Althusser’s work was received through sharply divergent political lenses

Evidence

Althusser’s is in some ways a peculiar and even poignant case. He remained a lifelong member of the French Communist Party because he believed in the centrality of the working class in the making of history, yet he advocated the idea of ‘history as a human-natural process’ which had neither subject nor goal. His highly nuanced essay ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ (For Marx, London: New Left Books, 1977) is notable for affirming, against the contemporary radical currents, a final determination by the economic, but his even more influential essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London: New Left Books, 1971) assigns so vast a space to the state that any methodological distinction between state and not-state as differential sites for ideological production and reproduction becomes difficult to maintain. Inside France, his philosophical positions were forms of intervention in the politics of the Communist Party, with at least a few of them obviously designed to challenge the Stalinist legacies within the party. His chief critic in Britain, E. P. Thompson, denounced him, on the other hand, as a Stalinist, while some of his key admirers, Hirst and Hindess among them for some years, sifted out the political charge of Althusser’s interventions and invoked him, instead, for the worst kind of structuralist constructs, static and anti-historical. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 637