Althusser's Catholic Marxism

What role do Louis Althusser's early theological essays play in his later work? Quite a lot, I argue in this article. By following through the shift in four key essays from 1946 to 1951, we can trace not only Althusser's reluctant abandonment of the Roman Catholic Church, but also the emergence of patterns of thought that would stay with him in his later, fully Marxist period. On the one hand, he would continue to universalize in a fashion he picked up from the Catholic Church's own practice of universalizing, especially in his arguments concerning ideology. On the other hand, the Church would become the `absent cause' of his later work, permeating it through allusions, examples, and longer arguments, especially the effort to historicize it and then recast it as idealism.