Dear Comrades,
Just discovered your site and listened to the discussion on The Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists. This text is an old favorite of mine; I first read it (in French) when it was published so I do mean “old”. I found your discussion well-informed, often nostalgia-inducing and often new and illuminating from the viewpoint of a new generation.The only thing I missed was a mise-en-contexte of Althusser’s intervention in terms of his actual audience of the period (not just “scientists” but more specifically philosophy students and scientists at the École normale supérieure, along with outside auditors) and the longer-term project in which the talk was meant as a prologomenon. This results of the project were published in two Maspero series: the continuation of “Théorie: Cours de phikosophie pour scientifiques” and the series “Algorithme”, with case studies drawn from the history of science. It would be interesting, I think, to analyze how Althusser’s theoretical ideas in Spontaneous Philosophy were developed by his students (Badiou, Fichant, Balibar, Macherey, etc) directly in “Théorie”, which I think would have clarified some of the questions raised in discussion, but also to look at the scientific practices (or praxis if you prefer, a term I always heard was used by the imprisoned Gramsci for the more Marxist-sounding practice to avoid censorship) examined in the other series “Algorithme”, written by scientists and historians of science interested in applying their understanding of Althusser’s position to actual scientific examples.If I may be a bit more personal: I was a young graduate student (in physics) in London in the late 60s and early 70s when Althusser’s work was published and it came as a thunderclap to us English-speaking Marxists. There were no translations of it at the time so it was funneled through those of us (like myself) who read French, or, more precisely, could learn to read Althusserian French, a very special subspecies of that language. Unlike Raymond Williams, we ate this stuff up; finally, a theoretical construction which was hard-headed and anti-humanist but not mechanical or reductionist. We put out a journal (called “Theoretical Practice” of course) and formed study groups. It influenced some English-language published work in the history of science (I’m thinking here of John Stachel, Luke Hodgkins, etc) and in a way has influenced my own work in that field. It did not so directly influence the Science for the People group (or their British cousins: Science for People) which, where there was a Marxist influence, tended to be more Maoist.Once again, thanks for the recording; it’s nice to see Louis being put back into the discussion again and I think it will gain from that.
With comradely regards,
Jim Ritter
