Althusser read Marx’s Preface as essentialist and historicist

Evidence

Althusser would argue that, here, the social totality is conceptualized, essentially, as an “expressive totality,” in which, despite its apparent levels and differentiations, contradictions in the “base” appear to unroll, evenly, and to be reflected sooner or later through corresponding modifications in the superstructures and the ideological forms. This, then, is still an “essentialist” conceptualization of a social formation. It is also “historicist,” in Althusser’s view, because it makes little if any separation between “theoretical productions” and “ideological forms”; it makes the theoretical level appear also as a “correspondence” or a reflection of the material base. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 488

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the key Althusserian concepts of ‘expressive totality’ and ‘historicism’ that structure his critique of Marx’s base/superstructure model.
• XREF: connects to: Althusser read Marx through straining metaphor while Goux’s continuist reading slips — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 939; Althusser never fully broke with Marxism’s Hegelian teleology; Althusser read mature Marx as employing structural not sequential causality — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 535 (+4 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Althusser read Marx through straining metaphor while Goux’s continuist reading slips — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 939; Althusser never fully broke with Marxism’s Hegelian teleology; Althusser read mature Marx as employing structural not sequential causality — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 535 (+4 more)