Bringing Althusser and Foucault Together: A Brief Overview of the Question of the State

Abstract

Bringing Althusser and Foucault together is common in political theory. A number of scholars have discussed this in terms of their teacher-student relationship, shared concerns on humanist theories and Foucault’s rejection of the concept of ideology; but less has so far been said about the relationship between their approaches to the question of the state. This paper seeks to provide a short review of the relationship between Althusser and Foucault on the particular issue of the state. However, before analysing this relationship, some of the categorical bases of the Marxist approaches to the state primarily will be examined. As is well-known, the question of the state is of key importance for Marxism and the debate over the Marxist approach to the state has been long and engaging. Thus, to analyse it in a very detailed way here is neither my main concern nor necessary for my discussion of the relationship between Althusser and Foucault’s approaches to the state. However, one can hardly discuss these approaches without first examining that Marx had upon their views of the state. Therefore, my intention is rather to summarize some of the crucial features of the classical Marxist conceptualisation of the state in order to examine Michel Foucault’s relationship to Marxism through Louis Althusser with regard to the question of the

state. Following this, I will focus on Althusser’s thoughts on the state and claim that Althusser, does nothing but provides a state- centric political analysis which defines the whole of the political phenomena in terms of class struggle and the state. Then, I will

discuss the relationship between Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser with regard the problem of the state in a more detailed way. I believe that Foucault’s turn to an alternative analysis of power, that is micro-physics of power, can be seen as a response to Althusser’s seminal work Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, which appeared in 1970.