Epistemological Break

Concept

For Bachelard the epistemological break denotes the disappearance of 'epistemological obstacles', the unthought, unconscious structures immanent in the sciences. He used the concept in two senses: a synchronic sense dividing scientific knowledge from ordinary or common knowledge, and a diachronic sense in which science develops by breaking with previous theories rather than by steady accumulation. Alongside the obstacle, the profile and the act, it became one of the epistemological categories representing discontinuity in intellectual history.

In Althusser's structural Marxism the break (French coupure épistémologique) is a discontinuous rupture separating a new science from its ideological prehistory. His central move was a rigid distinction between science and ideology: drawing on Bachelard, science is not the opposite of ignorance but of a 'tenacious web of error' embodied in ideology, and the break is understood as a change in a discourse's fundamental 'problematic', discerned by 'symptomatic reading'.

History

Bachelard's studies such as The New Scientific Spirit (1934) and The Formation of the Scientific Mind (1938) founded his historical epistemology. He was critical of Comte's positivism, which treated science as continual progress, and argued from Einstein's relativity that the history of science is discontinuous. Yet Bachelard himself almost never used the phrase 'epistemological break', and the expression became famous through Althusser.

Althusser's intervention was directed against the humanist Marxism dominant in Western universities in the 1950s and 1960s, which drew on the posthumously published early Marx. He sought a 'third way' between Stalinist dogmatic dialectical materialism and humanist or existentialist Marxisms, aiming to re-establish Marxism as a science by purging ideological, humanist and historicist elements. The intervention was shaped by Khrushchev's 1956 'Secret Speech' denouncing Stalin-era crimes, which he described as an 'earthquake', and by the Sino-Soviet split and Mao's theoretical work; it was conceived as a left-wing critique of Stalinism that did not abandon tools for analysing Stalinism.

Althusser located the break in Marx's development around 1845, with The German Ideology and the Theses on Feuerbach, which he held mark a rupture with the Hegelian and Feuerbachian humanism of the early writings and the founding of historical materialism; the 1844 Manuscripts therefore belong to scientific Marxism's prehistory rather than to it.

Distinctions

Bachelard's model is not purely discontinuist: his picture of science is 'discontinuous but progressive', and an epistemological break is not merely the rejection of past science but also a preservation, via reformulation, of old ideas in a new and broader context, so that older concepts can survive as restricted cases. He was particularly impressed by the profound break instigated in the twentieth century by the 'new scientific spirit' represented by relativity and quantum mechanics, holding that Newton's concepts were preserved only as special cases of the Einsteinian ones.

Bachelard distinguished the break from the 'obstacle' (a concept, method or mode of thinking that prevents a break), the 'profile' (an individual's composite understanding of a concept across historical stages) and the 'act' (a leap in scientific knowledge that may leap over an obstacle). His theory of discontinuity predated Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions by two or three decades, and Bachelard/Canguilhem and Kuhn/Althusser are treated as separate models of discontinuity: Bachelard's break pertains to the history of science, whereas Kuhn's model is that of paradigm shifts.

Althusser denied that humanist Marxism was authentically Marxist, defending 'theoretical anti-humanism' as an alternative to both Stalinism and the Marxist humanism then popular; concepts like 'Man' and human nature were for him ideological rather than scientific, and history a 'process without a subject'.

Contested scope

The notion of an epistemological break in Marx is contested. Lenin claimed Marx's first mature work was The Poverty of Philosophy (1847); Althusser championed the young/mature dichotomy against Marxist humanism and claimed The German Ideology (1845) marked the break. Scholars including Calvez, Tucker, McLellan, Fetscher, Avineri, Mészáros and Kołakowski deny any break between the Young Marx and the Old Marx, while Mandel distinguishes three positions and criticizes all as erroneous. It is also argued that Althusser's break is not to be conceived as a chronological point but as a 'process', which raises the question of how to conceive the transformation of Marx's thought without adopting a teleological or idealist perspective.

One political interpretation of Althusser's locating the break at 1845 is that it allowed him to 'neatly eliminate' questions concerning alienation and the nature of work which were 'embarrassing to the Soviet state'.

Relations and criticism

Althusser's epistemological break is conceptually nested in the wider structural-Marxist apparatus: anti-humanism and a 'process without a subject', overdetermination, the relative autonomy of the superstructures from the economic base ('determination in the last instance'), structural causality, and in his later work ideology and interpellation. It fed into Poulantzas, Balibar and Macherey, and framed the subsequent debate on the Young Marx.

Structural Marxism faced sustained criticism from other Marxist traditions, notably E. P. Thompson's charge of idealism and Stalinism; by the late 1970s the movement declined amid internal theoretical problems and the rise of post-structuralism, with many of Althusser's students becoming prominent critics.