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AbstractIn the past few years there has been a renewed interest in the work of Louis Althusser, although, in some cases, this interest has been one-sided, focusing mainly on his later writings on aleatory materialism. The three books reviewed in this article, however, offer balanced and insightful overviews of the totality of Althusser's work, placing it in the wider context of Marxist political and theoretical debates and stressing both its originality and strengths, but also its contradictions.

In For Althusser, Etienne Balibar (U of Paris, France) offers a eulogy, praising Althusser's contributions to Marxism & philosophy & illuminating aspects of his troubled personal life. With its style of presentation, subject, & its theoretical complexity, Althusser's For Marx (New York: Random House, 1970) is lauded as his greatest achievement, & is viewed as the major Marxist contribution to cultural criticism in the latter half of the twentieth century. Althusser is extolled for being both a philosopher & a communist, without subordinating the one to the other. In Althusser's Contribution, Stephen Resnick (U of Massachusetts, Amherst) & Richard Wolff explore Althusser's contribution to social theory, & discuss his epistemology of overdetermination, which posed key problems for Marxian orthodoxies, resulting in a theory that posited value & social change as emanations from diverse economic, political, cultural, & natural parts of life. Both articles eulogize Althusser as a consummate social theorist for whom the class struggle remained an abiding interest. W. Howard

Analyses of Louis Althusser's (eg, see Essays on Ideology, London: Verso, 1984) four primary achievements -- the concept of symptomatic reading, concepts of contradiction & overdetermination, the stress on the centrality of Karl Marx's Capital, & the theory of ideology -- lead to the conclusion that Althusser is integral to any theory that privileges concrete historical situations & contingency of dialectics. Thoughts are offered on Althusser's relevance for the advent of Gorbachevism in the USSR. 17 References. L. Baker