Louis Althusser (1918--1990) and his colleagues, prominently including *tienne Balibar, reworked Marxism using insights from structuralism, against the so-called ``humanist'' trend in Sartrean and Western Marxisms. Althusser offered an influential new reading of Marx's work, describing an ``epistemological break'' between the young, Hegelian Marx and the late Marx of Das Kapital. With _his_ focus on the economic level and theory, Althusser came into conflict with social historians, such as E.P. Thompson. <sep>, Pronoun: his