Born in Birmandreis, Algeria, Althusser later served in the French military during World War II and spent five years in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Following the war, Althusser studied philosophy at the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, where he later also taught as a professor. He joined the French Communist Party in 1948 and became widely known for his contributions to the theoretical debates concerning Marxism during the 1960s and 1970s. His major works include For Marx (1965) and Reading Capital (1968). Althusser's popularity declined in the early 1980s when he was confined to a psychiatric institution for three years after strangling his wife in 1980.

Althusser's Marxist theory was influenced by structuralism, which views social and cultural structures as complex systems of differentially related elements organized according to their own specific rules. For Althusser, structuralist Marxism differs from traditional Marxism in two significant respects: It is antihumanist and antieconomist. First, according to Althusser, Humanism privileges the notion of an individual subject or consciousness that precedes social experience and action. However, Marx's work demonstrated that consciousness is determined primarily by class location and social conflicts associated with the prevailing mode of production. Thus, Althusser insists that social structures should not be considered as the intentional products of subjects who possess a pregiven human nature, but that human subjects are produced by existing social conditions. In particular, ideology plays a fundamental role as a determining force shaping consciousness. The dominant capitalist mode of production reproduces itself, for example, by forming individuals with an ideological consciousness appropriate to the social division of labor and to the desires and habits of material consumption and accumulation. In other words, individual human behavior becomes an effect rather than a simple cause of the existing social structure in which it is located, even though the ideological framework leads individuals to consider themselves as self-determining agents.

Second, Althusser rejected economic determinism, or "economism," the conventional Marxist doctrine of the economic system being the most important driving force in determining the organization of society and its political, legal, and cultural components. Althusser argued instead that the structure of society consists of relatively autonomous levels (the ideological, political, cultural, and so forth) that can function and can be analyzed, independent of the economic system. Each level functions as a mode of production whose fundamental characteristics distinguish it from other levels. One consequence of Althusser's argument was a challenge to the Marxist theory of Historical Materialism, according to which, historical progress is necessarily determined by economic conflict between the ruling class and the oppressed classes of each form of society. Such a straightforward account of historical progress is surely misleading, Althusser suggested, given the "interpellation" of ideology and the relative autonomy of science, religion, law, education, and other ideological state apparatuses. Nevertheless, Althusser's critique was tempered by his claims that the "effectivity" of the relatively autonomous levels of society is, in the end, determined by the economy and that the later Marx himself recognized the complexity of historical change following a radical "epistemological break" with his early humanistic theory.

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