarship. But, much more importantly, Lewis is able to show how
Althusser's thought is the result of and a response to specific
French intellectual and political traditions of reading Marx. It is
through this combination of concerns that Louis Althusser and the
Traditions of French Marxism offers us a contemporary and poignant
Althusser whose ideas, under the weight of Lewis's pen, can help us
better understand what resources it may hold for philosophy,
political thought, and cultural thought today.
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