Lessons on Rousseau

The discovery of these Lectures on Rousseau is one of the true miracles that occurred in the restitution of Althusser’s posthumous legacy. They are beautifully transcribed and edited by Yves Vargas, an auditor to the lectures and himself a great Rousseau scholar. Not only do they add unexpected developments to the already celebrated Rousseau-interpretation by the Marxist philosopher, they fill a gap in the understanding of the sources of his late philosophy of “aleatory materialism”. Their reading will be a pleasure and an inspiration. – Etienne Balibar, co-author of Reading Capital

Louis Althusser was born in Algeria in 1918 and died in France in 1990. He taught philosophy for many years at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and was a leading intellectual in the French Communist Party. His books include For Marx; Reading Capital (with Etienne Balibar); Essays in Ideology; Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx; Machiavelli and Us; and The Spectre of Hegel.