Louis Althusser was a Marxist philosopher. After spending most of World War II in a German prison camp, he became a tutor in philosophy at France's elite École normale supérieure, where he taught for the rest of his career. In 1948, he joined the Communist Party. Influenced in part by the structuralist movement, which dominated French thought in the 1960s, he published a series of highly influential studies of the philosophy of Karl Marx. Althusser suffered from bipolar disorder throughout his life. In 1980, he killed his wife, who had been his companion for thirty years. He was declared unfit to plead to the crime on grounds of mental irresponsibility.

It is Althusser's theories of ideology that have proved most influential in the study of consumer ...