Reading Capital

Reading Capital (French: Lire le Capital) is a 1965 book about Karl Marx's Capital, written by the French philosopher Louis Althusser and his students Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, Pierre Macherey, and Roger Establet. The book was first published in France by François Maspero. An abridged edition was published in 1968, and a complete English translation in 2016.

Reading Capital is a key text of structural Marxism. It offers a philosophical re-reading of Capital as a scientific and theoretical work, rather than a text of humanist economics or historicist prophecy. The book introduced the influential concept of "symptomatic reading", a method of textual analysis that seeks to identify the unconscious, unposed theoretical problems within a text by examining its omissions and structural tensions. The authors critique empiricist, humanist, and Hegelian interpretations of Marx, arguing for an "epistemological break" in his thought around 1845, which separated his early, more ideological work from the scientific framework of his later writings. The book's publication history is complex; a heavily abridged French edition published in 1968 served as the basis for most international translations for decades, which significantly shaped its global reception by omitting several key essays.