Althusser’s famous essay “Ideology and the Ideological Apparatus of the State” was published in French in the journal La Pensée in 1970 and first translated into English by Ben Brewster for the collection Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: New Left Books, 1971). The essay was regarded by Althusser as preliminary, and subtitled “Notes towards an Investigation”, but it became immediately influential on Leftist thought and its revisions to Marxist theories of ideology are apparent in much cultural theory of the following decades.
In this essay Althusser recalled attention to Marx’s idea that a primary necessity for any social system was the “reproduction of the conditions of production” (…
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Citation: Clark, Robert. "Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d'état". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 October 2010 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=30740, accessed 23 November 2024.]