Theory of theoretical practice

Louis Althusser, French communist and philosopher, put forward a view of Marx's work that soon became widely influential. With For Marx and Reading Capital it won an international audience. It originated as a challenge to humanist and Hegelian themes then much current in discussion of Marx and inspired by his early writings, and it proffered a novel conception of Marxist philosophy.

In the young Marx, an ideological drama of human alienation and selfrealization, with humanity the author of its unfolding destiny. Thereafter, however, a science, historical materialism, theory of social formations and their history; and its concepts of structural explanation: the forces and relations of production, determination by the economy, superstructure, state, ideology.

Dialectical materialism, was implicit in the foundation of the science, historical materialism and was in the first instance epistemology, a theory of knowledge or science.

Theoretical practice needs no external guarantees of the latter's validity, since every science possesses internal modes of proof with which to validate its own products. Governed by the interior requirements of knowledge, not by extratheoretical exigencies, interests of society or class; autonomous therefore, not part of the superstructure, but following its own developmental course some way removed from the vicissitudes of social history; theoretical or scientific practice is distinct from ideological practice,distinct too from political practice and economic practice. These are all, nevertheless, equally practices, types of production. They share a common formal structure, each with its own raw material, means of production, production process and product. That is the way the world is. Epistemology in the first place, dialectical materialism contains also its ontology, theory of the ultimate nature and constituents of being.

Human beings are supports, effects, of the structures and relations of the social formation. Marx, according to Althusser, rejected the idea of a universal human essence or nature. He espoused thereby a theoretical antihumanism.