Many Marxists in recent years have tried to resist an economic reductionist interpretation of historical materialism, but at the same time insist that the economic is in some sense ultimately determinant. Most of them view society as a complex whole in which the various instances (aspects) of society are closely connected. Since this view of society is often mixed up with Weberian multi-causalism, these Marxists have to distinguish their interpretations of historical materialism from multi-causalism. The French philosopher Louise Althusser is probably the most influential one among those Marxists.
Unlike the usual interpretation of historical materialism, which is based on an essentialist，two-tiered explanatory model, Althusser's model—like the multi-causalist model--is anti-essentialist and one-tiered. The difference between Althusser and the multi-causalist is that，for Althusser，the society or the social formation is, as Althusser calls it, a structured whole, in which the economic is determinant in the last instance. Under this model, things are not explained by a single, pure contradiction, but always by the whole structure. The purpose of this paper is to explicate these ideas of Althusser's and to attempt to critically make sense of his structuralist model.