Louis Althusser’s Assessment of Early Marx and the Epistemological Break

The Transition from Young Marx to Mature Marx
Louis Althusser’s interpretation of Karl Marx is marked by a fundamental distinction between the early writings of Marx and the theoretical work that emerged from the mid-1840s onward. In For Marx and Reading Capital, Althusser develops the argument that Marx’s intellectual development cannot be understood simply as a gradual accumulation of ideas. Instead, he identifies a decisive theoretical transformation, which he describes through the concept of an epistemological break.








