In 1980, at the end of the most intensely political period of his work and life, Louis Althusser penned Philosophy for Non-philosophers. Available here for the first time in English, Philosophy for Non-philosophers constitutes a rigorous and engaged attempt to address a wide reading public unfamiliar with Althusser's project. As such, the work is a concentration of the most fundamental theses of Althusser's own ideas, and presents a synthesis of his sprawling and disparate philosophical and political writings. Nowhere else does Althusser push the distinction between philosophy and other disciplines as far, or develop in such detail the concept of 'practice'.

Rather than a work of 'popular philosophy', Philosophy for Non-philosophers is a continuation and conglomeration of Althusser's thought; a thought whose radicality is still perceptible in those that have followed since. Philosophy for Non-philosophers thus provides a vivid encapsulation of Althusser's seminal influence on the leading thinkers of today, including Ranciere, Badiou, Balibar, and Žižek.

Louis Althusser was a prominent French philosopher of the late twentieth century. His works include seminal writings on Marx, and the relation between post-war Marxist thought and other emerging discourses across the humanities (namely, structuralism). His works include, For Marx and Reading Capital.

G. M. Goshgarian translates fiction and philosophy from French, German and Armenian into English. He is the editor and translator of two recent collections of the work of Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Philosophy of the Encounter. He divides his time between Paris, Berlin, and Yerevan.

Introduction by Warren Montag

1. What Non-philosophers Say

2. Philosophy and Religion

THE BIG DETOUR

3. Abstraction

4. Technical Abstraction and Scientific Abstraction

5. Philosophical Abstraction

6. The Myth of the State of Nature

7. What is Practice?

8. The Practice of Production

9. Scientific Practice and Idealism

10. Scientific Practice and Materialism

11. Ideological Practice

12. The Ideological State Apparatuses

13. Political Practice

14. Psychoanalytic Practice

15. Artistic Practice

16. Philosophical Practice

17. Dominant Ideology and Philosophy

18. Philosophy as Theoretical Laboratory

19. Ideology and Philosophy

20. Philosophy and the Science of Class Struggle

21. A New Practice of Philosophy

22. The Dialectic: Laws or Theses?

Index