Louis Althusser

Louis Pierre Althusser lived from 16 October 1918 to 22 October 1990 and was a French Marxist philosopher who studied and later became a professor of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Commonly referred to as a structural Marxist despite a complicated relationship with French structuralism, of which he was critical in many respects, he later described himself as a social anarchist and was a long-time member and sometimes strong critic of the French Communist Party, directing his arguments against threats he saw to the theoretical foundations of Marxism, including the influence of empiricism, humanist and reformist tendencies dividing European communist parties, and the cult of personality and of ideology, though contemporary historical research has widely criticized these claims. Althusser's life was marked by periods of intense mental illness, and in 1980 he killed his wife, the sociologist Hélène Rytmann, by strangling her; he was declared unfit to stand trial due to insanity, was committed to a psychiatric hospital for three years, did little further academic work, and died in 1990.