France – From Kojève to Althusser
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Recapitulation: The French Hegel Renaissance (1930s-1950s)
Before we turn to Althusser, a brief look back at the French reception of Hegel, which we presented in detail in Chapter 6:[1]
Alexandre Kojève (1902-1968) gave his famous Hegel lectures in Paris from 1933 to 1939. His thesis: Hegel’s Phenomenology is anthropology – the history of humanity as a struggle for recognition. The “master-slave dialectic” is central: the human being becomes human through labor and struggle.
Kojève interpreted Hegel existentially: self-consciousness constitutes itself through negation – negation of nature (labor), negation of the other (struggle). This negation is freedom. History is the process in which freedom asserts itself – and with Napoleon/Hegel it is completed (the “end of history”).[2]
Jean Hyppolite (1907-1968) translated Hegel’s Phenomenology into French (1939/1941) and wrote a monumental commentary (1946). His reading was more phenomenological than Kojève’s – closer to Husserl, less Marxist.[3]
Jean Wahl (1888-1974) emphasized Hegel’s unhappy consciousness – the experience of being torn apart, of non-reconciliation. Against the optimistic reading (Kojève: history is complete), Wahl set: consciousness remains torn, reconciliation is precarious.[4]
These three – Kojève, Hyppolite, Wahl – shaped an entire generation of French intellectuals: Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Bataille, and later Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Twentieth-century French philosophy is unthinkable without Hegel.
Louis Althusser (1918-1990) – The Anti-Humanist Marx
Louis Althusser broke radically with this tradition. His message: forget Hegel! The Marx that matters is the anti-Hegelian Marx.[5]
Who was Althusser?
Althusser was born in Algeria in 1918, studied in Paris, and became a teacher at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) – the elite school for philosophers – in 1948. He was a member of the PCF (from 1948 onward), orthodox but intellectually brilliant.
Personally, Althusser’s life was tragic: he suffered from severe depression and was repeatedly hospitalized for psychiatric treatment. In 1980, in a psychotic episode, he killed his wife Hélène – he was declared not criminally responsible and committed to a psychiatric institution. He spent his final years in the shadow of this act.[6]
But in the 1960s, Althusser was the dominant figure of French Marxism.
The main work: For Marx and Reading Capital (1965)
In 1965 Althusser published two books simultaneously: Pour Marx (For Marx) and Lire Le Capital (Reading Capital, co-written with his students Balibar, Rancière, and Macherey).[7]
The central thesis: there is an “epistemological break” between the young Marx (up to around 1845) and the mature Marx (from 1845 on, especially Capital, 1867).
The young Marx: still Hegelian, humanist, idealist. He speaks of “alienation,” “the essence of man,” “species-being.” This is philosophy – speculative, not scientific.
The mature Marx: breaks with Hegel, develops science. No longer humanism (what is the human being?), but structural analysis (how does capitalism function?). No longer subject (the alienated worker), but structure (relations of production, class struggle, surplus value).
Althusser’s point: Hegel is not Marx’s precursor but his opponent. Marx became Marx by discarding Hegel.
The critique of Hegel
Althusser leveled three charges against Hegel:
1. Idealism: Hegel’s system is “the history of ideas” – the World Spirit unfolds itself. But reality does not consist of ideas but of material relations (economy, forces of production, class struggles).
2. Teleology: Hegel claims that history has a goal (absolute knowledge, freedom). But this is mystification. History has no goal – it is a process without a subject, driven by contradictory structures.
3. Humanism: Hegel’s philosophy is anthropocentric – the human being as subject who realizes itself. But “man” is not a substance but an effect of structures (ideology, relations of production). There is no “essence of man” – only historically specific forms of subjectivity.
Althusser’s formula: “History is a process without a subject.” This is anti-Hegelian: not the World Spirit, not the human being, not the class as conscious subject – but structural contradictions drive history.
The influence – and the criticism
Althusser’s work exploded onto the scene: within a few years he became internationally influential. Particularly among:
1. The student movement (1968): Althusser supplied theoretical ammunition against “humanist” Marxism (Sartre, Garaudy). Students read: not subject-philosophy, but structural critique. Not alienation, but class struggle.
2. Maoism: Althusser’s “anti-humanist” Marx fit the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) – radical critique of bureaucracy, of “revisionism,” of humanism.
3. Post-structuralism: Foucault, Deleuze, and later Derrida – all read Althusser. The idea that structures precede the subject, that the subject is an effect rather than a cause, shaped French philosophy for decades to come.
But criticism came quickly:
1. Too dogmatic: Althusser remained a PCF member and defended (with reservations) the Soviet Union. This was hard to sustain after 1968 (the Prague Spring!).
2. Too structuralist: The question arose: if there is no subject, then who makes revolution? If history is a “process without a subject” – why struggle at all? Althusser’s own students (Rancière, Balibar) broke with him because they could not answer this question.[8]
3. The “epistemological break” is questionable: Is the young Marx really so Hegelian? Is the mature Marx really so anti-Hegelian? Research shows: Marx remained dialectical throughout his life – less mechanically materialist and more Hegelian than Althusser admitted.[9]
Systematic assessment
Althusser grasped something important: Marx is not a humanist in the sense of “the human being has a fixed essence that has been alienated.” Marx shows that the “essence” of the human being is historically variable – it changes with the relations of production.
But Althusser exaggerated: one cannot excise Hegel from Marx altogether. Marx’s Capital is dialectically structured – the development from commodity to capital follows logical structures that Hegel had explicated (from abstract to concrete, from simple to complex, mediated through contradictions).
The lesson: neither simply “Marx = Hegel materialized” (too simplistic), nor “Marx against Hegel” (mistaken). Rather: Marx transforms Hegel – retaining the method while changing the object.
Note: Althusser will reappear in Chapter 18a, within the systematic treatment of structuralism.
Lucien Sève (b. 1926) – Against Althusser: Humanism Is Necessary
Lucien Sève was Althusser’s rival within the PCF. He too was a party member, he too a philosopher – but he defended humanism against Althusser’s “structuralism.”[10]
The main work: Marxism and the Theory of Personality (1969)
Sève’s most important book, Marxisme et théorie de la personnalité (1969), engages with psychology and pedagogy, and implicitly with Althusser.[11]
His thesis: Marxism needs a theory of personality – how do people develop? How do they become subjects? How do they learn, act, change?
Althusser had said: there is no subject, only structures. Sève says: no. Human beings are not merely effects of structures – they are agents who act, learn, and develop. Without a subject there is no practice; without practice there is no revolution.
The Hegel connection
Sève draws on Hegel – particularly on the theory of formation (Bildung). In the Phenomenology, Hegel shows that consciousness develops through labor and recognition. The bondsman becomes self-conscious through labor – not automatically, but through effort, through formation.
Sève applies this: human beings develop through social practice – labor, education, cooperation. This practice shapes personality. But personality is not passive (an effect of structures) but active (it shapes itself).
This is directed against Althusser: the human being is not merely structured but self-structuring. Not merely a product, but also a producer.
The impact
Sève was less influential than Althusser – not as brilliant, not as radical. But he was more important systematically: his theory is more coherent, closer to Marx, more open to practice.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991), Sève remained active – he wrote on ethics, on communism in the twenty-first century. He did not die (he is still alive as of 2025), remaining productive into old age.
In detail in Volume 2.1, Chapter 3. Here only a recapitulation for context. ↩︎
Alexandre Kojève: Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (1947), Paris: Gallimard. ↩︎
Jean Hyppolite: Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Paris: Aubier, 1946. ↩︎
Jean Wahl: Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (1929), Paris: Rieder. ↩︎
On Althusser: Gregory Elliott: Althusser: The Detour of Theory, London: Verso, 1987; Ted Benton: The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism, London: Macmillan, 1984. ↩︎
Althusser himself: L’avenir dure longtemps (1992, posthumous), Paris: Stock - autobiographical reflection. ↩︎
Louis Althusser: For Marx, Paris: Maspero, 1965. Louis Althusser et al.: Reading Capital, Paris: Maspero, 1965. ↩︎
Jacques Rancière: La leçon d’Althusser (1974), Paris: Gallimard - a sharp reckoning with Althusser. ↩︎
See e.g. Michael Heinrich: Wie das Marxsche Kapital lesen?, Stuttgart: Schmetterling, 2008 - shows that Marx’s Capital is structurally Hegelian. ↩︎
On Sève: [## TODO: GAP: Little Western secondary literature.] ↩︎
Lucien Sève: Marxisme et théorie de la personnalité, Paris: Éditions sociales, 1969. ↩︎