Structural Marxists

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Structural Marxism is of French origin. Louis Althusser is considered to be the originator of this school. His analysis (as in Reading Capital or For Marx) was dense and abstract. Works of Nicos Poulantzas and Ernesto Laclau also exemplify structural Marxism. Structuralist Marxist analyses are different. The influence of the historical works of Fernand Braudel and the Annales School historians in general inspired a new mode of social analysis that drew upon the ideas of Marx but went beyond it. Examples are: Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World System and Theda Skocpol's The States and Social Revolutions among others. The main difference between structural Marxism and the Structuralist Marxist analysis is that the former is highly abstract and scholastic (see Perry Anderson's or E.P. Thompson's critique) while the latter is historically (therefore, empirically) grounded.