Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau and Marx

The groundbreaking Marxist philosopher provides unique appraisals of major writers.

“One reads him with excitement. There is no mystery about his capacity to inspire the intelligent young.” — Eric Hobsbawm

“Althusser traversed so many lives — so many personal, historical, philosophical and political adventures; marked, inflected, influenced so many discourses, actions and existences by the radiant and provocative force of his thought — that the most diverse and contradictory accounts could never exhaust their source.” — Jacques Derrida

Louis Althusser taught political philosophy for many years at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and was a leading intellectual in the French Communist Party. Among his other works are Reading Capital, Machiavelli and Us, and For Marx, all available from Verso.