This is a chapter that forms part of a larger whole, originally written in French. The quotations refer to French sources, with some exceptions.
It was with what the Marxist intellectuals of the 1970s considered to be
the residues of bourgeois ideology that the mature Marx was to break
away, by developing a science that was to account history and its logic at a
structural level. Althusser sees in Marx’s work an effort to found a
scientific theory of history, free of all the humanist presuppositions that
make positive knowledge of the social world and its revolutionary
transformation impossible.1 For Althusser, Marx’s work is divided into two
periods, that of the young Marx imbued with Feuerbachian humanism, and
that of the mature Marx who founded a scientific theory of history. I shall
try to show that, on this precise point, Althusser’s point of view accords
well with anarchist thought.