Balibar was born in Avallon, Yonne, Burgundy, France in 1942, and first rose to prominence as one of Althusser's pupils at the École normale supérieure.

Balibar's chapter, "On the Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism," was republished along with those of Althusser in the book's abridged version (trans.

As Balibar points out, the term appears only twice in the first edition of Capital, published in 1867: in the dedication to Wilhelm Wolff and in the two final sections on the "General Law of Capitalist Accumulation".

For Balibar, this implies that "the emergence of a revolutionary form of subjectivity (or identity)... is never a specific property of nature, and therefore brings with it no guarantees, but obliges us to search for the conditions in a conjuncture that can precipitate class struggles into mass movements..." Moreover, "[t]here is no proof… that these forms are always and eternally the same (for example, the party-form, or the trade union).

[8]: 331 In order to minimize these regional, class, and race conflicts, nation-states fabricate myths of origin that produce the illusion of shared ethnicity among all their inhabitants.

In order to create these myths of origins, nation-states scour the historical period during which they were "formed" to find justification for their existence.