Louis Althusser 1970
“Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays
Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses
(Notes towards an Investigation)
First published: in La Pensée, 1970;
Translated: from the French by Ben Brewster;
Source: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Monthly Review Press 1971;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
On the Reproduction of the Conditions of Production[1]
I must now expose more fully something which was briefly glimpsed in my analysis when I spoke of the
necessity to renew the means of production if production is to be possible. That was a passing hint. Now I
shall consider it for itself.
As Marx said, every child knows that a social formation which did not reproduce the conditions of
production at the same time as it produced would not last a year. [2] The ultimate condition of production is
therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production. This may be ‘simple’ (reproducing exactly the
previous conditions of production) or ‘on an extended scale’ (expanding them). Let us ignore this last
distinction for the moment.
What, then, is the reproduction of the conditions of production?
Here we are entering a domain which is both very familiar (since Capital Volume Two) and uniquely
ignored. The tenacious obviousnesses (ideological obviousnesses of an empiricist type) of the point of view
of production alone, or even of that of mere productive practice (itself abstract in relation to the process of
production) are so integrated into our everyday ‘consciousness’ that it is extremely hard, not to say almost
impossible, to raise oneself to the point of view of reproduction. Nevertheless, everything outside this point
of view remains abstract (worse than one-sided: distorted) – even at the level of production, and, a fortiori,
at that of mere practice.
Let us try and examine the matter methodically.
To simplify my exposition, and assuming that every social formation arises from a dominant mode of
production, I can say that the process of production sets to work the existing productive forces in and under
definite relations of production.
It follows that, in order to exist, every social formation must reproduce the conditions of its production at
the same time as it produces, and in order to be able to produce. It must therefore reproduce:
1. the productive forces,
2. the existing relations of production.
Reproduction of the Means of Production
Everyone (including the bourgeois economists whose work is national accounting, or the modern ‘macroeconomic’ ‘theoreticians’) now recognizes, because Marx compellingly proved it in Capital Volume Two,
that no production is possible which does not allow for the reproduction of the material conditions of
production: the reproduction of the means of production.
The average economist, who is no different in this than the average capitalist, knows that each year it is
essential to foresee what is needed to replace what has been used up or worn out in production: raw
material, fixed installations (buildings), instruments of production (machines), etc. I say the average
economist = the average capitalist, for they both express the point of view of the firm, regarding it as
sufficient simply to give a commentary on the terms of the firm’s financial accounting practice.
But thanks to the genius of Quesnay who first posed this ‘glaring’ problem, and to the genius of Marx who
resolved it, we know that the reproduction of the material conditions of production cannot be thought at the
level of the firm, because it does not exist at that level in its real conditions. What happens at the level of
the firm is an effect, which only gives an idea of the necessity of reproduction, but absolutely fails to allow
its conditions and mechanisms to be thought.
A moment’s reflection is enough to be convinced of this: Mr X, a capitalist who produces woollen yarn in
his spinning-mill, has to ‘reproduce’ his raw material, his machines, etc. But he does not produce them for
his own production – other capitalists do: an Australian sheep farmer, Mr Y, a heavy engineer producing
machine-tools, Mr Z, etc., etc. And Mr Y and Mr Z, in order to produce those products which are the
condition of the reproduction of Mr X’s conditions of production, also have to reproduce the conditions of
their own production, and so on to infinity – the whole in proportions such that, on the national and even
the world market, the demand for means of production (for reproduction) can be satisfied by the supply.
In order to think this mechanism, which leads to a kind of ‘endless chain’, it is necessary to follow Marx’s
‘global’ procedure, and to study in particular the relations of the circulation of capital between Department
I (production of means of production) and Department II (production of means of consumption), and the
realization of surplus value, in Capital, Volumes Two and Three.
We shall not go into the analysis of this question. It is enough to have mentioned the existence of the
necessity of the reproduction of the material conditions of production.
Reproduction of Labour-Power
However, the reader will not have failed to note one thing. We have discussed the reproduction of the
means of production – but not the reproduction of the productive forces. We have therefore ignored the
reproduction of what distinguishes the productive forces from the means of production, i.e. the
reproduction of labour power.
From the observation of what takes place in the firm, in particular from the examination of the financial
accounting practice which predicts amortization and investment, we have been able to obtain an
approximate idea of the existence of the material process of reproduction, but we are now entering a
domain in which the observation of what happens in the firm is, if not totally blind, at least almost entirely
so, and for good reason: the reproduction of labour power takes place essentially outside the firm.
How is the reproduction of labour power ensured?
It is ensured by giving labour power the material means with which to reproduce itself: by wages. Wages
feature in the accounting of each enterprise, but as ‘wage capital’, [3] not at all as a condition of the material
reproduction of labour power.
However, that is in fact how it ‘works’, since wages represents only that part of the value produced by the
expenditure of labour power which is indispensable for its reproduction: so indispensable to the
reconstitution of the labour power of the wage-earner (the wherewithal to pay for housing, food and
clothing, in short to enable the wage earner to present himself again at the factory gate the next day – and
every further day God grants him); and we should add: indispensable for raising and educating the children
in whom the proletarian reproduces himself (in n models where n = 0, 1, 2, etc....) as labour power.
Remember that this quantity of value (wages) necessary for the reproduction of labour power is determined
not by the needs of a ‘biological’ Guaranteed Minimum Wage (Salaire Minimum Interprofessionnel
Garanti) alone, but by the needs of a historical minimum (Marx noted that English workers need beer while
French proletarians need wine) – i.e. a historically variable minimum.
I should also like to point out that this minimum is doubly historical in that it is not defined by the historical
needs of the working class ‘recognized’ by the capitalist class, but by the historical needs imposed by the
proletarian class struggle (a double class struggle: against the lengthening of the working day and against
the reduction of wages).
However, it is not enough to ensure for labour power the material conditions of its reproduction if it is to be
reproduced as labour power. I have said that the available labour power must be ‘competent’, i.e. suitable to
be set to work in the complex system of the process of production. The development of the productive
forces and the type of unity historically constitutive of the productive forces at a given moment produce the
result that the labour power has to be (diversely) skilled and therefore reproduced as such. Diversely:
according to the requirements of the socio-technical division of labour, its different ‘jobs’ and ‘posts’.
How is this reproduction of the (diversified) skills of labour power provided for in a capitalist regime?
Here, unlike social formations characterized by slavery or serfdom this reproduction of the skills of labour
power tends (this is a tendential law) decreasingly to be provided for ‘on the spot’ (apprenticeship within
production itself), but is achieved more and more outside production: by the capitalist education system,
and by other instances and institutions.
What do children learn at school? They go varying distances in their studies, but at any rate they learn to
read, to write and to add – i.e. a number of techniques, and a number of other things as well, including
elements (which may be rudimentary or on the contrary thoroughgoing) of ‘scientific’ or ‘literary culture’,
which are directly useful in the different jobs in production (one instruction for manual workers, another for
technicians, a third for engineers, a final one for higher management, etc.). Thus they learn know-how.
But besides these techniques and knowledges, and in learning them, children at school also learn the ‘rules’
of good behaviour, i.e. the attitude that should be observed by every agent in the division of labour,
according to the job he is ‘destined’ for: rules of morality, civic and professional conscience, which
actually means rules of respect for the socio-technical division of labour and ultimately the rules of the
order established by class domination. They also learn to ‘speak proper French’, to ‘handle’ the workers
correctly, i.e. actually (for the future capitalists and their servants) to ‘order them about’ properly, i.e.
(ideally) to ‘speak to them’ in the right way, etc.
To put this more scientifically, I shall say that the reproduction of labour power requires not only a
reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the
established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a
reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and
repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class ‘in words’.
In other words, the school (but also other State institutions like the Church, or other apparatuses like the
Army) teaches ‘know-how’, but in forms which ensure subjection to the ruling ideology or the mastery of
its ‘practice’. All the agents of production, exploitation and repression, not to speak of the ‘professionals of
ideology’ (Marx), must in one way or another be ‘steeped’ in this ideology in order to perform their tasks
‘conscientiously’ – the tasks of the exploited (the proletarians), of the exploiters (the capitalists), of the
exploiters’ auxiliaries (the managers), or of the high priests of the ruling ideology (its ‘functionaries’), etc.
The reproduction of labour power thus reveals as its sine qua non not only the reproduction of its ‘skills’
but also the reproduction of its subjection to the ruling ideology or of the ‘practice’ of that ideology, with
the proviso that it is not enough to say ‘not only but also’, for it is clear that it is in the forms and under the
forms of ideological subjection that provision is made for the reproduction of the skills of labour power.
But this is to recognize the effective presence of a new reality: ideology.
Here I shall make two comments.
The first is to round off my analysis of reproduction.
I have just given a rapid survey of the forms of the reproduction of the productive forces, i.e. of the means
of production on the one hand, and of labour power on the other.
But I have not yet approached the question of the reproduction of the relations of production. This is a
crucial question for the Marxist theory of the mode of production. To let it pass would be a theoretical
omission – worse, a serious political error.
I shall therefore discuss it. But in order to obtain the means to discuss it, I shall have to make another long
detour.
The second comment is that in order to make this detour, I am obliged to re-raise my old question: what is a
society?
Infrastructure and Superstructure
On a number of occasions[4] I have insisted on the revolutionary character of the Marxist conception of the
‘social whole’ insofar as it is distinct from the Hegelian ‘totality’. I said (and this thesis only repeats
famous propositions of historical materialism) that Marx conceived the structure of every society as
constituted by ‘levels’ or ‘instances’ articulated by a specific determination: the infrastructure, or economic
base (the ‘unity’ of the productive forces and the relations of production) and the superstructure, which
itself contains two ‘levels’ or ‘instances’: the politico-legal (law and the State) and ideology (the different
ideologies, religious, ethical, legal, political, etc.).
Besides its theoretico-didactic interest (it reveals the difference between Marx and Hegel), this
representation has the following crucial theoretical advantage: it makes it possible to inscribe in the
theoretical apparatus of its essential concepts what I have called their respective indices of effectivity. What
does this mean?
It is easy to see that this representation of the structure of every society as an edifice containing a base
(infrastructure) on which are erected the two ‘floors’ of the superstructure, is a metaphor, to be quite
precise, a spatial metaphor: the metaphor of a topography (topique).[5] Like every metaphor, this metaphor
suggests something, makes some thing visible. What? Precisely this: that the upper floors could not ‘stay
up’ (in the air) alone, if they did not rest precisely on their base.
Thus the object of the metaphor of the edifice is to represent above all the ‘determination in the last
instance’ by the economic base. The effect of this spatial metaphor is to endow the base with an index of
effectivity known by the famous terms: the determination in the last instance of what happens in the upper
‘floors’ (of the superstructure) by what happens in the economic base.
Given this index of effectivity ‘in the last instance’, the ‘floors’ of the superstructure are clearly endowed
with different indices of effectivity. What kind of indices?
It is possible to say that the floors of the superstructure are not determinant in the last instance, but that they
are determined by the effectivity of the base; that if they are determinant in their own (as yet undefined)
ways, this is true only insofar as they are determined by the base.
Their index of effectivity (or determination), as determined by the determination in the last instance of the
base, is thought by the Marxist tradition in two ways: (1) there is a ‘relative autonomy’ of the
superstructure with respect to the base; (2) there is a ‘reciprocal action’ of the superstructure on the base.
We can therefore say that the great theoretical advantage of the Marxist topography, i.e. of the spatial
metaphor of the edifice (base and superstructure) is simultaneously that it reveals that questions of
determination (or of index of effectivity) are crucial; that it reveals that it is the base which in the last
instance determines the whole edifice; and that, as a consequence, it obliges us to pose the theoretical
problem of the types of ‘derivatory’ effectivity peculiar to the superstructure, i.e. it obliges us to think what
the Marxist tradition calls conjointly the relative autonomy of the superstructure and the reciprocal action
of the superstructure on the base.
The greatest disadvantage of this representation of the structure of every society by the spatial metaphor of
an edifice, is obviously the fact that it is metaphorical: i.e. it remains descriptive.
It now seems to me that it is possible and desirable to represent things differently. NB, I do not mean by
this that I want to reject the classical metaphor, for that metaphor itself requires that we go beyond it. And I
am not going beyond it in order to reject it as outworn. I simply want to attempt to think what it gives us in
the form of a description.
I believe that it is possible and necessary to think what characterizes the essential of the existence and
nature of the superstructure on the basis of reproduction. Once one takes the point of view of reproduction,
many of the questions whose existence was indicated by the spatial metaphor of the edifice, but to which it
could not give a conceptual answer, are immediately illuminated.
My basic thesis is that it is not possible to pose these questions (and therefore to answer them) except from
the point of view of reproduction.
I shall give a short analysis of Law, the State and Ideology from this point of view. And I shall reveal what
happens both from the point of view of practice and production on the one hand, and from that of
reproduction on the other.
The State
The Marxist tradition is strict, here: in the Communist Manifesto and the Eighteenth Brumaire (and in all
the later classical texts, above all in Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune and Lenin’s on State and
Revolution), the State is explicitly conceived as a repressive apparatus. The State is a ‘machine’ of
repression, which enables the ruling classes (in the nineteenth century the bourgeois class and the ‘class’ of
big landowners) to ensure their domination over the working class, thus enabling the former to subject the
latter to the process of surplus-value extortion (i.e. to capitalist exploitation).
The State is thus first of all what the Marxist classics have called the State Apparatus. This term means: not
only the specialized apparatus (in the narrow sense) whose existence and necessity I have recognized in
relation to the requirements of legal practice, i.e. the police, the courts, the prisons; but also the army,
which (the proletariat has paid for this experience with its blood) intervenes directly as a supplementary
repressive force in the last instance, when the police and its specialized auxiliary corps are ‘outrun by
events’; and above this ensemble, the head of State, the government and the administration.
Presented in this form, the Marxist-Leninist ‘theory’ of the State has its finger on the essential point, and
not for one moment can there be any question of rejecting the fact that this really is the essential point. The
State Apparatus, which defines the State as a force of repressive execution and intervention ‘in the interests
of the ruling classes’ in the class struggle conducted by the bourgeoisie and its allies against the proletariat,
is quite certainly the State, and quite certainly defines its basic ‘function’.
From Descriptive Theory to Theory as such
Nevertheless, here too, as I pointed out with respect to the metaphor of the edifice (infrastructure and
superstructure), this presentation of the nature of the State is still partly descriptive.
As I shall often have occasion to use this adjective (descriptive), a word of explanation is necessary in order
to remove any ambiguity.
Whenever, in speaking of the metaphor of the edifice or of the Marxist ‘theory’ of the State, I have said that
these are descriptive conceptions or representations of their objects, I had no ulterior critical motives. On
the contrary, I have every grounds to think that great scientific discoveries cannot help but pass through the
phase of what I shall call descriptive ‘theory ‘. This is the first phase of every theory, at least in the domain
which concerns us (that of the science of social formations). As such, one might and in my opinion one
must – envisage this phase as a transitional one, necessary to the development of the theory. That it is
transitional is inscribed in my expression: ‘descriptive theory’, which reveals in its conjunction of terms the
equivalent of a kind of ‘contradiction’. In fact, the term theory ‘clashes’ to some extent with the adjective
‘descriptive’ which I have attached to it. This means quite precisely: (1) that the ‘descriptive theory’ really
is, without a shadow of a doubt, the irreversible beginning of the theory; but (2) that the ‘descriptive’ form
in which the theory is presented requires, precisely as an effect of this ‘contradiction’, a development of the
theory which goes beyond the form of ‘description’.
Let me make this idea clearer by returning to our present object: the State.
When I say that the Marxist ‘theory’ of the State available to us is still partly ‘descriptive’, that means first
and foremost that this descriptive ‘theory’ is without the shadow of a doubt precisely the beginning of the
Marxist theory of the State, and that this beginning gives us the essential point, i.e. the decisive principle of
every later development of the theory.
Indeed, I shall call the descriptive theory of the State correct, since it is perfectly possible to make the vast
majority of the facts in the domain with which it is concerned correspond to the definition it gives of its
object. Thus, the definition of the State as a class State, existing in the Repressive State Apparatus, casts a
brilliant light on all the facts observable in the various orders of repression whatever their domains: from
the massacres of June 1848 and of the Paris Commune, of Bloody Sunday, May 1905 in Petrograd, of the
Resistance, of Charonne, etc., to the mere (and relatively anodyne) interventions of a ‘censorship’ which
has banned Diderot’s La Réligieuse or a play by Gatti on Franco; it casts light on all the direct or indirect
forms of exploitation and extermination of the masses of the people (imperialist wars); it casts light on that
subtle everyday domination beneath which can be glimpsed, in the forms of political democracy, for
example, what Lenin, following Marx, called the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
And yet the descriptive theory of the State represents a phase in the constitution of the theory which itself
demands the ‘supersession’ of this phase. For it is clear that if the definition in question really does give us
the means to identify and recognize the facts of oppression by relating them to the State, conceived as the
Repressive State Apparatus, this ‘interrelationship’ gives rise to a very special kind of obviousness, about
which I shall have something to say in a moment: ‘Yes, that’s how it is, that’s really true!’ [6]
And the accumulation of facts within the definition of the State may multiply examples, but it does not
really advance the definition of the State, i.e. the scientific theory of the State. Every descriptive theory thus
runs the risk of ‘blocking’ the development of the theory, and yet that development is essential.
That is why I think that, in order to develop this descriptive theory into theory as such, i.e. in order to
understand further the mechanisms of the State in its functioning, I think that it is indispensable to add
something to the classical definition of the State as a State Apparatus.
The Essentials of the Marxist Theory of the State
Let me first clarify one important point: the State (and its existence in its apparatus) has no meaning except
as a function of State power. The whole of the political class struggle revolves around the State. By which I
mean around the possession, i.e. the seizure and conservation of State power by a certain class or by an
alliance between classes or class fractions. This first clarification obliges me to distinguish between State
power (conservation of State power or seizure of State power), the objective of the political class struggle
on the one hand, and the State Apparatus on the other.
We know that the State Apparatus may survive, as is proved by bourgeois ‘revolutions’ in nineteenthcentury France (1830, 1848), by coups d’état (2 December, May 1958), by collapses of the State (the fall of
the Empire in 1870, of the Third Republic in 1940), or by the political rise of the petty bourgeoisie (189095 in France), etc., without the State Apparatus being affected or modified: it may survive political events
which affect the possession of State power.
Even after a social revolution like that of 1917, a large part of the State Apparatus survived after the seizure
of State power by the alliance of the proletariat and the small peasantry: Lenin repeated the fact again and
again.
It is possible to describe the distinction between state power and state apparatus as part of the ‘Marxist
theory’ of the state, explicitly present since Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire and Class Struggles in France.
To summarize the ‘Marxist theory of the state’ on this point, it can be said that the Marxist classics have
always claimed that (1) the state is the repressive state apparatus, (2) state power and state apparatus must
be distinguished, (3) the objective of the class struggle concerns state power, and in consequence the use of
the state apparatus by the classes (or alliance of classes or of fractions of classes) holding state power as a
function of their class objectives, and (4) the proletariat must seize state power in order to destroy the
existing bourgeois state apparatus and, in a first phase, replace it with a quite different, proletarian, state
apparatus, then in later phases set in motion a radical process, that of the destruction of the state (the end of
state power, the end of every state apparatus).
In this perspective, therefore, what I would propose to add to the ‘Marxist theory’ of the state is already
there in so many words. But it seems to me that even with this supplement, this theory is still in part
descriptive, although it does now contain complex and differential elements whose functioning and action
cannot be understood without recourse to further supplementary theoretical development.
The State Ideological Apparatuses
Thus, what has to be added to the ‘Marxist theory’ of the state is something else.
Here we must advance cautiously in a terrain which, in fact, the Marxist classics entered long before us, but
without having systematized in theoretical form the decisive advances implied by their experiences and
procedures. Their experiences and procedures were indeed restricted in the main to the terrain of political
practice.
In fact, i.e. in their political practice, the Marxist classics treated the State as a more complex reality than
the definition of it given in the ‘Marxist theory of the state’, even when it has been supplemented as I have
just suggested. They recognized this complexity in their practice, but they did not express it in a
corresponding theory.[7]
I should like to attempt a very schematic outline of this corresponding theory. To that end, I propose the
following thesis.
In order to advance the theory of the State it is indispensable to take into account not only the distinction
between state power and state apparatus, but also another reality which is clearly on the side of the
(repressive) state apparatus, but must not be confused with it. I shall call this reality by its concept: the
Ideological State Apparatuses.
What are the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs)?
They must not be confused with the (repressive) State apparatus. Remember that in Marxist theory, the
State Apparatus (SA) contains: the Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the
Prisons, etc., which constitute what I shall in future call the Repressive State Apparatus. Repressive
suggests that the State Apparatus in question ‘functions by violence’ – at least ultimately (since repression,
e.g. administrative repression, may take non-physical forms).
I shall call Ideological State Apparatuses a certain number of realities which present themselves to the
immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions. I propose an empirical list of these
which will obviously have to be examined in detail, tested, corrected and re-organized. With all the
reservations implied by this requirement, we can for the moment regard the following institutions as
Ideological State Apparatuses (the order in which I have listed them has no particular significance):
 the religious ISA (the system of the different churches),
 the educational ISA (the system of the different public and private ‘schools’),
 the family ISA,[8]
 the legal ISA,[9]
 the political ISA (the political system, including the different parties),
 the trade-union ISA,
 the communications ISA (press, radio and television, etc.),
 the cultural ISA (literature, the arts, sports, etc.).
I have said that the ISAs must not be confused with the (Repressive) State Apparatus. What constitutes the
difference?
As a first moment, it is clear that while there is one (Repressive) State Apparatus, there is a plurality of
Ideological State Apparatuses. Even presupposing that it exists, the unity that constitutes this plurality of
ISAs as a body is not immediately visible.
As a second moment, it is clear that whereas the unified – (Repressive) State Apparatus belongs entirely to
the public domain, much the larger part of the Ideological State Apparatuses (in their apparent dispersion)
are part, on the contrary, of the private domain. Churches, Parties, Trade Unions, families, some schools,
most newspapers, cultural ventures, etc., etc., are private.
We can ignore the first observation for the moment. But someone is bound to question the second, asking
me by what right I regard as Ideological State Apparatuses, institutions which for the most part do not
possess public status, but are quite simply private institutions. As a conscious Marxist, Gramsci already
forestalled this objection in one sentence. The distinction between the public and the private is a distinction
internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law exercises its
‘authority’. The domain of the State escapes it because the latter is ‘above the law’: the State, which is the
State of the ruling class, is neither public nor private; on the contrary, it is the precondition for any
distinction between public and private. The same thing can be said from the starting-point of our State
Ideological Apparatuses. It is unimportant whether the institutions in which they are realized are ‘public’ or
‘private’. What matters is how they function. Private institutions can perfectly well ‘function’ as
Ideological State Apparatuses. A reasonably thorough analysis of any one of the ISAs proves it.
But now for what is essential. What distinguishes the ISAs from the (Repressive) State Apparatus is the
following basic difference: the Repressive State Apparatus functions ‘by violence’, whereas the Ideological
State Apparatuses function ‘by ideology’.
I can clarify matters by correcting this distinction. I shall say rather that every State Apparatus, whether
Repressive or Ideological, ‘functions’ both by violence and by ideology, but with one very important
distinction which makes it imperative not to confuse the Ideological State Apparatuses with the
(Repressive) State Apparatus.
This is the fact that the (Repressive) State Apparatus functions massively and predominantly by repression
(including physical repression), while functioning secondarily by ideology. (There is no such thing as a
purely repressive apparatus.) For example, the Army and the Police also function by ideology both to
ensure their own cohesion and reproduction, and in the ‘values’ they propound externally.
In the same way, but inversely, it is essential to say that for their part the Ideological State Apparatuses
function massively and predominantly by ideology, but they also function secondarily by repression, even if
ultimately, but only ultimately, this is very attenuated and concealed, even symbolic. (There is no such
thing as a purely ideological apparatus.) Thus Schools and Churches use suitable methods of punishment,
expulsion, selection, etc., to ‘discipline’ not only their shepherds, but also their flocks. The same is true of
the Family.... The same is true of the cultural IS Apparatus (censorship, among other things), etc.
Is it necessary to add that this determination of the double ‘functioning’ (predominantly, secondarily) by
repression and by ideology, according to whether it is a matter of the (Repressive) State Apparatus or the
Ideological State Apparatuses, makes it clear that very subtle explicit or tacit combinations may be woven
from the interplay of the (Repressive) State Apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatuses? Everyday life
provides us with innumerable examples of this, but they must be studied in detail if we are to go further
than this mere observation.
Nevertheless, this remark leads us towards an understanding of what constitutes the unity of the apparently
disparate body of the ISAs. If the ISAs ‘function’ massively and predominantly by ideology, what unifies
their diversity is precisely this functioning, insofar as the ideology by which they function is always in fact
unified, despite its diversity and its contradictions, beneath the ruling ideology, which is the ideology of
‘the ruling class’. Given the fact that the ‘ruling class’ in principle holds State power (openly or more often
by means of alliances between classes or class fractions), and therefore has at its disposal the (Repressive)
State Apparatus, we can accept the fact that this same ruling class is active in the Ideological State
Apparatuses insofar as it is ultimately the ruling ideology which is realized in the Ideological State
Apparatuses, precisely in its contradictions. Of course, it is a quite different thing to act by laws and
decrees in the (Repressive) State Apparatus and to ‘act’ through the intermediary of the ruling ideology in
the Ideological State Apparatuses. We must go into the details of this difference – but it cannot mask the
reality of a profound identity. To my knowledge, no class can hold State power over a long period without
at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological Apparatuses. I only need one
example and proof of this: Lenin’s anguished concern to revolutionize the educational Ideological State
Apparatus (among others), simply to make it possible for the Soviet proletariat, who had seized State
power, to secure the future of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transition to socialism. [10]
This last comment puts us in a position to understand that the Ideological State Apparatuses may be not
only the stake, but also the site of class struggle, and often of bitter forms of class struggle. The class (or
class alliance) in power cannot lay down the law in the ISAs as easily as it can in the (repressive) State
apparatus, not only because the former ruling classes are able to retain strong positions there for a long
time, but also because the resistance of the exploited classes is able to find means and occasions to express
itself there, either by the utilization of their contradictions, or by conquering combat positions in them in
struggle.[11]
Let me run through my comments.
If the thesis I have proposed is well-founded, it leads me back to the classical Marxist theory of the State,
while making it more precise in one point. I argue that it is necessary to distinguish between State power
(and its possession by ...) on the one hand, and the State Apparatus on the other. But I add that the State
Apparatus contains two bodies: the body of institutions which represent the Repressive State Apparatus on
the one hand, and the body of institutions which represent the body of Ideological State Apparatuses on the
other.
But if this is the case, the following question is bound to be asked, even in the very summary state of my
suggestions: what exactly is the extent of the role of the Ideological State Apparatuses? What is their
importance based on? In other words: to what does the ‘function’ of these Ideological State Apparatuses,
which do not function by repression but by ideology, correspond?
On the Reproduction of the Relations of Production
I can now answer the central question which I have left in suspense for many long pages: how is the
reproduction of the relations of production secured?
In the topographical language (Infrastructure, Superstructure), I can say: for the most part, [12] it is secured
by the legal-political and ideological superstructure.
But as I have argued that it is essential to go beyond this still descriptive language, I shall say: for the most
part, it is secured by the exercise of State power in the State Apparatuses, on the one hand the (Repressive)
State Apparatus, on the other the Ideological State Apparatuses.
What I have just said must also be taken into account, and it can be assembled in the form of the following
three features:
1. All the State Apparatuses function both by repression and by ideology, with the difference that the
(Repressive) State Apparatus functions massively and predominantly by repression, whereas the
Ideological State Apparatuses function massively and predominantly by ideology.
2. Whereas the (Repressive) State Apparatus constitutes an organized whole whose different parts are
centralized beneath a commanding unity, that of the politics of class struggle applied by the political
representatives of the ruling classes in possession of State power, the Ideological State Apparatuses are
multiple, distinct, ‘relatively autonomous’ and capable of providing an objective field to contradictions
which express, in forms which may be limited or extreme, the effects of the clashes between the capitalist
class struggle and the proletarian class struggle, as well as their subordinate forms.
3. Whereas the unity of the (Repressive) State Apparatus is secured by its unified and centralized
organization under the leadership of the representatives of the classes in power executing the politics of the
class struggle of the classes in power, the unity of the different Ideological State Apparatuses is secured,
usually in contradictory forms, by the ruling ideology, the ideology of the ruling class.
Taking these features into account, it is possible to represent the reproduction of the relations of
production[13] in the following way, according to a kind of ‘division of labour’.
The role of the repressive State apparatus, insofar as it is a repressive apparatus, consists essentially in
securing by force (physical or otherwise) the political conditions of the reproduction of relations of
production which are in the last resort relations of exploitation. Not only does the State apparatus contribute
generously to its own reproduction (the capitalist State contains political dynasties, military dynasties, etc.),
but also and above all, the State apparatus secures by repression (from the most brutal physical force, via
mere administrative commands and interdictions, to open and tacit censorship) the political conditions for
the action of the Ideological State Apparatuses.
In fact, it is the latter which largely secure the reproduction specifically of the relations of production,
behind a ‘shield’ provided by the repressive State apparatus. It is here that the role of the ruling ideology is
heavily concentrated, the ideology of the ruling class, which holds State power. It is the intermediation of
the ruling ideology that ensures a (sometimes teeth-gritting) ‘harmony’ between the repressive State
apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatuses, and between the different State Ideological Apparatuses.
We are thus led to envisage the following hypothesis, as a function precisely of the diversity of ideological
State Apparatuses in their single, because shared, role of the reproduction of the relations of production.
Indeed we have listed a relatively large number of Ideological State Apparatuses in contemporary capitalist
social formations: the educational apparatus, the religious apparatus, the family apparatus, the political
apparatus, the trade-union apparatus, the communications apparatus, the ‘cultural’ apparatus, etc.
But in the social formations of that mode of production characterized by ‘serfdom’ (usually called the
feudal mode of production), we observe that although there is a single repressive State apparatus which,
since the earliest known Ancient States, let alone the Absolute Monarchies, has been formally very similar
to the one we know today, the number of Ideological State Apparatuses is smaller and their individual types
are different. For example, we observe that during the Middle Ages, the Church (the religious Ideological
State Apparatus) accumulated a number of functions which have today devolved on to several distinct
Ideological State Apparatuses, new ones in relation to the past I am invoking, in particular educational and
cultural functions. Alongside the Church there was the family Ideological State Apparatus, which played a
considerable part, incommensurable with its role in capitalist social formations. Despite appearances, the
Church and the Family were not the only Ideological State Apparatuses. There was also a political
Ideological State Apparatus (the Estates General, the Parlement, the different political factions and
Leagues, the ancestors of the modern political parties, and the whole political system of the free Communes
and then of the Villes). There was also a powerful ‘proto-trade union’ Ideological State Apparatus, if I may
venture such an anachronistic term (the powerful merchants’ and bankers’ guilds and the journeymen’s
associations, etc.). Publishing and Communications, even, saw an indisputable development, as did the
theatre; initially both were integral parts of the Church, then they became more and more independent of it.
In the pre-capitalist historical period which I have examined extremely broadly, it is absolutely clear that
there was one dominant Ideological State Apparatus, the Church, which concentrated within it not only
religious functions, but also educational ones, and a large proportion of the functions of communications
and ‘culture’. It is no accident that all ideological struggle, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century,
starting with the first shocks of the Reformation, was concentrated in an anti-clerical and anti-religious
struggle; rather this is a function precisely of the dominant position of the religious Ideological State
Apparatus.
The foremost objective and achievement of the French Revolution was not just to transfer State power from
the feudal aristocracy to the merchant-capitalist bourgeoisie, to break part of the former repressive State
apparatus and replace it with a new one (e.g., the national popular Army) but also to attack the number-one
Ideological State Apparatus: the Church. Hence the civil constitution of the clergy, the confiscation of
ecclesiastical wealth, and the creation of new Ideological State Apparatuses to replace the religious
Ideological State Apparatus in its dominant role.
Naturally, these things did not happen automatically: witness the Concordat, the Restoration and the long
class struggle between the landed aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie throughout the nineteenth
century for the establishment of bourgeois hegemony over the functions formerly fulfilled by the Church:
above all by the Schools. It can be said that the bourgeoisie relied on the new political, parliamentarydemocratic, Ideological State Apparatus, installed in the earliest years of the Revolution, then restored after
long and violent struggles, for a few months in 1848 and for decades after the fall of the Second Empire, in
order to conduct its struggle against the Church and wrest its ideological functions away from it, in other
words, to ensure not only its own political hegemony, but also the ideological hegemony indispensable to
the reproduction of capitalist relations of production.
That is why I believe that I am justified in advancing the following Thesis, however precarious it is. I
believe that the Ideological State Apparatus which has been installed in the dominant position in mature
capitalist social formations as a result of a violent political and ideological class struggle against the old
dominant Ideological State Apparatus, is the educational ideological apparatus.
This thesis may seem paradoxical, given that for everyone, i.e. in the ideological representation that the
bourgeoisie has tried to give itself and the classes it exploits, it really seems that the dominant Ideological
State Apparatus in capitalist social formations is not the Schools, but the political Ideological State
Apparatus, i.e. the regime of parliamentary democracy combining universal suffrage and party struggle.
However, history, even recent history, shows that the bourgeoisie has been and still is able to accommodate
itself to political Ideological State Apparatuses other than parliamentary democracy: the First and Second
Empires, Constitutional Monarchy (Louis XVIII and Charles X), Parliamentary Monarchy (LouisPhilippe), Presidential Democracy (de Gaulle), to mention only France. In England this is even clearer. The
Revolution was particularly ‘successful’ there from the bourgeois point of view, since unlike France, where
the bourgeoisie, partly because of the stupidity of the petty aristocracy, had to agree to being carried to
power by peasant and plebeian ‘journées révolutionnaires’, something for which it had to pay a high price,
the English bourgeoisie was able to ‘compromise’ with the aristocracy and ‘share’ State power and the use
of the State apparatus with it for a long time (peace among all men of good will in the ruling classes!). In
Germany it is even more striking, since it was behind a political Ideological State Apparatus in which the
imperial Junkers (epitomized by Bismarck), their army and their police provided it with a shield and
leading personnel, that the imperialist bourgeoisie made its shattering entry into history, before ‘traversing’
the Weimar Republic and entrusting itself to Nazism.
Hence I believe I have good reasons for thinking that behind the scenes of its political Ideological State
Apparatus, which occupies the front of the stage, what the bourgeoisie has installed as its number-one, i.e.
as its dominant Ideological State Apparatus, is the educational apparatus, which has in fact replaced in its
functions the previously dominant Ideological State Apparatus, the Church. One might even add: the
School-Family couple has replaced the Church-Family couple.
Why is the educational apparatus in fact the dominant Ideological State Apparatus in capitalist social
formations, and how does it function?
For the moment it must suffice to say:
1. All Ideological State Apparatuses, whatever they are, contribute to the same result: the reproduction of
the relations of production, i.e. of capitalist relations of exploitation.
2. Each of them contributes towards this single result in the way proper to it. The political apparatus by
subjecting individuals to the political State ideology, the ‘indirect’ (parliamentary) or ‘direct’ (plebiscitary
or fascist) ‘democratic’ ideology. The communications apparatus by cramming every ‘citizen’ with daily
doses of nationalism, chauvinism, liberalism, moralism, etc, by means of the press, the radio and television.
The same goes for the cultural apparatus (the role of sport in chauvinism is of the first importance), etc. The
religious apparatus by recalling in sermons and the other great ceremonies of Birth, Marriage and Death,
that man is only ashes, unless he loves his neighbour to the extent of turning the other cheek to whoever
strikes first. The family apparatus ...but there is no need to go on.
3. This concert is dominated by a single score, occasionally disturbed by contradictions (those of the
remnants of former ruling classes, those of the proletarians and their organizations): the score of the
Ideology of the current ruling class which integrates into its music the great themes of the Humanism of the
Great Forefathers, who produced the Greek Miracle even before Christianity, and afterwards the Glory of
Rome, the Eternal City, and the themes of Interest, particular and general, etc. nationalism, moralism and
economism.
4. Nevertheless, in this concert, one Ideological State Apparatus certainly has the dominant role, although
hardly anyone lends an ear to its music: it is so silent! This is the School.
It takes children from every class at infant-school age, and then for years, the years in which the child is
most ‘vulnerable’, squeezed between the Family State Apparatus and the Educational State Apparatus, it
drums into them, whether it uses new or old methods, a certain amount of ‘know-how’ wrapped in the
ruling ideology (French, arithmetic, natural history, the sciences, literature) or simply the ruling ideology in
its pure state (ethics, civic instruction, philosophy). Somewhere around the age of sixteen, a huge mass of
children are ejected ‘into production’: these are the workers or small peasants. Another portion of
scholastically adapted youth carries on: and, for better or worse, it goes somewhat further, until it falls by
the wayside and fills the posts of small and middle technicians, white-collar workers, small and middle
executives, petty bourgeois of all kinds. A last portion reaches the summit, either to fall into intellectual
semi-employment, or to provide, as well as the ‘intellectuals of the collective labourer’, the agents of
exploitation (capitalists, managers), the agents of repression (soldiers, policemen, politicians,
administrators, etc.) and the professional ideologists (priests of all sorts, most of whom are convinced
‘laymen’).
Each mass ejected en route is practically provided with the ideology which suits the role it has to fulfil in
class society: the role of the exploited (with a ‘highly-developed’ ‘professional’, ‘ethical’, ‘civic’,
‘national’ and a-political consciousness); the role of the agent of exploitation (ability to give the workers
orders and speak to them: ‘human relations’), of the agent of repression (ability to give orders and enforce
obedience ‘without discussion’, or ability to manipulate the demagogy of a political leader’s rhetoric), or of
the professional ideologist (ability to treat consciousnesses with the respect, i.e. with the contempt,
blackmail, and demagogy they deserve, adapted to the accents of Morality, of Virtue, of ‘Transcendence’,
of the Nation, of France’s World Role, etc.).
Of course, many of these contrasting Virtues (modesty, resignation, submissiveness on the one hand,
cynicism, contempt, arrogance, confidence, self-importance, even smooth talk and cunning on the other)
are also taught in the Family, in the Church, in the Army, in Good Books, in films and even in the football
stadium. But no other Ideological State Apparatus has the obligatory (and not least, free) audience of the
totality of the children in the capitalist social formation, eight hours a day for five or six days out of seven.
But it is by an apprenticeship in a variety of know-how wrapped up in the massive inculcation of the
ideology of the ruling class that the relations of production in a capitalist social formation, i.e. the relations
of exploited to exploiters and exploiters to exploited, are largely reproduced. The mechanisms which
produce this vital result for the capitalist regime are naturally covered up and concealed by a universally
reigning ideology of the School, universally reigning because it is one of the essential forms of the ruling
bourgeois ideology: an ideology which represents the School as a neutral environment purged of ideology
(because it is ...lay), where teachers respectful of the ‘conscience’ and ‘freedom’ of the children who are
entrusted to them (in complete confidence) by their ‘parents’ (who are free, too, i.e. the owners of their
children) open up for them the path to the freedom, morality and responsibility of adults by their own
example, by knowledge, literature and their ‘liberating’ virtues.
I ask the pardon of those teachers who, in dreadful conditions, attempt to turn the few weapons they can
find in the history and learning they ‘teach’ against the ideology, the system and the practices in which they
are trapped. They are a kind of hero. But they are rare and how many (the majority) do not even begin to
suspect the ‘work’ the system (which is bigger than they are and crushes them) forces them to do, or worse,
put all their heart and ingenuity into performing it with the most advanced awareness (the famous new
methods!). So little do they suspect it that their own devotion contributes to the maintenance and
nourishment of this ideological representation of the School, which makes the School today as ‘natural’,
indispensable-useful and even beneficial for our contemporaries as the Church was ‘natural’, indispensable
and generous for our ancestors a few centuries ago.
In fact, the Church has been replaced today in its role as the dominant Ideological State Apparatus by the
School. It is coupled with the Family just as the Church was once coupled with the Family. We can now
claim that the unprecedentedly deep crisis which is now shaking the education system of so many States
across the globe, often in conjunction with a crisis (already proclaimed in the Communist Manifesto)
shaking the family system, takes on a political meaning, given that the School (and the School/Family
couple) constitutes the dominant Ideological State Apparatus, the Apparatus playing a determinant part in
the reproduction of the relations of production of a mode of production threatened in its existence by the
world class struggle.
On Ideology
When I put forward the concept of an Ideological State Apparatus, when I said that the ISAs ‘function by
ideology’, I invoked a reality which needs a little discussion: ideology.
It is well known that the expression ‘ideology’ was invented by Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy and their friends,
who assigned to it as an object the (genetic) theory of ideas. When Marx took up the term fifty years later,
he gave it a quite different meaning, even in his Early Works. Here, ideology is the system of the ideas and
representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group. The ideologico-political struggle
conducted by Marx as early as his articles in the Rheinische Zeitung inevitably and quickly brought him
face to face with this reality and forced him to take his earliest intuitions further.
However, here we come upon a rather astonishing paradox. Everything seems to lead Marx to formulate a
theory of ideology. In fact, The German Ideology does offer us, after the 1844 Manuscripts, an explicit
theory of ideology, but ...it is not Marxist (we shall see why in a moment). As for Capital, although it does
contain many hints towards a theory of ideologies (most visibly, the ideology of the vulgar economists), it
does not contain that theory itself, which depends for the most part on a theory of ideology in general.
I should like to venture a first and very schematic outline of such a theory. The theses I am about to put
forward are certainly not off the cuff, but they cannot be sustained and tested, i.e. confirmed or rejected,
except by much thorough study and analysis.
Ideology has no History
One word first of all to expound the reason in principle which seems to me to found, or at least to justify,
the project of a theory of ideology in general, and not a theory of particular ideologies, which, whatever
their form (religious, ethical, legal, political), always express class positions.
It is quite obvious that it is necessary to proceed towards a theory of ideologies in the two respects I have
just suggested. It will then be clear that a theory of ideologies depends in the last resort on the history of
social formations, and thus of the modes of production combined in social formations, and of the class
struggles which develop in them. In this sense it is clear that there can be no question of a theory of
ideologies in general, since ideologies (defined in the double respect suggested above: regional and class)
have a history, whose determination in the last instance is clearly situated outside ideologies alone,
although it involves them.
On the contrary, if I am able to put forward the project of a theory of ideology in general, and if this theory
really is one of the elements on which theories of ideologies depend, that entails an apparently paradoxical
proposition which I shall express in the following terms: ideology has no history.
As we know, this formulation appears in so many words in a passage from The German Ideology. Marx
utters it with respect to metaphysics, which, he says, has no more history than ethics (meaning also the
other forms of ideology).
In The German Ideology, this formulation appears in a plainly positivist context. Ideology is conceived as a
pure illusion, a pure dream, i.e. as nothingness. All its reality is external to it. Ideology is thus thought as an
imaginary construction whose status is exactly like the theoretical status of the dream among writers before
Freud. For these writers, the dream was the purely imaginary, i.e. null, result of ‘day’s residues’, presented
in an arbitrary arrangement and order, sometimes even ‘inverted’, in other words, in ‘disorder’. For them,
the dream was the imaginary, it was empty, null and arbitrarily ‘stuck together’ (bricolé), once the eyes had
closed, from the residues of the only full and positive reality, the reality of the day. This is exactly the
status of philosophy and ideology (since in this book philosophy is ideology par excellence) in The German
Ideology.
Ideology, then, is for Marx an imaginary assemblage (bricolage), a pure dream, empty and vain, constituted
by the ‘day’s residues’ from the only full and positive reality, that of the concrete history of concrete
material individuals materially producing their existence. It is on this basis that ideology has no history in
The German Ideology, since its history is outside it, where the only existing history is, the history of
concrete individuals, etc. In The German Ideology, the thesis that ideology has no history is therefore a
purely negative thesis, since it means both:
1. ideology is nothing insofar as it is a pure dream (manufactured by who knows what power: if not by the
alienation of the division of labour, but that, too, is a negative determination);
2. ideology has no history, which emphatically does not mean that there is no history in it (on the contrary,
for it is merely the pale, empty and inverted reflection of real history) but that it has no history of its own.
Now, while the thesis I wish to defend formally speaking adopts the terms of The German Ideology
(‘ideology has no history’), it is radically different from the positivist and historicist thesis of The German
Ideology.
For on the one hand, I think it is possible to hold that ideologies have a history of their own (although it is
determined in the last instance by the class struggle); and on the other, I think it is possible to hold that
ideology in general has no history, not in a negative sense (its history is external to it), but in an absolutely
positive sense.
This sense is a positive one if it is true that the peculiarity of ideology is that it is endowed with a structure
and a functioning such as to make it a non-historical reality, i.e. an omni-historical reality, in the sense in
which that structure and functioning are immutable, present in the same form throughout what we can call
history, in the sense in which the Communist Manifesto defines history as the history of class struggles, i.e.
the history of class societies.
To give a theoretical reference-point here, I might say that, to return to our example of the dream, in its
Freudian conception this time, our proposition: ideology has no history, can and must (and in a way which
has absolutely nothing arbitrary about it, but, quite the reverse, is theoretically necessary, for there is an
organic link between the two propositions) be related directly to Freud’s proposition that the unconscious is
eternal, i.e. that it has no history.
If eternal means, not transcendent to all (temporal) history, but omnipresent, trans-historical and therefore
immutable in form throughout the extent of history, I shall adopt Freud’s expression word for word, and
write ideology is eternal, exactly like the unconscious. And I add that I find this comparison theoretically
justified by the fact that the eternity of the unconscious is not unrelated to the eternity of ideology in
general.
That is why I believe I am justified, hypothetically at least, in proposing a theory of ideology in general, in
the sense that Freud presented a theory of the unconscious in general.
To simplify the phrase, it is convenient, taking into account what has been said about ideologies, to use the
plain term ideology to designate ideology in general, which I have just said has no history, or, what comes
to the same thing, is eternal, i.e. omnipresent in its immutable form throughout history (= the history of
social formations containing social classes). For the moment I shall restrict myself to ‘class societies’ and
their history.
Ideology is a ‘Representation’ of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions
of Existence
In order to approach my central thesis on the structure and functioning of ideology, I shall first present two
theses, one negative, the other positive. The first concerns the object which is ‘represented’ in the
imaginary form of ideology, the second concerns the materiality of ideology.
Thesis I. Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.
We commonly call religious ideology, ethical ideology, legal ideology, political ideology, etc., so many
‘world outlooks’. Of course, assuming that we do not live one of these ideologies as the truth (e.g. ‘believe’
in God, Duty, Justice, etc....), we admit that the ideology we are discussing from a critical point of view,
examining it as the ethnologist examines the myths of a ‘primitive society’, that these ‘world outlooks’ are
largely imaginary, i.e. do not ‘correspond to reality’.
However, while admitting that they do not correspond to reality, i.e. that they constitute an illusion, we
admit that they do make allusion to reality, and that they need only be ‘interpreted’ to discover the reality
of the world behind their imaginary representation of that world (ideology = illusion/allusion).
There are different types of interpretation, the most famous of which are the mechanistic type, current in
the eighteenth century (God is the imaginary representation of the real King), and the ‘hermeneutic ‘
interpretation, inaugurated by the earliest Church Fathers, and revived by Feuerbach and the theologicophilosophical school which descends from him, e.g. the theologian Barth (to Feuerbach, for example, God
is the essence of real Man). The essential point is that on condition that we interpret the imaginary
transposition (and inversion) of ideology we arrive at the conclusion that in ideology ‘men represent their
real conditions of existence to themselves in an imaginary form’.
Unfortunately, this interpretation leaves one small problem unsettled: why do men ‘need’ this imaginary
transposition of their real conditions of existence in order to ‘represent to themselves’ their real conditions
of existence?
The first answer (that of the eighteenth century) proposes a simple solution: Priests or Despots are
responsible. They ‘forged’ the Beautiful Lies so that, in the belief that they were obeying God, men would
in fact obey the Priests and Despots, who are usually in alliance in their imposture, the Priests acting in the
interests of the Despots or vice versa, according to the political positions of the ‘theoreticians’ concerned.
There is therefore a cause for the imaginary transposition of the real conditions of existence: that cause is
the existence of a small number of cynical men who base their domination and exploitation of the ‘people’
on a falsified representation of the world which they have imagined in order to enslave other minds by
dominating their imaginations.
The second answer (that of Feuerbach, taken over word for word by Marx in his Early Works) is more
‘profound’, i.e. just as false. It, too, seeks and finds a cause for the imaginary transposition and distortion of
men’s real conditions of existence, in short, for the alienation in the imaginary of the representation of
men’s conditions of existence. This cause is no longer Priests or Despots, nor their active imagination and
the passive imagination of their victims. This cause is the material alienation which reigns in the conditions
of existence of men themselves. This is how, in The Jewish Question and elsewhere, Marx defends the
Feuerbachian idea that men make themselves an alienated (= imaginary) representation of their conditions
of existence because these conditions of existence are themselves alienating (in the 1844 Manuscripts:
because these conditions are dominated by the essence of alienated society – ‘alienated labour’).
All these interpretations thus take literally the thesis which they presuppose, and on which they depend, i.e.
that what is reflected in the imaginary representation of the world found in an ideology is the conditions of
existence of men, i.e. their real world.
Now I can return to a thesis which I have already advanced: it is not their real conditions of existence, their
real world, that ‘men’ ‘represent to themselves’ in ideology, but above all it is their relation to those
conditions of existence which is represented to them there. It is this relation which is at the centre of every
ideological, i.e. imaginary, representation of the real world. It is this relation that contains the ‘cause’ which
has to explain the imaginary distortion of the ideological representation of the real world. Or rather, to
leave aside the language of causality it is necessary to advance the thesis that it is the imaginary nature of
this relation which underlies all the imaginary distortion that we can observe (if we do not live in its truth)
in all ideology.
To speak in a Marxist language, if it is true that the representation of the real conditions of existence of the
individuals occupying the posts of agents of production, exploitation, repression, ideologization and
scientific practice, does in the last analysis arise from the relations of production, and from relations
deriving from the relations of production, we can say the following: all ideology represents in its
necessarily imaginary distortion not the existing relations of production (and the other relations that derive
from them), but above all the (imaginary) relationship of individuals to the relations of production and the
relations that derive from them. What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real
relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the
real relations in which they live.
If this is the case, the question of the ‘cause’ of the imaginary distortion of the real relations in ideology
disappears and must be replaced by a different question: why is the representation given to individuals of
their (individual) relation to the social relations which govern their conditions of existence and their
collective and individual life necessarily an imaginary relation? And what is the nature of this
imaginariness? Posed in this way, the question explodes the solution by a ‘clique’[14], by a group of
individuals (Priests or Despots) who are the authors of the great ideological mystification, just as it
explodes the solution by the alienated character of the real world. We shall see why later in my exposition.
For the moment I shall go no further.
Thesis II: Ideology has a material existence.
I have already touched on this thesis by saying that the ‘ideas’ or ‘representations’, etc., which seem to
make up ideology do not have an ideal (idéale or idéelle) or spiritual existence, but a material existence. I
even suggested that the ideal (idéale, idéelle) and spiritual existence of ‘ideas’ arises exclusively in an
ideology of the ‘idea’ and of ideology, and let me add, in an ideology of what seems to have ‘founded’ this
conception since the emergence of the sciences, i.e. what the practicians of the sciences represent to
themselves in their spontaneous ideology as ‘ideas’, true or false. Of course, presented in affirmative form,
this thesis is unproven. I simply ask that the reader be favourably disposed towards it, say, in the name of
materialism. A long series of arguments would be necessary to prove it.
This hypothetical thesis of the not spiritual but material existence of ‘ideas’ or other ‘representations’ is
indeed necessary if we are to advance in our analysis of the nature of ideology. Or rather, it is merely useful
to us in order the better to reveal what every at all serious analysis of any ideology will immediately and
empirically show to every observer, however critical.
While discussing the Ideological State Apparatuses and their practices, I said that each of them was the
realization of an ideology (the unity of these different regional ideologies – religious, ethical, legal,
political, aesthetic, etc. – being assured by their subjection to the ruling ideology). I now return to this
thesis: an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. This existence is material.
Of course, the material existence of the ideology in an apparatus and its practices does not have the same
modality as the material existence of a paving-stone or a rifle. But, at the risk of being taken for a NeoAristotelian (NB Marx had a very high regard for Aristotle), I shall say that ‘matter is discussed in many
senses’, or rather that it exists in different modalities, all rooted in the last instance in ‘physical’ matter.
Having said this, let me move straight on and see what happens to the ‘individuals’ who live in ideology,
i.e. in a determinate (religious, ethical, etc.) representation of the world whose imaginary distortion depends
on their imaginary relation to their conditions of existence, in other words, in the last instance, to the
relations of production and to class relations (ideology = an imaginary relation to real relations). I shall say
that this imaginary relation is itself endowed with a material existence.
Now I observe the following.
An individual believes in God, or Duty, or Justice, etc. This belief derives (for everyone, i.e. for all those
who live in an ideological representation of ideology, which reduces ideology to ideas endowed by
definition with a spiritual existence) from the ideas of the individual concerned, i.e. from him as a subject
with a consciousness which contains the ideas of his belief. In this way, i.e. by means of the absolutely
ideological ‘conceptual’ device (dispositif) thus set up (a subject endowed with a consciousness in which he
freely forms or freely recognizes ideas in which he believes), the (material) attitude of the subject
concerned naturally follows.
The individual in question behaves in such and such a way, adopts such and such a practical attitude, and,
what is more, participates in certain regular practices which are those of the ideological apparatus on which
‘depend’ the ideas which he has in all consciousness freely chosen as a subject. If he believes in God, he
goes to Church to attend Mass, kneels, prays, confesses, does penance (once it was material in the ordinary
sense of the term) and naturally repents and so on. If he believes in Duty, he will have the corresponding
attitudes, inscribed in ritual practices ‘according to the correct principles’. If he believes in Justice, he will
submit unconditionally to the rules of the Law, and may even protest when they are violated, sign petitions,
take part in a demonstration, etc.
Throughout this schema we observe that the ideological representation of ideology is itself forced to
recognize that every ‘subject’ endowed with a ‘consciousness’ and believing in the ‘ideas’ that his
‘consciousness’ inspires in him and freely accepts, must ‘act according to his ideas’, must therefore
inscribe his own ideas as a free subject in the actions of his material practice. If he does not do so, ‘that is
wicked’.
Indeed, if he does not do what he ought to do as a function of what he believes, it is because he does
something else, which, still as a function of the same idealist scheme, implies that he has other ideas in his
head as well as those he proclaims, and that he acts according to these other ideas, as a man who is either
‘inconsistent’ (‘no one is willingly evil’) or cynical, or perverse.
In every case, the ideology of ideology thus recognizes, despite its imaginary distortion, that the ‘ideas’ of a
human subject exist in his actions, or ought to exist in his actions, and if that is not the case, it lends him
other ideas corresponding to the actions (however perverse) that he does perform. This ideology talks of
actions: I shall talk of actions inserted into practices. And I shall point out that these practices are governed
by the rituals in which these practices are inscribed, within the material existence of an ideological
apparatus, be it only a small part of that apparatus: a small mass in a small church, a funeral, a minor
match at a sports’ club, a school day, a political party meeting, etc.
Besides, we are indebted to Pascal’s defensive ‘dialectic’ for the wonderful formula which will enable us to
invert the order of the notional schema of ideology. Pascal says more or less: ‘Kneel down, move your lips
in prayer, and you will believe.’ He thus scandalously inverts the order of things, bringing, like Christ, not
peace but strife, and in addition something hardly Christian (for woe to him who brings scandal into the
world!) – scandal itself. A fortunate scandal which makes him stick with Jansenist defiance to a language
that directly names the reality.
I will be allowed to leave Pascal to the arguments of his ideological struggle with the religious Ideological
State Apparatus of his day. And I shall be expected to use a more directly Marxist vocabulary, if that is
possible, for we are advancing in still poorly explored domains.
I shall therefore say that, where only a single subject (such and such an individual) is concerned, the
existence of the ideas of his belief is material in that his ideas are his material actions inserted into
material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological
apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject. Naturally, the four inscriptions of the adjective
‘material’ in my proposition must be affected by different modalities: the materialities of a displacement for
going to mass, of kneeling down, of the gesture of the sign of the cross, or of the mea culpa, of a sentence,
of a prayer, of an act of contrition, of a penitence, of a gaze, of a hand-shake, of an external verbal
discourse or an ‘internal’ verbal discourse (consciousness), are not one and the same materiality. I shall
leave on one side the problem of a theory of the differences between the modalities of materiality.
It remains that in this inverted presentation of things, we are not dealing with an ‘inversion’ at all, since it is
clear that certain notions have purely and simply disappeared from our presentation, whereas others on the
contrary survive, and new terms appear.
Disappeared: the term ideas.
Survive: the terms subject, consciousness, belief, actions.
Appear: the terms practices, rituals, ideological apparatus.
It is therefore not an inversion or overturning (except in the sense in which one might say a government or
a glass is overturned), but a reshuffle (of a non-ministerial type), a rather strange reshuffle, since we obtain
the following result.
Ideas have disappeared as such (insofar as they are endowed with an ideal or spiritual existence), to the
precise extent that it has emerged that their existence is inscribed in the actions of practices governed by
rituals defined in the last instance by an ideological apparatus. It therefore appears that the subject acts
insofar as he is acted by the following system (set out in the order of its real determination): ideology
existing in a material ideological apparatus, prescribing material practices governed by a material ritual,
which practices exist in the material actions of a subject acting in all consciousness according to his belief.
But this very presentation reveals that we have retained the following notions: subject, consciousness,
belief, actions. From this series I shall immediately extract the decisive central term on which everything
else depends: the notion of the subject.
And I shall immediately set down two conjoint theses:
1. there is no practice except by and in an ideology;
2. there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects.
I can now come to my central thesis.
Ideology Interpellates Individuals as Subjects
This thesis is simply a matter of making my last proposition explicit: there is no ideology except by the
subject and for subjects. Meaning, there is no ideology except for concrete subjects, and this destination for
ideology is only made possible by the subject: meaning, by the category of the subject and its functioning.
By this I mean that, even if it only appears under this name (the subject) with the rise of bourgeois
ideology, above all with the rise of legal ideology,[15] the category of the subject (which may function under
other names: e.g., as the soul in Plato, as God, etc.) is the constitutive category of all ideology, whatever its
determination (regional or class) and whatever its historical date – since ideology has no history.
I say: the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology, but at the same time and immediately I add
that the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function
(which defines it) of ‘constituting ‘ concrete individuals as subjects. In the interaction of this double
constitution exists the functioning of all ideology, ideology being nothing but its functioning in the material
forms of existence of that functioning.
In order to grasp what follows, it is essential to realize that both he who is writing these lines and the reader
who reads them are themselves subjects, and therefore ideological subjects (a tautological proposition), i.e.
that the author and the reader of these lines both live ‘spontaneously’ or ‘naturally’ in ideology in the sense
in which I have said that ‘man is an ideological animal by nature’.
That the author, insofar as he writes the lines of a discourse which claims to be scientific, is completely
absent as a ‘subject’ from ‘his’ scientific discourse (for all scientific discourse is by definition a subject-less
discourse, there is no ‘Subject of science’ except in an ideology of science) is a different question which I
shall leave on one side for the moment.
As St Paul admirably put it, it is in the ‘Logos’, meaning in ideology, that we ‘live, move and have our
being’. It follows that, for you and for me, the category of the subject is a primary ‘obviousness’
(obviousnesses are always primary): it is clear that you and I are subjects (free, ethical, etc....). Like all
obviousnesses, including those that make a word ‘name a thing’ or ‘have a meaning’ (therefore including
the obviousness of the ‘transparency’ of language), the ‘obviousness’ that you and I are subjects – and that
that does not cause any problems – is an ideological effect, the elementary ideological effect.[16] It is indeed
a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are ‘obviousnesses’)
obviousnesses as obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognize and before which we have the
inevitable and natural reaction of crying out (aloud or in the ‘still, small voice of conscience’): ‘That’s
obvious! That’s right! That’s true!’
At work in this reaction is the ideological recognition function which is one of the two functions of
ideology as such (its inverse being the function of misrecognition – méconnaissance).
To take a highly ‘concrete’ example, we all have friends who, when they knock on our door and we ask,
through the door, the question ‘Who’s there?’, answer (since ‘it’s obvious’) ‘It’s me’. And we recognize
that ‘it is him’, or ‘her’. We open the door, and ‘it’s true, it really was she who was there’. To take another
example, when we recognize somebody of our (previous) acquaintance ((re)-connaissance) in the street, we
show him that we have recognized him (and have recognized that he has recognized us) by saying to him
‘Hello, my friend’, and shaking his hand (a material ritual practice of ideological recognition in everyday
life – in France, at least; elsewhere, there are other rituals).
In this preliminary remark and these concrete illustrations, I only wish to point out that you and I are
always already subjects, and as such constantly practice the rituals of ideological recognition, which
guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete, individual, distinguishable and (naturally) irreplaceable
subjects. The writing I am currently executing and the reading you are currently[17] performing are also in
this respect rituals of ideological recognition, including the ‘obviousness’ with which the ‘truth’ or ‘error’
of my reflections may impose itself on you.
But to recognize that we are subjects and that we function in the practical rituals of the most elementary
everyday life (the hand-shake, the fact of calling you by your name, the fact of knowing, even if I do not
know what it is, that you ‘have’ a name of your own, which means that you are recognized as a unique
subject, etc.) – this recognition only gives us the ‘consciousness’ of our incessant (eternal) practice of
ideological recognition – its consciousness, i.e. its recognition – but in no sense does it give us the
(scientific) knowledge of the mechanism of this recognition. Now it is this knowledge that we have to
reach, if you will, while speaking in ideology, and from within ideology we have to outline a discourse
which tries to break with ideology, in order to dare to be the beginning of a scientific (i.e. subject-less)
discourse on ideology.
Thus in order to represent why the category of the ‘subject’ is constitutive of ideology, which only exists by
constituting concrete subjects as subjects, I shall employ a special mode of exposition: ‘concrete’ enough to
be recognized, but abstract enough to be thinkable and thought, giving rise to a knowledge.
As a first formulation I shall say: all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete
subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject.
This is a proposition which entails that we distinguish for the moment between concrete individuals on the
one hand and concrete subjects on the other, although at this level concrete subjects only exist insofar as
they are supported by a concrete individual.
I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the
individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that
very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the
lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ [18]
Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn
round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why?
Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was
hailed’ (and not someone else). Experience shows that the practical telecommunication of hailings is such
that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognizes that it is really
him who is being hailed. And yet it is a strange phenomenon, and one which cannot be explained solely by
‘guilt feelings’, despite the large numbers who ‘have something on their consciences’.
Naturally for the convenience and clarity of my little theoretical theatre I have had to present things in the
form of a sequence, with a before and an after, and thus in the form of a temporal succession. There are
individuals walking along. Somewhere (usually behind them) the hail rings out: ‘Hey, you there!’ One
individual (nine times out often it is the right one) turns round, believing/suspecting/knowing that it is for
him, i.e. recognizing that ‘it really is he’ who is meant by the hailing. But in reality these things happen
without any succession. The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as
subjects are one and the same thing.
I might add: what thus seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes
place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it. That is why
those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology
is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am
ideological’. It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in
ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. As is well known, the
accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself (unless one is really a Spinozist or a
Marxist, which, in this matter, is to be exactly the same thing). Which amounts to saying that ideology has
no outside (for itself), but at the same time that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality).
Spinoza explained this completely two centuries before Marx, who practised it but without explaining it in
detail. But let us leave this point, although it is heavy with consequences, consequences which are not just
theoretical, but also directly political, since, for example, the whole theory of criticism and self-criticism,
the golden rule of the Marxist-Leninist practice of the class struggle, depends on it.
Thus ideology hails or interpellates individuals as subjects. As ideology is eternal, I must now suppress the
temporal form in which I have presented the functioning of ideology, and say: ideology has always-already
interpellated individuals as subjects, which amounts to making it clear that individuals are always-already
interpellated by ideology as subjects, which necessarily leads us to one last proposition: individuals are
always-already subjects. Hence individuals are ‘abstract’ with respect to the subjects which they always
already are. This proposition might seem paradoxical.
That an individual is always-already a subject, even before he is born, is nevertheless the plain reality,
accessible to everyone and not a paradox at all. Freud shows that individuals are always ‘abstract’ with
respect to the subjects they always-already are, simply by noting the ideological ritual that surrounds the
expectation of a ‘birth’, that ‘happy event’. Everyone knows how much and in what way an unborn child is
expected. Which amounts to saying, very prosaically, if we agree to drop the ‘sentiments’, i.e. the forms of
family ideology (paternal/maternal conjugal/fraternal) in which the unborn child is expected: it is certain in
advance that it will bear its Father’s Name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable. Before
its birth, the child is therefore always-already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific
familial ideological configuration in which it is ‘expected’ once it has been conceived. I hardly need add
that this familial ideological configuration is, in its uniqueness, highly structured, and that it is in this
implacable and more or less ‘pathological’ (presupposing that any meaning can be assigned to that term)
structure that the former subject to-be will have to ‘find’ ‘its’ place, i.e. ‘become’ the sexual subject (boy or
girl) which it already is in advance. It is clear that this ideological constraint and pre-appointment, and all
the rituals of rearing and then education in the family, have some relationship with what Freud studied in
the forms of the pre-genital and genital ‘stages’ of sexuality, i.e. in the ‘grip’ of what Freud registered by its
effects as being the unconscious. But let us leave this point, too, on one side.
Let me go one step further. What I shall now turn my attention to is the way the ‘actors’ in this mise en
scène [setting] of interpellation, and their respective roles, are reflected in the very structure of all ideology.
An Example: The Christian Religious Ideology
As the formal structure of all ideology is always the same, I shall restrict my analysis to a single example,
one accessible to everyone, that of religious ideology, with the proviso that the same demonstration can be
produced for ethical, legal, political, aesthetic ideology, etc.
Let us therefore consider the Christian religious ideology. I shall use a rhetorical figure and ‘make it speak’,
i.e. collect into a fictional discourse what it ‘says’ not only in its two Testaments, its Theologians, Sermons,
but also in its practices, its rituals, its ceremonies and its sacraments. The Christian religious ideology says
something like this:
It says: I address myself to you, a human individual called Peter (every individual is called by his name, in
the passive sense, it is never he who provides his own name), in order to tell you that God exists and that
you are answer able to Him. It adds: God addresses himself to you through my voice (Scripture having
collected the Word of God, Tradition having transmitted it, Papal Infallibility fixing it for ever on ‘nice’
points). It says: this is who you are: you are Peter! This is your origin, you were created by God for all
eternity, although you were born in the 1920th year of Our Lord! This is your place in the world! This is
what you must do! By these means, if you observe the ‘law of love’ you will be saved, you, Peter, and will
become part of the Glorious Body of Christ! Etc....
Now this is quite a familiar and banal discourse, but at the same time quite a surprising one.
Surprising because if we consider that religious ideology is indeed addressed to individuals, [19] in order to
‘transform them into subjects’, by interpellating the individual, Peter, in order to make him a subject, free
to obey or disobey the appeal, i.e. God’s commandments; if it calls these individuals by their names, thus
recognizing that they are always-already interpellated as subjects with a personal identity (to the extent that
Pascal’s Christ says: ‘It is for you that I have shed this drop of my blood!’); if it interpellates them in such a
way that the subject responds: ‘Yes, it really is me!’ if it obtains from them the recognition that they really
do occupy the place it designates for them as theirs in the world, a fixed residence: ‘It really is me, I am
here, a worker, a boss or a soldier!’ in this vale of tears; if it obtains from them the recognition of a
destination (eternal life or damnation) according to the respect or contempt they show to ‘God’s
Commandments’, Law become Love; – if everything does happen in this way (in the practices of the wellknown rituals of baptism, confirmation, communion, confession and extreme unction, etc. ...), we should
note that all this ‘procedure’ to set up Christian religious subjects is dominated by a strange phenomenon:
the fact that there can only be such a multitude of possible religious subjects on the absolute condition that
there is a Unique, Absolute, Other Subject, i.e. God.
It is convenient to designate this new and remarkable Subject by writing Subject with a capital S to
distinguish it from ordinary subjects, with a small s.
It then emerges that the interpellation of individuals as subjects presupposes the ‘existence’ of a Unique
and central Other Subject, in whose Name the religious ideology interpellates all individuals as subjects.
All this is clearly[20] written in what is rightly called the Scriptures. ‘And it came to pass at that time that
God the Lord (Yahweh) spoke to Moses in the cloud. And the Lord cried to Moses, “Moses!” And Moses
replied “It is (really) I! I am Moses thy servant, speak and I shall listen!” And the Lord spoke to Moses and
said to him, “I am that I am"’.
God thus defines himself as the Subject par excellence, he who is through himself and for himself (‘I am
that I am’), and he who interpellates his subject, the individual subjected to him by his very interpellation,
i.e. the individual named Moses. And Moses, interpellated-called by his Name, having recognized that it
‘really’ was he who was called by God, recognizes that he is a subject, a subject of God, a subject subjected
to God, a subject through the Subject and subjected to the Subject. The proof: he obeys him, and makes his
people obey God’s Commandments.
God is thus the Subject, and Moses and the innumerable subjects of God’s people, the Subject’s
interlocutors-interpellates: his mirrors, his reflections. Were not men made in the image of God? As all
theological reflection proves, whereas He ‘could’ perfectly well have done without men, God needs them,
the Subject needs the subjects, just as men need God, the subjects need the Subject. Better: God needs men,
the great Subject needs subjects, even in the terrible inversion of his image in them (when the subjects
wallow in debauchery, i.e. sin).
Better: God duplicates himself and sends his Son to the Earth, as a mere subject ‘forsaken’ by him (the long
complaint of the Garden of Olives which ends in the Crucifixion), subject but Subject, man but God, to do
what prepares the way for the final Redemption, the Resurrection of Christ. God thus needs to ‘make
himself’ a man, the Subject needs to become a subject, as if to show empirically, visibly to the eye, tangibly
to the hands (see St. Thomas) of the subjects, that, if they are subjects, subjected to the Subject, that is
solely in order that finally, on Judgement Day, they will re-enter the Lord’s Bosom, like Christ, i.e. re-enter
the Subject.[21]
Let us decipher into theoretical language this wonderful necessity for the duplication of the Subject into
subjects and of the Subject itself into a subject-Subject.
We observe that the structure of all ideology, interpellating individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique
and Absolute Subject is speculary, i.e. a mirror-structure, and doubly speculary: this mirror duplication is
constitutive of ideology and ensures its functioning. Which means that all ideology is centred, that the
Absolute Subject occupies the unique place of the Centre, and interpellates around it the infinity of
individuals into subjects in a double mirror-connexion such that it subjects the subjects to the Subject,
while giving them in the Subject in which each subject can contemplate its own image (present and future)
the guarantee that this really concerns them and Him, and that since everything takes place in the Family
(the Holy Family: the Family is in essence Holy), ‘God will recognize his own in it’, i.e. those who have
recognized God, and have recognized themselves in Him, will be saved.
Let me summarize what we have discovered about ideology in general.
The duplicate mirror-structure of ideology ensures simultaneously:
1. the interpellation of ‘individuals’ as subjects;
2. their subjection to the Subject;
3. the mutual recognition of subjects and Subject, the subjects’ recognition of each other, and finally the
subject’s recognition of himself;[22]
4. the absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that on condition that the subjects recognize what
they are and behave accordingly, everything will be all right: Amen – ‘So be it’.
Result: caught in this quadruple system of interpellation as subjects, of subjection to the Subject, of
universal recognition and of absolute guarantee, the subjects ‘work’, they ‘work by themselves’ in the vast
majority of cases, with the exception of the ‘bad subjects’ who on occasion provoke the intervention of one
of the detachments of the (Repressive) State Apparatus. But the vast majority of (good) subjects work all
right ‘all by themselves’, i.e. by ideology (whose concrete forms are realized in the Ideological State
Apparatuses). They are inserted into practices governed by the rituals of the ISAs. They ‘recognize’ the
existing state of affairs (das Bestehende), that ‘it really is true that it is so and not otherwise’, and that they
must be obedient to God, to their conscience, to the priest, to de Gaulle, to the boss, to the engineer, that
thou shalt ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’, etc. Their concrete, material behaviour is simply the inscription
in life of the admirable words of the prayer: ‘Amen – So be it’.
Yes, the subjects ‘work by themselves’. The whole mystery of this effect lies in the first two moments of
the quadruple system I have just discussed, or, if you prefer, in the ambiguity of the term subject. In the
ordinary use of the term, subject in fact means: (1) a free subjectivity, a centre of initiatives, author of and
responsible for its actions; (2) a subjected being, who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore
stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission. This last note gives us the meaning
of this ambiguity, which is merely a reflection of the effect which produces it: the individual is
interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e.
in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions
of his subjection ‘all by himself’. There are no subjects except by and for their subjection. That is why they
‘work all by themselves’.
‘So be it! ...’ This phrase which registers the effect to be obtained proves that it is not ‘naturally’ so
(‘naturally’: outside the prayer, i.e. outside the ideological intervention). This phrase proves that it has to be
so if things are to be what they must be, and let us let the words slip: if the reproduction of the relations of
production is to be assured, even in the processes of production and circulation, every day, in the
‘consciousness’, i.e. in the attitudes of the individual-subjects occupying the posts which the sociotechnical division of labour assigns to them in production, exploitation, repression, ideologization,
scientific practice, etc. Indeed, what is really in question in this mechanism of the mirror recognition of the
Subject and of the individuals interpellated as subjects, and of the guarantee given by the Subject to the
subjects if they freely accept their subjection to the Subject’s ‘commandments’? The reality in question in
this mechanism, the reality which is necessarily ignored (méconnue) in the very forms of recognition
(ideology = misrecognition/ignorance) is indeed, in the last resort, the reproduction of the relations of
production and of the relations deriving from them.
January-April 1969
P.S. If these few schematic theses allow me to illuminate certain aspects of the functioning of the
Superstructure and its mode of intervention in the Infrastructure, they are obviously abstract and
necessarily leave several important problems unanswered, which should be mentioned:
1. The problem of the total process of the realization of the reproduction of the relations of production.
As an element of this process, the ISAs contribute to this reproduction. But the point of view of their
contribution alone is still an abstract one.
It is only within the processes of production and circulation that this reproduction is realized. It is realized
by the mechanisms of those processes, in which the training of the workers is ‘completed’, their posts
assigned them, etc. It is in the internal mechanisms of these processes that the effect of the different
ideologies is felt (above all the effect of legal-ethical ideology).
But this point of view is still an abstract one. For in a class society the relations of production are relations
of exploitation, and therefore relations between antagonistic classes. The reproduction of the relations of
production, the ultimate aim of the ruling class, cannot therefore be a merely technical operation training
and distributing individuals for the different posts in the ‘technical division’ of labour. In fact there is no
‘technical division’ of labour except in the ideology of the ruling class: every ‘technical’ division, every
‘technical’ organization of labour is the form and mask of a social (= class) division and organization of
labour. The reproduction of the relations of production can therefore only be a class undertaking. It is
realized through a class struggle which counterposes the ruling class and the exploited class.
The total process of the realization of the reproduction of the relations of production is therefore still
abstract, insofar as it has not adopted the point of view of this class struggle. To adopt the point of view of
reproduction is therefore in the last instance, to adopt the point of view of the class struggle.
2. The problem of the class nature of the ideologies existing in a social formation.
The ‘mechanism’ of ideology in general is one thing. We have seen that it can be reduced to a few
principles expressed in a few words (as ‘poor’ as those which, according to Marx, define production in
general, or in Freud, define the unconscious in general). If there is any truth in it, this mechanism must be
abstract with respect to every real ideological formation.
I have suggested that the ideologies were realized in institutions, in their rituals and their practices, in the
ISAs. We have seen that on this basis they contribute to that form of class struggle, vital for the ruling
class, the reproduction of the relations of production. But the point of view itself however real, is still an
abstract one.
In fact, the State and its Apparatuses only have meaning from the point of view of the class struggle, as an
apparatus of class struggle ensuring class oppression and guaranteeing the conditions of exploitation and its
reproduction. But there is no class struggle without antagonistic classes. Whoever says class struggle of the
ruling class says resistance, revolt and class struggle of the ruled class.
That is why the ISAs are not the realization of ideology in general, nor even the conflict-free realization of
the ideology of the ruling class. The ideology of the ruling class does not become the ruling ideology by the
grace of God, nor even by virtue of the seizure of State power alone. It is by the installation of the ISAs in
which this ideology is realized and realizes itself that it becomes the ruling ideology. But this installation is
not achieved all by itself; on the contrary, it is the stake in a very bitter and continuous class struggle: first
against the former ruling classes and their positions in the old and new ISAs, then against the exploited
class.
But this point of view of the class struggle in the ISAs is still an abstract one. In fact, the class struggle in
the ISAs is indeed an aspect of the class struggle, sometimes an important and symptomatic one: e.g. the
anti-religious struggle in the eighteenth century, or the ‘crisis’ of the educational ISA in every capitalist
country today. But the class struggles in the ISAs is only one aspect of a class struggle which goes beyond
the ISAs. The ideology that a class in power makes the ruling ideology in its ISAs is indeed ‘realized’ in
those ISAs, but it goes beyond them, for it comes from elsewhere. Similarly, the ideology that a ruled class
manages to defend in and against such ISAs goes beyond them, for it comes from elsewhere.
It is only from the point of view of the classes, i.e. of the class struggle, that it is possible to explain the
ideologies existing in a social formation. Not only is it from this starting-point that it is possible to explain
the realization of the ruling ideology in the ISAs and of the forms of class struggle for which the ISAs are
the seat and the stake. But it is also and above all from this starting-point that it is possible to understand
the provenance of the ideologies which are realized in the ISAs and confront one another there. For if it is
true that the ISAs represent the form in which the ideology of the ruling class must necessarily be realized,
and the form in which the ideology of the ruled class must necessarily be measured and confronted,
ideologies are not ‘born’ in the ISAs but from the social classes at grips in the class struggle: from their
conditions of existence, their practices, their experience of the struggle, etc.
April 1970
Notes
1. This text is made up of two extracts from an ongoing study. The sub-title ‘Notes towards an
Investigation’ is the author’s own. The ideas expounded should not be regarded as more than the
introduction to a discussion.
2. Marx to Kugelmann, 11 July 1868, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1955, p. 209.
3. Marx gave it its scientific concept: variable capital.
4. In For Marx and Reading Capital, 1965 (English editions 1969 and 1970 respectively).
5. Topography from the Greek topos: place. A topography represents in a definite space the respective sites
occupied by several realities: thus the economic is at the bottom (the base), the superstructure above it.
6. See p. 158 below, On Ideology.
7. To my knowledge, Gramsci is the only one who went any distance in the road I am taking. He had the
‘remarkable’ idea that the State could not be reduced to the (Repressive) State Apparatus, but included, as
he put it, a certain number of institutions from ‘civil society’: the Church, the Schools, the trade unions, etc.
Unfortunately, Gramsci did not systematize his institutions, which remained in the state of acute but
fragmentary notes (cf. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, International Publishers, 1971, pp.
12, 259, 260-3; see also the letter to Tatiana Schucht, 7 September 1931, in Lettre del Carcere, Einaudi,
1968, p. 479. English-language translation in preparation.
8. The family obviously has other ‘functions’ than that of an ISA. It intervenes in the reproduction of
labour power. In different modes of production it is the unit of production and/or the unit of consumption.
9. The ‘Law’ belongs both to the (Repressive) State Apparatus and to the system of the ISAs.
10. In a pathetic text written in 1937, Krupskaya relates the history of Lenin’s desperate efforts and what
she regards as his failure.
11. What I have said in these few brief words about the class struggle in the ISAs is obviously far from
exhausting the question of the class struggle.
To approach this question, two principles must be borne in mind:
The first principle was formulated by Marx in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy: ‘In considering such transformations [a social revolution] a distinction should always be made
between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined
with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic – in short,
ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.’ The class struggle is
thus expressed and exercised in ideological forms, thus also in the ideological forms of the ISAs. But the
class struggle extends far beyond these forms, and it is because it extends beyond them that the struggle of
the exploited classes may also be exercised in the forms of the ISAs, and thus turn the weapon of ideology
against the classes in power.
This by virtue of the second principle: the class struggle extends beyond the ISAs because it is rooted
elsewhere than in ideology, in the Infrastructure, in the relations of production, which are relations of
exploitation and constitute the base for class relations.
12. For the most part. For the relations of production are first reproduced by the materiality of the processes
of production and circulation. But it should not be forgotten that ideological relations are immediately
present in these same processes.
13. For that part of reproduction to which the Repressive State Apparatus and the Ideological State
Apparatus contribute.
14. I use this very modern term deliberately. For even in Communist circles, unfortunately, it is a
commonplace to ‘explain’ some political deviation (left or right opportunism) by the action of a ‘clique’.
15. Which borrowed the legal category of ‘subject in law’ to make an ideological notion: man is by nature a
subject.
16. Linguists and those who appeal to linguistics for various purposes often run up against difficulties
which arise because they ignore the action of the ideological effects in all discourses – including even
scientific discourses.
17. NB: this double ‘currently’ is one more proof of the fact that ideology is ‘eternal’, since these two
‘currentlys’ are separated by an indefinite interval; I am writing these lines on 6 April 1969, you may read
them at any subsequent time.
18. Hailing as an everyday practice subject to a precise ritual takes a quite ‘special’ form in the policeman’s
practice of ‘hailing’ which concerns the hailing of ‘suspects’.
19. Although we know that the individual is always already a subject, we go on using this term, convenient
because of the contrasting effect it produces.
20. I am quoting in a combined way, not to the letter but ‘in spirit and truth’.
21. The dogma of the Trinity is precisely the theory of the duplication of the Subject (the Father) into a
subject (the Son) and of their mirror-connexion (the Holy Spirit).
22. Hegel is (unknowingly) an admirable ‘theoretician’ of ideology insofar as he is a ‘theoretician’ of
Universal Recognition who unfortunately ends up in the ideology of Absolute Knowledge. Feuerbach is an
astonishing ‘theoretician’ of the mirror connexion, who unfortunately ends up in the ideology of the Human
Essence. To find the material with which to construct a theory of the guarantee, we must turn to Spinoza.
Louis Althusser Archive
Althusser Glossary 1969
Written and translated: 1969 by Ben Brewster.
Althusser’s interpolations are indicated by [square brackets]. Entries marked with * are taken from the later
glossary included with Reading “Capital” (1970).
ABSTRACT (abstrait). For Althusser, the theoretical opposition between the abstract and the concrete lies
wholly in the realm of theory. The abstract is the starting-point for theoretical practice, its Generality I
(q.v.), while the concrete is its end-point (Generality III). The common theoretical view that regards theory
as abstract and reality as concrete is characteristic of the works of Feuerbach and of Marx’s own youth.
ALIENATION (aliénation, Entäusserung). An ideological concept used by Marx in his Early Works (q.v.)
and regarded by the partisans of these works as the key concept of Marxism. Marx derived the term from
Feuerbach’s anthropology where it denoted the state of man and society where the essence of man is only
present to him in the distorted form of a god, which, although man created it in the image of his essence
(the species-being), appears to him as an external, pre-existing creator. Marx used the concept to criticize
the State and the economy as confiscating the real self-determining labour of men in the same way. In his
later works, however, the term appears very rarely, and where it does it is either used ironically, or with a
different conceptual content (in Capital, for instance).
BREAK, EPISTEMOLOGICAL (coupure epistémologique). A concept introduced by Gaston Bachelard in
his La Formation de l’esprit scientifique, and related to uses of the term in studies in the history of ideas by
Canguilhem and Foucault (see Althusser’s Letter to the Translator). It describes the leap from the prescientific world of ideas to the scientific world; this leap involves a radical break with the whole pattern
and frame of reference of the pre-scientific (ideological) notions, and the construction of a new pattern
(problematic q.v.). Althusser applies it to Marx’s rejection of the Hegelian and Feuerbachian ideology of
his youth and the construction of the basic concepts of dialectical and historical materialism (q.v.) in his
later works.
CAUSALITY, LINEAR, EXPRESSIVE AND STRUCTURAL* (causalité linéaire, expressive et
structurale). Whereas classical theories of causality have only two models, linear (transitive, mechanical)
causality, which only describes the effects of one element on another, and expressive (teleological)
causality, which can describe the effect of the whole on the parts, but only by making the latter an
‘expression’ of the former, a phenomenon of its essence, Marxist theory introduces a new concept of the
effect of the whole on the parts, structural, complex causality, where the complex totality (q.v.) of the
structure in dominance (q.v.) is a structure of effects with present-absent causes. The cause of the effects is
the complex organization of the whole, present-absent in its economic, political, ideological and
knowledge effects. Marx himself often used the theatrical analogy of the Darstellung (representation, mise
en scène). Empiricist ideologies, seeing the action on the stage, the effects, believe that they are seeing a
faithful copy of reality, recognizing themselves and their preconceptions in the mirror held up to them by
the play. The Hegelian detects the hand of God or the Spirit writing the script and directing the play. For
the Marxist, on the contrary, this is a theatre, but one which reflects neither simple reality nor any
transcendental truth, a theatre without an author; the object of his science is the mechanism which produces
the stage effects.
COMBINATION / COMBINATORY* (combination, Verbindung / combinatoire). The only theory of the
totality (q.v.) available to classical philosophy is the Leibnizian conception of an expressive totality
(totalité expressive) in which each part ‘conspires’ in the essence of the totality, so that the whole can be
read in each of the parts, which are total parts (partes totales) homologous with it. Modern structuralism
(q.v.) reproduces this ideology in its concept of a combinatory, a formal pattern of relations and (arbitrarily
occupied) places which recur as homologous patterns with a different content throughout the social
formation and its history. Theoretically, the combinatory will produce all the possible structures of the
social formation, past, present and future, which are or will be realized or not according to chance or to
some kind of principle of natural selection. Marxism has an apparently similar concept, that of combination
or Verbindung (Marx). The Verbindung, however, has nothing in common with the formalism of the
combinatory: it is a complex structure, doubly articulated (in the mode of production, by the productive
forces connection and the relations of production connection – q.v.), and one that specifies its content (its
‘supports’ – q.v.), which changes with a change in the formation or mode of production analysed.
CONCRETE-IN-THOUGHT / REAL-CONCRETE (concret-de-pensée/ concret-réel). In Feuerbach’s
ideology, the speculative abstract (q.v.), theory, is opposed to the concrete, reality. For the mature Marx,
however, the theoretical abstract and concrete both exist in thought as Generalities I and III (q.v.). The
concrete-in-thought is produced wholly in thought, whereas the real-concrete ‘survives independently
outside thought before and after’ (Marx).
CONJUNCTURE (conjoncture). The central concept of the Marxist science of politics (cf. Lenin’s ‘current
moment’); it denotes the exact balance of forces, state of overdetermination (q.v.) of the contradictions at
any given moment to which political tactics must be applied.
CONSCIOUSNESS (conscience). A term designating the region where ideology is located (‘false
consciousness’) and superseded (‘true consciousness’), contaminated by the pre-Marxist ideology of the
Young Marx. In fact, Althusser argues, ideology is profoundly unconscious – it is a structure imposed
involuntarily on the majority of men.
CONTRADICTION (contradiction). A term for the articulation of a practice (q.v.) into the complex whole
of the social formation (q.v.). Contradictions may be antagonistic or non-antagonistic according to whether
their state of overdetermination (q.v.) is one of fusion or condensation, or one of displacement (q.v.).
CONTRADICTIONS, CONDENSATION, DISPLACEMENT AND FUSION OF (condensation,
déplacement et fusion des contradictions). Condensation and displacement were used by Freud to indicate
the two ways dream-thoughts are represented in the dream-work – by the compression of a number of
dream-thoughts into one image, or by transferring psychical intensity from one image to another. Althusser
uses the analogy of these processes of psychical overdetermination to denote the different forms of the
overdetermination (q.v.) of contradictions in the Marxist theory of history. In periods of stability the
essential contradictions of the social formation are neutralized by displacement; in a revolutionary
situation, however, they may condense or fuse into a revolutionary rupture.
DENEGATION* (dénégation, Vernesnung). Freud used the term Verneinung (normally translated into
English as negation, but denegation has been used in this text because of the Hegelian ambiguity of
negation) to designate an unconscious denial masked by a conscious acceptance, or vice versa (in
fetishisms, for example, there is a denegation of the female’s absence of a penis). Translated into French as
dénégation, it is one of a set of concepts for the place of the conscious system in the total psychic
mechanism (the unconscious) which Althusser applies by analogy to the place of ideology in the social
formation. The role of historical materialism is to analyse (in the strict sense) the mechanisms producing
the ideological recognition of the obvious, given facts, just as psycho-analysis explains the mechanism
producing the mirror-recognition of Narcissistic identification with the other. This mythical recognition
structure, typical of ideology, explains the latter’s closed circular nature, its homology with wish-fulfilment
(plein-du-désir) in analysis, as ideology fulfilment (plein-de-idéologie). Science and analysis, on the other
hand, are open systems of concepts, because they cannot be defined by any spatial metaphor.
DEVELOPMENT, UNEVEN (développement inégal). A concept of Lenin and Mao Tse-tung: the
overdetermination (q.v.) of all the contradictions in a social formation (q.v.) means that none can develop
simply; the different overdeterminations in different times and places result in quite different patterns of
social development.
DIALECTIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS (dialectique de la conscience). The Hegelian dialectic, or any
dialectic where the various elements or moments are externalizations of a single, simple, internal principle,
as Rome in Hegel’s Philosophy of History is an expression of the abstract legal personality, etc.
DISLOCATION* (décalage). Empiricist and historicist problematics assume a one-to-one correspondence
(correspondence biunivoque) between the concepts of a science and its real object, and a relation of
expressive homology between these objects themselves (although these correspondences may be direct or
inverted – i.e., the order of emergence of the concepts in the science may follow the historical sequence, or,
on the contrary, follow a reverse order). Althusser argues, on the contrary, that the relations between
ideology and the other practices, between the different practices in general, between the elements in each
practice, and between ideology and science, are, in principle, relations of dislocations, staggered with
respect to one another: each has its own time and rhythrn of development. The totality is the theory of their
articulation together, so it cannot be discovered by making an ‘essential section’ (q.v.) through the current
of historical movement at any time one. This dislocation plays an important part in the theory of transition
(q.v.).
EFFECTIVITY, SPECIFIC (efficacité spécifique). The characteristic of Marx’s later theory: the different
aspects of the social formation are not related as in Hegel’s dialectic of consciousness (q.v.) as phenomena
and essence, each has its precise influence on the complex totality, the structure in dominance (q.v.). Thus
base and super-structure (q.v.) must not be conceived as vulgar Marxism conceives them, as essence and
phenomenon, the State and ideology are not mere expressions of the economy, they are autonomous within
a structured whole where one aspect is dominant, this dominance being determined in the last instance by
the economy.
EMPIRICISM (empirisme). Althusser uses the concept of empiricism in a very wise sense to include all
‘epistemologies’ that oppose a given subject to a given object and call knowledge the abstraction by the
subject of the essence of the object. Hence the knowledge of the object is part of the object itself. This
remains true whatever the nature of the subject (psychological, historical, etc.) or of the object (continuous,
discontinuous, mobile, immobile, etc.) in question. So as well as covering those epistemologies
traditionally called ‘empiricist’, this definition includes classical idealism, and the epistemology of
Feuerbach and the Young Marx.
FETISHISM* (fétichisme). Fetishism is the mechanism which conceals the real functioning (the real
movement – wirkliche Bewegung) of the dominant structure in the social formation, i.e., it is the
constitutive dislocation (q.v.) between the ideological practice and the other practices (q.v.). This is not a
subjective mystification, but the mode of appearance of reality (Marx calls it a reality – Wirklichkeit). In the
capitalist mode of production it takes the form of the fetishism of commodities, i.e., the personification of
certain things (money-capital) and the ‘reification’ of a certain relationship (labour). It does not consist of a
general ‘reification’ of all relationships, as some humanist interpretations of Marx argue, but only of this
particular relationship. Fetishism is not absent from other modes of production, it is merely displaced onto
whichever level is dominant in the social formation characterized by that mode of production.
FORMATION, SOCIAL (formation sociale). [A concept denoting ‘society’ so-called. L. A.]. The concrete
complex whole comprising economic practice, political practice and ideological practice (q.v.) at a certain
place and stage of development. Historical materialism is the science of social formations.
HISTORICISM* (historicisme). A currently widespread interpretation of Marxism which originated around
the time of the October Revolution, and which dominates the ideas of authors as diverse as Lukács, Korsch,
Gramsci, Della Volpe, Colletti and Sartre. It is characterized by a linear view of time (q.v.) susceptible to
an essential section (q.v.) into a present at any moment. The knowledge of history is then the selfconsciousness of each present. This self-consciousness of the present may take a number of forms;
(different ‘mediations’ may intercede between the historian and the totality): the class consciousness of the
revolutionary proletariat (Lukács), the organic ideology of the ruling (hegemonic) class (Gramsci), or the
practice of human inter-subjectivity as a whole, human ‘praxis’ (Sartre). Historicisms may or may not be
humanist (Sartre and Colletti respectively).
GENERALITIES I, II AND III (Généralités I, II et III). In theoretical practice (q.v.), the process of the
production of knowledge, Generalities I are the abstract, part-ideological, part-scientific generalities that
are the raw material of the science, Generalities III are the concrete, scientific generalities that are
produced, while Generalities II are the theory of the science at a given moment, the means of production of
knowledge (q.v.).
HUMANISM (humanisme). Humanism is the characteristic feature of the ideological problematic (q.v.)
from which Marx emerged, and more generally, of most modern ideology; a particularly conscious form of
humanism is Feuerbach’s anthropology, which dominates Marx’s Early Works (q.v.). As a science,
however, historical materialism, as exposed in Marx’s later works, implies a theoretical anti-humanism.
‘Real-humanism’ characterizes the works of the break (q.v.): the humanist form is retained, but usages such
as ‘the ensemble of the social relations’ point forward to the concepts of historical materialism. However,
the ideology (q.v.) of a socialist society may be a humanism, a proletarian ‘class humanism’ [an expression
I obviously use in a provisional, half-critical sense. L. A.].
IDEOLOGY (idéologie). Ideology is the ‘lived’ relation between men and their world, or a reflected form
of this unconscious relation, for instance a ‘philosophy’ (q.v.), etc. It is distinguished from a science not by
its falsity, for it can be coherent and logical (for instance, theology), but by the fact that the practico-social
predominates in it over the theoretical, over knowledge. Historically, it precedes the science that is
produced by making an epistemological break (q.v.) with it, but it survives alongside science as an essential
element of every social formation (q.v.), including a socialist and even a communist society.
KNOWLEDGE (connaissance). Knowledge is the product of theoretical practice (q.v.); it is Generalities
III (q.v.). As such it is clearly distinct from the practical recognition (reconnaissance) of a theoretical
problem.
MATERIALISM, DIALECTICAL AND HISTORICAL (matérialisme, dialectique et historique).
Historicists, even those who claim to be Marxists, reject the classical Marxist distinction between historical
and dialectical materialism since they see philosophy as the self-knowledge of the historical process, and
hence identify philosophy and the science of history; at best, dialectical materialism is reduced to the
historical method, while the science of history is its content. Althusser, rejecting historicism, rejects this
identification. For him, historical materialism is the science of history, while dialectical materialism,
Marxist philosophy, is the theory of scientific practice.
MODEL* (modèle). The theory of models is a variant of empiricism (q.v.). According to this theory,
Capital, for example, analyses not the real capitalist world, but the properties of an ideal, simplified model
of it, which is then applied to empirical reality, which, of course, it only fits approximately. For Althusser,
the theory in Capital is only ‘ideal’ in the sense that it only involves the object of knowledge, like all
theory, not the real object, and the knowledge it produces is perfectly adequate to its object, not an
approximation to it. Related to the general theory of models are both the view that Volume Three of
Capital is a concretization, removing the simplifications of the ideal model of Volume One, and the theory
of the ‘English example’ in Capital as a model for capitalist development everywhere else. For Althusser,
Volume Three is as much concerned with the object of knowledge as Volume One, and England is only a
source of illustrations in Capital, not a theoretical norm.
NEGATION OF THE NEGATION (négation de la négation). A Hegelian conception that Marx ‘flirts’
with even in his mature works. It denotes the process of destruction and resumption
(supersession/Aufhebung. q.v.) whereby the Spirit moves from one stage of its development to another. For
Marx, it describes the fact that capitalism, having come into being by the destruction of feudalism, is itself
destined to be destroyed by the rise of socialism and communism [this description makes a metaphorical
use of the notion. L. A.].
OVERDETERMINATION (surdétermination, Überdeterminierung) Freud used this term to describe
(among other things) the representation of the dream-thoughts in images privileged by their condensation
of a number of thoughts in a single image (condensation/Verdichtung), or by the transference of psychic
energy from a particularly potent thought to apparently trivial images (displacement/VerschiebungVerstellung). Althusser uses the same term to describe the effects of the contradictions in each practice
(q.v.) constituting the social formation (q.v.) on the social formation as a whole, and hence back on each
practice and each contradiction, defining the pattern of dominance and subordination, antagonism and nonantagonism of the contradictions in the structure in dominance (q.v.) at any given historical moment.
More precisely, the overdetermination of a contradiction is the reflection in it of its conditions of existence
within the complex whole, that is, of the other contradictions in the complex whole, in other words its
uneven development (q.v.).
‘PHILOSOPHY’ / PHILOSOPHY (‘philosophie’/philosophie). ‘Philosophy’ (in inverted commas) is used
to denote the reflected forms of ideology (q.v.) as opposed to Theory (q.v.). See Althusser’s own ‘Remarks
on the Terminology Adopted’ . Philosophy (without inverted commas) is used in the later written essays to
denote Marxist philosophy, i.e., dialectical materialism.
PRACTICE, ECONOMIC, POLITICAL, IDEOLOGICAL AND THEORETICAL (pratique économique,
politique, idéologique et théorique). Althusser takes up the theory introduced by Engels and much
elaborated by Mao Tse-tung that economic, political and ideological practice are the three practices
(processes of production or transformation) that constitute the social formation (q.v.). Economic practice is
the transformation of nature by human labour into social products, political practice the transformation of
social relations by revolution, ideological practice the transformation of one relation to the lived world into
a new relation by ideological struggle. In his concern to stress the distinction between science and ideology
(q.v.), Althusser insists that theory constitutes a fourth practice, theoretical practice, that transforms
ideology into knowledge with theory. The determinant moment in each practice is the work of production
which brings together raw materials, men and means of production – not the men who perform the work,
who cannot therefore claim to be the subjects of the historical process. Subsidiary practices are also
discussed by Althusser, e.g. technical practice (pratique technique).
PROBLEMATIC (problématique). A word or concept cannot be considered in isolation; it only exists in
the theoretical or ideological framework in which it is used: its problematic. A related concept can clearly
be seen at work in Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (but see Althusser’s Letter to the Translator).
It should be stressed that the problematic is not a world-view.
It is not the essence of the thought of an individual or epoch which can be deduced from a body of texts by
an empirical, generalizing reading; it is centred on the absence of problems and concepts within the
problematic as much as their presence; it can therefore only be reached by a symptomatic reading (lecture
symptomale q.v.) on the model of the Freudian analyst’s reading of his patient’s utterances.
PRODUCTION / DISCOVERY OF A KNOWLEDGE* (production / découverte d’uneconnaissance).
Engels noted the difference between Priestley’s production of oxygen without realizing the theoretical
significance of the new substance, and Lavoisier’s discovery of (the concept of) oxygen, with its
revolutionary consequences for the science of chemistry. He compared this with the difference between the
production of the reality of surplus-value in classical economic theory and Marx’s discovery of the concept
of surplus-value. The slightly pejorative use of production here should not be confused with Althusser’s
insistence that knowledge is a specific mode of production (q.v.).
PRODUCTION, MODE OF* (mode de production, Produktionsweise). The mode of material production is
the central concept of the theory of the economic practice of the social formation. It is itself a complex
structure, doubly articulated by the productive forces connection and the relations of production connection
(q.v.), and containing three elements: the labourer, the means of production (sub-divided into object of
labour and instrument of labour), and the non-labourer. The term can also be applied by analogy to any
other practice or level, for they are all also doubly articulated, contain a similar set of elements, and
produce a specific product.
PRODUCTIVE FORCES / RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION* (forces productives / rapports de
production). These concepts are generally taken (even by some Marxists) to mean the machines or their
productivity on the one hand, and the human relations between the members of a society on the other. For
Althusser and Balibar, on the contrary, they are the two different articulations of the combination (q.v.) of
the mode of production: they are both ‘relations’ (connections – relations) combining together labourers,
means of production and non-labourers within the mode of production. The productive forces constitute the
connection of real appropriation (wirkliche Aneignung) of nature, or the ‘possession’ connection, while the
relations of production are the relations of expropriation of the product or the ‘property-ownership’
connection (not the corresponding ‘law of property’ which is not even an ‘expression’ of the relations of
production, but a structure dislocated from them, a superstructure). This double articulation appears in
every aspect of the mode of production, in the difference between use-value and exchange value, and in the
difference between the technical and the social division of labour, etc. While the productive forces cannot
be reduced to machines or quantifiable techniques, the relations of production can not be reduced to
relations between men alone, to human relations or inter-subjectivity, as they are in the historicist ideology
(q.v.).
READING (lecture). The problems of Marxist theory (or of any other theory) can only be solved by
learning to read the texts correctly (hence the title of Althusser’s later book, Lire le Capital, ‘Reading
Capital’); neither a superficial reading, collating literal references, nor a Hegelian reading, deducing the
essence of a corpus by extracting the ‘true kernel from the mystified shell’, will do. Only a symptomatic
reading (lecture symptomale), constructing the problematic, the unconsciousness of the text, is a reading of
Marx’s work that will allow us to establish the epistemological break that makes possible historical
materialism as a science (q.v.).
REPRODUCTION* (reproduction). Simple reproduction is often regarded as simplified ‘model’ (q.v.) of
extended reproduction, and the analysis of reproduction as the realization of production in history, the
introduction of temporality into the analysis of production, in the form of the conditions of its continuation.
Balibar shows, however, that simple reproduction is the concept of social production. Social production is
only apparently the production of things; in reality it is the production of a social relation, i.e., the
reproduction of the relations of production. Hence simple and extended reproduction are synchronic (q.v.)
concepts of the mode of production.
SECTION, ESSENTIAL* (coupe d’essence). Ideological theories (empiricism, idealism, historicism) see
the historical totality as analysable in a present, a contemporaneity, in which the relations between the parts
can be seen and recorded. To see this present implies the possibility of cutting a section through the
historical current, a section in which the essence of that current is visible. This essential section is
impossible for Althusser and Balibar because there is no present for all the elements and structures at once
in their conceptual system. The possibility of an essential section is one of the positive tests for an
empiricist ideology of history.
SPONTANEITY (spontaneité). A term employed by Lenin to criticize an ideological and political
tendency in the Russian Social-Democratic movement that held that the revolutionary movement should
base itself on the ‘spontaneous’ action of the working class rather than trying to lead it by imposing on this
action, by means of a party, policies produced by the party’s theoretical work. [For Lenin, the real
spontaneity, capacity for action, inventiveness and so on, of the ‘masses’, was to be respected as the most
precious aspect of the workers’ movement: but at the same time Lenin condemned the ‘ideology of
spontaneity’ (a dangerous ideology) shared by his opponents (populists and ‘Socialist Revolutionaries’),
and recognized that the real spontaneity of the masses was to be sustained and criticized in the mean time
in order to ‘liberate’ it from the influence of bourgeois ideology. L. A.]. In this sense, Lenin argued that to
make concessions to ‘spontaneity’ was to hand the revolutionary movement over to the power of bourgeois
ideology, and hence to the counter-revolution. Althusser generalizes this by arguing that each practice
(q.v.) and its corresponding science must not be left to develop on their own, however successful they may
temporarily be, since to do so leaves the field open for an ideology (characteristically pragmatism) to seize
hold of the science, and for the counter-revolution to seize the practice. The ‘unity of theory and practice’
cannot be the simple unity of a reflection, it is the complex one of an epistemological break (q.v.) [in
theory. In political practice this unity takes another form (not examined in this book). L. A.].
STRUCTURALISM* (structuralisme). A fashionable ideology according to which only the relations
between the elements (i.e., their places) in the totality are significant, and the occupants of these places are
arbitrary. The set of places and relations is the structuralist combinatory (q.v.). Structuralism also conceives
of the combinatory as the synchronic structure and its temporal or historical realization, its development, as
the diachrony.
STRUCTURE, DECENTRED (structure décentrée). The Hegelian totality (q.v.) presupposes an original,
primary essence that lies behind the complex appearance that it has produced by externalization in history;
hence it is a structure with a centre. The Marxist totality, however, is never separable in this way from the
elements that constitute it, as each is the condition of existence of all the others; hence it has no centre, only
a dominant element, and a determination in the last instance: it is a decentred structure.
STRUCTURE IN DOMINANCE (structure à dominante). The Marxist totality (q.v.) is neither a whole
each of whose elements is equivalent as the phenomenon of an essence (Hegelianism), nor are some of its
elements epiphenomena of any one of them (economism or mechanism); the elements are asymmetrically
related but autonomous (contradictory); one of them is dominant. [The economic base ‘determines’ (‘in the
last instance’) which element is to be dominant in a social formation (see Lire le Capital). L. A.]. Hence it
is a structure in dominance.
But the dominant element is not fixed for all time, it varies according to the overdetermination (q.v.) of the
contradictions and their uneven development (q.v.). In the social formation this overdetermination is, in the
last instance, determined by the economy (determiné en dernière instance de l’économie). This is
Althusser’s clarification of the classical Marxist assertion that the superstructure (q.v.) is relatively
autonomous but the economy is determinant in the last instance. The phrase ‘in the last instance’ does not
indicate that there will be some ultimate time or ever was some starting-point when the economy will be or
was solely determinant, the other instances preceding it or following it: ‘the last instance never comes’, the
structure is always the co-presence of all its elements and their relations of dominance and subordination it
is an ‘ever-pre-given structure’ (structure toujours-déjà-donnée).
SUPERSESSION (depassement, Aufhebung). A Hegelian concept popular among Marxist-humanists, it
denotes the process of historical development by the destruction and retention at a higher level of an old
historically determined situation in a new historically determined situation – e.g. socialism is the
supersession of capitalism, Marxism a supersession of Hegelianism. Althusser asserts that it is an
ideological concept, and he substitutes for it that of the historical transition, or, in the development of a
science, by the epistemological break (q.v.).
SUPERSTRUCTURE / STRUCTURE (superstructure/structure). In classical Marxism the social
formation (q.v.) is analysed into the components economic structure – determinant in the last instance – and
relatively autonomous superstructures: (1) the State and law; (2) ideology. Althusser clarifies this by
dividing it into the structure (the economic practice) and the superstructure (political and ideological
practice). The relation between these three is that of a structure in dominance (q.v.), determined in the last
instance by the structure.
SUPPORT* (support, porteur, Träger). Humanist ideologies see the social totality as the totality of intersubjective relations between men, as civil society, tho society of human needs. In other words, they are
anthropologies strictly homologous with the classical economic theory of the homo oeconomicus. In
Marxist theory, on the contrary, the real protagonists of history are the social relations of production,
political struggle and ideology, which are constituted by the place assigned to these protagonists in the
complex structure of the social formation (e.g., the labourer and the capitalist in the capitalist mode of
production, defined by their different relations to the means of production). The biological men are only the
supports or bearers of the guises (Charaktermasken) assigned to them by the structure of relations in the
social formation. Hence each articulation of the mode of production and each level of the social formation
defines for itself a potentially different form of historical individuality. The correspondence or noncorrespondence of these forms of historical individuality plays an important part in transition (q.v.).
SYNCHRONY / DIACHRONY* (synchronie / diachronie). Althusser and Balibar oppose the structuralist
(q.v.) ideological use of these terms, and insist that the synchrony of an object is merely the concept of that
object, existing as one of a set of concepts in the theory of that object (e.g., the synchrony of production is
its concept: reproduction – q.v.). However, they make slightly different uses of the concept of diachrony.
Althusser only uses it to indicate the ‘time’ of the proof, the fact that the concepts emerge in a certain order
in the proof, an order which has nothing to do with the historical emergence of the real objects of those
concepts. Balibar, on the other hand, uses it to designate the theory of the transition from one mode of
production to another.
TENDENCY* (tendance, Tendenz). Marx describes a number of the capitalist mode of production as
tendencies (notably the tendency of the rate of profit to fall). These tendencies have often been seen as the
patterns of historical development from one mode of production to another, as the symptoms of the
‘negation of the negation’ (q.v.) which leads to a higher historical phase. Balibar shows that they are in fact
merely the concept of the pattern of development peculiar to a mode of production, the concept of the limits
of variation of its movement and of the eventual barriers to its development, i.e., they are features of the
synchronic analysis (q.v.) of the mode of production, not of the diachronic analysis of the transition from
one mode of production to another.
THEORY, ‘THEORY’, THEORY (théorie, ‘théorie’, Théorie). For Althusser theory is a specific, scientific
theoretical practice (q.v.). In Chapter 6 ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’, a distinction is also made between
‘theory’ (in inverted commas), the determinate theoretical system of a given science, and Theory (with a
capital T), the theory of practice in general, i.e. dialectical materialism (q.v.). [In a few words in the preface
to the Italian translation of Lire le Capital, reproduced in the new French edition of the book, and to be
published in the English translation (New Left Books), I have pointed out that I now regard my definition
of philosophy (Theory as ‘the Theory of theoretical practice’) as a unilateral and, in consequence, false
conception of dialectical materialism. Positive indications of the new definition I propose can be found: (1)
in an interview published in L’Unità in February 1968 and reproduced in the Italian translation of Lire le
Capital (Feltrinelli) and in La Pensée (April 1968); 2) in Lénine et la philosophie, the text of a lecture I
gave to the Société Française de Philosophie in February 1968, and published under the same title by
François Maspero in January 1969. The new definition of philosophy can be resumed in three points: (1)
philosophy ‘represents’ the class struggle in the realm of theory, hence philosophy is neither a science, nor
a pure theory (Theory), but a political practice of intervention in the realm of theory; (2) philosophy
‘represents’ scientificity in the realm of political practice, hence philosophy is not the political practice, but
a theoretical practice of intervention in the realm of politics; (3) philosophy is an original ‘instance’
(differing from the instances of science and poli-tics) that represents the one instance alongside (auprès de)
the other, in the form of a specific intervention (political-theoretical). L. A.].
TIME* (temps). Hegelian theories of history see time as the mode of existence (Dasein) of the concept
(Begriff). There is therefore a unique linear time in which the totality of historical possibilities unfolds.
Empiricist theories of history as a chronology of ‘events’ accept the same conception of time by default.
This simple unilinear time can then be divided into ‘events’ (short-term phenomena) and ‘structures’ (longterm phenomena), or periodized in evolutionist fashion into self-contemporaneous ‘modes of production’,
the static or ‘synchronic’ analysis of which has a dynamic or ‘diachronic’ development in time into another
mode of production. This dynamics or diachrony is then history. For Althusser and Balibar, on the contrary,
there is no simple unilinear time in which the development of the social formation unfolds: each level of
the social formation and each element in each level has a different temporality, and the totality is
constituted by the articulation together of the dislocations (q.v.) between these temporalities. It is thus
never possible to construct a self-contemporaneity of the structure, or essential section (q.v.). Historical
time is always complex and multi-linear. The synchrony of the social formation, or of one of its levels or
elements, is the concept of its structure, i.e., of its dislocation and articulation into the totality. It therefore
includes both ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ elements (tendencies – q.v.). The term diachrony (q.v. synchrony) can
only be applied to the concept of the phase of transition (q.v.). History itself is not a temporality, but an
epistemological category designating the object of a certain science, historical materialism.
TOTALITY (totalité, Totalität). An originally Hegelian concept that has become confused by its use by all
theorists who wish to stress the whole rather than the various parts in any system. However, the Hegelian
and the Marxist totalities are quite different. The Hegelian totality is the essence behind the multitude of its
phenomena, but the Marxist totality is a decentred structure in dominance (q.v.).
TRANSITION* (passage). Marx’s analysis of the transition from one mode of production to another has
two sides. First there is the analysis of the pre-history of the mode of production, the genealogy of its
constitutive elements, as they emerge in the interstices of the previous mode of production. Second there is
the analysis of the phase of transition itself, which is not a destructuration-restructuration, but a mode of
production in its own right, although one in which there is a dislocation (q.v.) of a special type rather than a
homology between the two articulations of the structure and therefore between the modes of historical
individuality defined by the structure, a dislocation within the mode of production and between the mode of
production and the other levels of the social formation. This dislocation is such that, rather than defining
reciprocal limitations which maintain the structure within a certain pattern of development, one of the
dislocating connections transforms the other. Thus, the phase of manufacture is a transitional phase in the
development of the capitalist mode of production. The labourer is separated from the means of labour in the
property connection; but he is still linked to them in the connection of real appropriation, through his
traditional craft skill. Labourer and instrument of labour are opposed to object of labour. Hence the labour
process still has its feudal form, whereas the property relation is capitalist. The introduction of machines
breaks down this feudal connection between the labourer and his means of labour, replacing it by one
homologous with the property connection, in which the means and the object of labour are connected and
opposed to the labourer.
WORKS OF MARX, EARLY, TRANSITIONAL AND MATURE (Oeuvres de jeunesse, de maturation et
de la maturité de Marx). Althusser rejects the view that Marx’s works form a theoretical unity. He divides
them as follows: Early Works (up to 1842); Works of the Break (Oeuvres de la Coupure – 1845);
Transitional Works (1845-47); Mature Works (1857-83). It should be remembered, however, that the
epistemological break (q.v.) can neither be punctual, nor made once and for all: it is to be thought as a
‘continuous break’, and its criticism applies even to the latest of Marx’s works, which ‘flirt’ with Hegelian
expressions and contain pre-Marxist ‘survivals’.
A Letter to the Translator
Thank you for your glossary; what you have done in it is extremely important from a political, educational
and theoretical point of view. I offer you my warmest thanks.
I return your text with a whole series of corrections and interpolations (some of which are fairly long and
important, you will see why).
A minor point: you refer twice to Foucault and once to Canguilhem vis-à-vis my use of ‘break’ and, I think,
of ‘problematic’. I should like to point out that Canguilhem has lived and thought in close contact with the
work of Bachelard for many years, so it is not surprising if he refers somewhere to the term
‘epistemological break’, although this term is rarely to be found as such in Bachelard’s texts (on the other
hand, if the term is uncommon, the thing is there all the time from a certain point on in Bachelard’s work).
But Canguilhem has not used this concept systematically, as I have tried to do. As for Foucault, the uses he
explicitly or implicitly makes of the concepts ‘break’ and ‘problematic’ are echoes either of Bachelard, or
of my own systematic ‘use’ of Bachelard (as far as ‘break’ is concerned) and of what I owe to my
unfortunate friend Martin (for ‘problematic’). I am not telling you this out of ‘author’s pride’ (it means
nothing to me), but out of respect both for the authors referred to and for the readers.
As for these authors: Canguilhem’s use of the concept ‘break’ differs from mine, although his interpretation
does tend in the same direction. In fact, this should be put the other way round: my debt to Canguilhem is
incalculable, and it is my interpretation that tends in the direction of his, as it is a continuation of his, going
beyond the point where his has (for the time being) stopped. Foucault: his case is quite different. He was a
pupil of mine, and ‘something’ from my writings has passed into his, including certain of my formulations.
But (and it must be said, concerning as it does his own philosophical personality) under his pen and in his
thought even the meanings he gives to formulations he has borrowed from me are transformed into another
quite different meaning than my own. Please take these corrections into account; I entrust them to you in so
far as they may enlighten the English reader (who has access in particular to that great work, Madness and
Civilization), and guide him in his references.
Much more important are the corrections I have suggested for some of your rubrics. In most cases they are
merely corrections (precisions) which do not affect the state of the theoretical concepts that figure in the
book (For Marx). They cast a little more light on what you yourself have very judiciously clarified. But in
other cases they are corrections of a different kind: bearing on a certain point in Lenin’s thought, for
example (my interpolation on the question of spontaneity). And finally, in other cases (see my last
interpolation), I have tried to give some hints to guide the English reader in the road I have travelled since
the (now quite distant) publication of the articles that make up For Marx. You will understand why I am so
insistent on all these corrections and interpolations. I urge you to give them a place in your glossary, and
add that (1) I have myself gone over the text of the glossary line by line, and (2) I have made changes in
matters of detail (which need not be indicated) and a few important interpolations.
As a result, everything should be perfectly dear. And we shall have removed the otherwise inevitable snare
into which readers of 1969 would certainly have ‘fallen’, if they were allowed to believe that the author of
texts that appeared one by one between 1960 and 1965 has remained in the position of these old articles
whereas time has not ceased to pass... . You can easily imagine the theoretical, ideological and political
misunderstandings that could not but have arisen from this ‘fiction’, and how much time and effort would
have had to be deployed to ‘remove’ these misunderstandings. The procedure I suggest has the advantage
that it removes any misunderstanding of this kind in advance, since, on the one hand, I leave the system of
concepts of 1960 to 1965 as it was, while on the other, I indicate the essential point in which I have
developed in the intervening years – since, finally, I give references to the new writings that contain the
new definition of philosophy that I now hold, and I summarize the new conception which I have arrived at
(provisionally – but what is not provisional?).
Louis Althusser Archive