Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx: Politics and History

In Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx: Politics and History, the groundbreaking Marxist/post-structuralist philosopher Louis Althusser provides unique appraisals of three major writers.

In the first two essays of this book, Althusser analyses the work of two of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment, whose thought is still the focus of contemporary controversy: Montesquieu and Rousseau. He shows that they made considerable advances towards establishing a science of politics, particularly in comparison with the theorists of natural law, although they remained the victims of the ideologies of their day and class.

Montesquieu accepted as given the political notions current in French absolutism, while Rousseau attempted to impose by moral conversion an already outdated mode of production.

The third essay examines Marx’s relationship to Hegel and elaborates on the discussions of this theme in Althusser’s earlier books, For Marx and Reading Capital. Althusser argues that Marx was able to establish a theory of historical materialism and the possibility of a Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism not simply by turning his back on Hegel, but by extracting and converting certain categories from Hegel’s Logic and applying them to English political economy and French socialist political theory.

[Note: ‘Montesquieu: Politics and History’ orig. published 1959; ‘Rousseau: The Social Contract’ orig. published 1968 (from 1965-66 lectures); ‘Marx’s Relation to Hegel’ orig. published 1970.]