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Althusser, Louis
Louis Althusser was born in October 1918 near Algiers. A devout Catholic in his youth, he founded a student Christian movement and even considered a religious vocation. He was called up for military service in September 1939, and in June 1940, was taken prisoner-of-war, spending the rest of World War II in a German prison camp. After the war, he became a tutor in philosophy at France’s elite university the École normale supérieure, where he remained for the rest of his career. In October 1948, like many French intellectuals of the period, Althusser joined the Communist Party. Throughout the 1960s, he published a series of highly influential studies of the philosophy of Karl Marx, collected in For Marx (1965) and Reading Capital (1965). Censured for ...
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