Allow me to recommend a wonderful little book on this topic: _Humanism_,
by Tony Davies (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). It's concise,
elegant, and I dig it. Allow me to quote his citation of Althusser and
his elaboration on it:
"Marx broke radically with every theory that based history and
politics on an essence of man ... This rupture with every
*philosophical* anthropology or humanism is no secondary detail;
it is Marx's scientific discovery ... The earlier idealist ('bour-
geois') philosophy depended in all its domains and arguments
(its 'theory of knowledge', its conception of history, its political
economy, its ethics, its aesthetics, etc.) on a problematic of
*human nature* (or the essence of man) ... By rejecting the
essence of man as his theoretical basis, Marx rejected the whole
of this organic system of postulates." (Althusser 1969:227)
The "break" identified by Althusser in Marx's early writings,
and fiercely disputed by his critics, is, he insists, theoretical
and philosophical, not ethical or practical. It is perfectly
consistent for a "theoretical antihumanist" to be a practical
"humanist" -- to be fond of children, subscribe to Oxfam and Amnesty
and help old ladies across the road. Indeed, he argues, a certain
pragmatic humanism of rights an values, however ideological and
theoretically unsound, may be a necessary fiction in the mucky
business of political organization and struggle.
He also notes that, as with Nietzsche, philosophical antihumanism has very
"humanistic" aims. Antihumanism is not a rejection of the ethical. If
anything, it redirects our discourse from the subject of 'man' and
frees it for the ethical.
Nathan