His arguments and theses were set against the threats that he saw attacking the theoretical foundations of Marxism. These included both the influence of empiricism on Marxist theory, and humanist and reformist socialist orientations which manifested as divisions in the European communist parties, as well as the problem of the cult of personality and of ideology.
Althusser is commonly referred to as a structural Marxist , although his relationship to other schools of French structuralism is not a simple affiliation and he was critical of many aspects of structuralism.
He later described himself as a social anarchist. Althusser's life was marked by periods of intense mental illness. He was declared unfit to stand trial due to insanity and committed to a psychiatric hospital for three years. He did little further academic work, dying in His father, Charles-Joseph Althusser, was a lieutenant in the French army and a bank clerk, while his mother, Lucienne Marthe Berger, a devout Catholic , worked as a schoolteacher.
Seized in Vannes in June , he was held in a prisoner-of-war camp in Schleswig-Holstein , in Northern Germany, for the five remaining years of the war.
This second occupation allowed him to read philosophy and literature. Hegel and Hermann Hesse. Martin, to whom Althusser dedicated his first book, would later commit suicide.
