The great irony here, of course, is that in writing about the ideology of liberal capitalism, from the perspective of a Marxist-Leninist seeking to overthrow it, Althusser was foreseeing, dimly, the future failures of his own fellow ’68ers. They, the intellectual children of the French theorists, are now the wizened enforcers of the liberal capitalist order, wielding critical theory as the new establishment’s most powerful weapon.
