Rousseau’s State of Pure Nature
Althusser’s reading of Rousseau takes us to the very heart of questions on the management of our natural world in the age of the Anthropocene.
Louis Althusser was born in Algeria in 1918 and died in France in 1990. He taught philosophy for many years at the Ecole Normale Superieur in Paris, and was a leading intellectual in the French Communist Party. His books include For Marx; Reading Capital (with Étienne Balibar); Essays on Ideology; Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx; Machiavelli and Us; and The Spectre of Hegel.
Althusser’s reading of Rousseau takes us to the very heart of questions on the management of our natural world in the age of the Anthropocene.