Louis Althusser aleatorikus materialista történelemelmélete

In my paper I analyze and interpret Louis Althusser’s two main texts written in the 1980’s, the last period of his philosophical activity: The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter and Philosophy and Marxism. Contrary to previous interpretations of these texts, I do not consider them as either primarily ontologically or politically motivated, but as writings inquiring about the role of contingency in history, and thus as a reflection on the possibility of a theory of history which can account for this. In order to argue for the coherence of such a theory, I differentiate between the concepts of contingency and of the aleatory, which are not always clearly contrasted by Althusser. After first analyzing his view on the role of philosophy and the concepts of his “aleatory materialism”, I examine his substantive statements about the characteristics of history, the way his theory reflects on the possible interpretations of history and finally the role of human agency within this theory.