"But someone is bound to question ... by what right I regard as Ideological State Apparatuses, institutions which for the most part do not possess public status, but are quite simply private institutions. As a conscious Marxist, Gramsci already forestalled this objection in one sentence. The distinction between the public and the private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law exercises its ‘authority’. The domain of the State escapes it because the latter is ‘above the law’: the State, which is the State of the ruling class, is neither public nor private; on the contrary, it is the precondition for any distinction between public and private. The same thing can be said from the starting-point of our State Ideological Apparatuses. It is unimportant whether the institutions in which they are realized are ‘public’ or ‘private’. What matters is how they function."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
p. 97
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Louis_Althusser
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Louis Althusser
22 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Louis Althusser →
Related Quotes
"Like every 'intellectual', a philosophy teacher is a petty bourgeois. When he opens his mouth, it is petty-bourgeois …"
"You know what Lenin says about 'intellectuals'. Individually certain of them may (politically) be declared revolution…"
"To become 'ideologists of the working class' (Lenin), 'organic intellectuals' of the proletariat (Gramsci), intellect…"
"Class instinct is subjective and spontaneous. ... To arrive at proletarian class positions, the class instinct of pro…"
"The sciences we are familiar with have been installed in a number of great 'continents'. Before Marx, two such contin…"
"The number-one philosophical battle therefore takes place on the frontier between the scientific and the ideological.…"
"To be a Communist is to be a partisan and artisan of Marxism-Leninist philosophy: of dialectical materialism."
"The reproduction of labour power thus reveals as its sine qua non not only the reproduction of its ‘skills’ but also …"
"The proletariat must seize state power in order to destroy the existing bourgeois state apparatus and, in a first pha…"
"I shall call Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immed…"