> Althusser's long been a whipping boy and I used to have a gut reaction
> against him as well. But I wanted to read some Poulantzas, whose first book
> uses all the Athusserian terminology, so one day I sat down and read
> Althusser and found out that there's an awful lot of caricature about him.
> Like most caricatures this is not baseless, but it is way exaggerated and
> Althusser is nowhere near as crazy as E. P. Thompson et al paint him. (I
> haven't read the rest of the Kolakowski essay mainly because of a prejudice
> that he's a bitter anti-communist cold warrior, but that preconception comes
> from an E. P. Thompson essay too - also in SR - so maybe I ought to.)
>
Thanks, this post is great - really useful. And yes, you should read Kolakowski. He wrote a reply to the E.P Thompson essay, by the way.
SA