Althusser's Catholic Marxism

Abstract

What role do Louis Althusser's early theological essays play in his later work? Quite a lot, I argue in this article. By following through the shift in four key essays from 1946 to 1951, we can trace not only Althusser's reluctant abandonment of the Roman Catholic Church, but also the emergence of patterns of thought that would stay with him in his later, fully Marxist period. On the one hand, he would continue to universalize in a fashion he picked up from the Catholic Church's own practice of universalizing, especially in his arguments concerning ideology. On the other hand, the Church would become the ‘absent cause’ of his later work, permeating it through allusions, examples, and longer arguments, especially the effort to historicize it and then recast it as idealism.

Keywords:

• Louis Althusser
• Ideology
• Theology
• Roman Catholic Church
• Marxism

Notes

¹See, among others, Callinicos (1976), Elliott (1987), and Clarke et al. (1980). Margaret Majumbar (1995) passes by this phase with embarrassed brevity, preferring to begin with the moment he joined the Parti communiste français (PCF).

²They are “The International of Decent Feelings” (1997, 21–35; 1994a, 35–57), “A Matter of Fact” (1997, 185–96; 1994a, 261–75), “On Conjugal Obscenity” (1997, 231–40; 1994a, 327–39), and his letter to Jean Lacroix (1997, 197–230; 1994a, 277–325). “On Conjugal Obscenity” remained unpublished until after his death, and is found in the first volume of Écrits philosophiques et politiques (1994a). The letter to Lacroix was also unpublished until this 1994 collection.

³“In fact the Church, via its chaplains and encyclicals, made their own militants aware of the ‘social question,’ of which most of us were totally ignorant. Of course, once we recognized that there was a ‘social question’ and that the remedies proposed were ridiculous, it did not take much, in my case the profound political vision of “Père Hours,” for us to explore what lay behind the wooly-minded slogans of the Catholic Church and rapidly convert to Marxism before joining the Communist Party!” (Althusser 1994b, 205; 1992, 197).

⁴Other comments carry on the same pattern. For instance, see his distancing of the Church as a medieval institution in his discussions of Montesquieu (1977, 21; 1959, 10) and Machiavelli (1999, 69).

⁵For Althusser, Utopian socialist doctrine “proposes socialist goals for human action … based on non-scientific principles, deriving from religious, moral or juridical, i.e. ideological principles” (1990, 3; see further 1977, 225 n. 6; 1965, 231–2 n. 6).

⁶Along with ethics, law, politics, and aesthetics, religion is one of the “practical ideologies” (1971, 18; 1998, 152–3). As for practical ideologies, they “are complex formations which shape notions-representations-images into behaviour-conduct-attitude-gestures. The ensemble functions as practical norms that govern the attitude and concrete positions men adopt towards the real objects and real problems of their social and individual existence, and towards their history” (1990, 83).

⁷The contrast with the “Ideological State Apparatuses” essay and the discussion of ideology in “Marxism and Humanism” (1969, 221–47; 1965, 225–49) couldn't be sharper, for in the latter essay the pages devoted to ideology (1969, 231–6; 1965 238–43) mention most of his main points without any reference to the Church.

⁸See, for instance, the glancing comments of Ricoeur (1994, 64), Barrett (1991, 101), Pepper (1995), Montag (1995), Rushdy (1992), and Albiac (1998).

⁹In fact, in “Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation: Ideology and Ideological Struggle” (1990, 1–42), Althusser argues that religion is the first form of ideology (25), after which moral, juridical, aesthetic, political, and philosophical forms appear.

¹⁰In this respect, I would merely be replicating the detailed biography of Moulier Boutang (1992, especially 99–171).