Alex Hochuli
posted 20 June 2007

Louis Althusser strangled his wife. He was judged to have been mentally unstable at the time and so was only committed to a psychiatric hospital. Following his release he secluded himself, emerging only to produce an autobiography. Then he died.

Subtitled ‘Montesquieu; Rousseau; Marx’, Politics and History is composed of three distinct (and separately conceived) essays on each of the three thinkers, the first two forming the bulk of the work. Sections on Montesquieu and Rousseau concern themselves primarily with each thinker’s major work of political theory, The Spirit of Laws and The Social Contract, respectively. Surveying Althusser’s work, this reviewer is tempted, out of courtesy to the reader, to relay what the French Marxist philosopher himself says; to seize Althusser’s understanding of Montesquieu and Rousseau and simply pass it on. Like any game of Chinese whispers, though, something would be lost on the way. To convey my understanding of a theorist’s understanding of other theorists’ understanding of the world is, to me, just too many degrees of separation. Suffice, perhaps, to recommend you just click on the link above and buy the book, appending a note of the type you find on many university level textbooks: ‘Suitable for students of politics and the general public’.

But then, that’s not quite enough. Indeed, it’s a cop-out. ‘Write a review? For you? Why don’t you just read the book yourself and tell me what you think?’ That doesn’t work. And then there is a further issue: this is not a new publication. Politics and History was initially published, as a collection of three essays translated into English, in 1972 (the French originals predating it by at least a decade). The problem then is not only how to engage with a writer’s critique of other writers – a challenge, sure, but surmountable – but to interpret it in an original way. To find the key to unlock Althusser’s critique of Montesquieu, Rousseau and Marx in 2007, we must look beyond the book itself.

Why has this work been re-published? The series title indicates that somebody here should be a ‘radical thinker’. But it’s not Althusser – that’s seeing only the wood, and no trees. We need to look at the smaller picture. The reason Althusser, the real Althusser, ducks and dives throughout the work, presenting his unvarnished thoughts at only a few key instances, is that he is not ‘the radical thinker’. He is deliberately inconspicuous through much of the book. His work is an attempt to examine what makes a truly radical thinker. In a time when relevance is paramount, here’s why this matters to you, Mr and Ms General-Public-and-not-student-of-political-theory.

Montesquieu presents himself as radical by seeking to examine not essences, but laws. ‘The objects of this work are the Laws, the various customs, and manners, of all the nations on earth,’ says Montesquieu (via Althusser) contra thinkers who preceded him and reflected ‘not on the totality of concrete facts but either on some of them or on society in general’. Montesquieu presents us with a genuine revolution in method, then. But, when it comes to an engagement with the structure of French society in the mid-18th century, we learn from Althusser (and only at the very end of his section on Montesquieu) that Montesquieu’s was not an objective analysis of French politics and society, but rather, his detailing of the power struggles between crown, court and the emerging bourgeoisie amounted to little more than a defence of his own class interests. His counsel, that the absolute power of the monarch be tempered by the aristocracy so as to ward against despotism, would in reality serve only as a buffer between the seat of ultimate power, Versailles, and the toiling masses.

So, in spite of his contribution to scholarship as a father of modern political science, and the censure that l’Esprit des Lois attracted upon publication, Montesquieu was not very radical at all. Next we have Rousseau – ‘taking men as they are and laws as they might be’ – who, if only at a rhetorical level, sounds far more radical than the aristocratic Président de Parlement of Bordeaux who precedes him. In The Social Contract, Rousseau reveals himself to be a truly original thinker, making radical conceptual leaps so as to overcome inherent contradictions (‘Discrepancies’, of which Althusser identifies four) in his contractual theory. These include the question of how individuals can make a pact with the community, in order to protect the liberties of each with the force of all, if there is no pre-existing entity (‘the community’) with which to make that compact. In itself, Rousseau’s is a radical, inspired theory of how man, civilised man, can become truly free. Althusser’s reading of it, as with Montesquieu, allows the original genius to shine through, while at the same time getting to the heart of the theory, unpicking tensions and contradictions. Again, Althusser appears after 40-odd pages of leading the reader by the hand through Rousseau’s thought, to assert why the latter can not be the truly radical thinker he aspires to be. All other apparent contradictions aside, where Rousseau’s Social Contract really falls down is in its attempt to prohibit ‘intermediary associations’.

Rousseau’s theory relies on equal and autonomous individuals acting and voting beyond their immediate, particular interests. This, Althusser alleges, necessitates either a recourse to religion which impels individuals to act morally (a too fragile edifice) or a regression to a feudal economy of autonomous economic actors (eg the independent artisan). Neither is possible or desirable, and so Rousseau’s theory crashes to the ground, as there is nothing to prevent the individual from pursuing, not the general will, but the interests of ‘intermediary groups’ – associations greater than the individual but smaller than the community with which each individual has made a contract. Class-based politics are thus prohibited. And yet, for Althusser, they are crucial to the equality to which Rousseau aspires.

Thus, Montesquieu’s and Rousseau’s supposed claims to bear the standard of radicalism are invalidated – Montesquieu for ignoring the masses altogether in his attempt to protect against despotism; Rousseau for being impracticable. So where does that leave ‘radical thinking’? Well, a bit predictably, with Marx. Which is exactly what we get in the concluding section of Politics and History, in which Althusser, taking Marx’s understanding of Hegel as his starting point, concludes that, rather than Montesquieu, it was Marx who founded a true science of history. This, against intuition, is actually the least convincing section of the three. Gone is the detached stance of the scholar. The real Althusser has stood up. He uses a much-too-short space (less than half the length given to Rousseau, a quarter of the length given to Montesquieu) to explicate what is, theoretically, the most complex of the three. Much of the space is used to beat the more humanistic strands in Marxism, dismissing ‘human potential’ as ignoring the great laws of history.

So, again, in the spirit of the times, why is this relevant? In a world-historical context in which, despite hyperbolic claims about the world speeding up, it seems that the wheels of history have slowed down, this sort of historical thinking should be welcomed. A re-examination of thinkers who strove to change history through an examination of society would be no bad thing today. Whether one subscribes to the now-deceased Althusser’s now-deceased project or not, his attempt to identify what makes a thinker radical deserves serious consideration; and the book is indeed ultimately worthy of inclusion in this Verso series. The challenge seems to be, in the face of all manner of structural limitations to human action on the one hand, and platitudes that ‘your choices matter’ on the other, to resist having ‘radical thinkers redux’ as all the the future has to offer.