LOUIS ALTHUSSER’S CRITIQUE OF THE POLITICAL THEORY

Abstract

The article analyzes various projects of hybridization of materialism and political theory in one conceptual system. Special attention is paid to the critical analysis of the phenomenon of economic materialism of the nineteenth century, which for a long time remained the only example of a materialistic analysis of politics. The subsequent development of materialism that became a new limit of economic determinism, put new problems in the context of the capabilities of materialistic policy. The author proposes to follow the argument of the French philosopher Louis Althusser as a philosophy of aleatory materialism created by the thinker himself, including to substantiate the variations of materialistic understanding of the political. The article consistently disassembled the prerequisites for the crisis of the Marxist economic interpretation of history, which, at the original stage of its own formation, had extremely few common with philosophical materialism. The further struggle of new materialists with the idea of a universal explanatory principle ultimately allowed them to create a new type of philosophical knowledge that is not related to the idea of universal history. The focus in this case is chained to the political aspect of Althusser's Materialism regarding the theory of conjuncture as a genuine object of any materialistic politics. Finally, the author compares aleatory materialism with a number of other directions of post-modern materialistic ontology, whose representatives direct their own criticism towards the anthropological component of the political theory, which, however, leads to the denial of this discipline in principle. Thus, it is Althuserianism that in couple with Schmitterism, are the only examples of a successful project to create a materialistic theory of politics. 

Keywords:

materialism, aleatory materialism, political theory, сontingency, economism, Marxism, Althussser, Althuserianism, political