 Cohen goes on to affirm and defend the historical and empirical claim that “bullshit Marxism” flourishes in French intellectual culture. (He had judged this second part of his discussion as “too speculative”, and it was only published posthumously [G. Cohen 2013: viii].) In the 1960s, he read a great deal of French Marxism, especially work by Louis Althusser and his followers. At the time, Cohen found much of that material hard to understand, but located the blame for those difficulties entirely within himself. Moreover, whenever he finally managed to extract a reasonable idea from this Althusserian literature, he was inclined—precisely because of that effort and investment—to consider it more important and interesting than it actually was. This psychological mechanism—“a blend, perhaps” of “adaptive preference formation” and “cognitive dissonance reduction”—may be widespread (2013: 95). Despite this youthful attraction, Cohen did not succumb to Althusserianism, because, as he puts it: 