| Summary: | This article examines the genesis of Nicos Poulantzas’s book Political Power and Social Classes, a manuscript that was extensively studied and criticised by Louis Althusser, and transformed by the exchange between the two, particularly around the concepts of hegemony and civil society. This correspondence is that of a master and his pupil, a teacher’s lesson and a human drama. While Poulantzas transfigures his text and seems to have converted to the intransigence of the master, he retains his original finesse and doubts, derived from the Gramscian matrix. Over time, he becomes disenchanted with his master, and the pupil seems to become master of himself once again, as a young Greek, a foreigner, a European, faced with the French magisterium, as a thinker in the making, an iconoclast faced with the force of the French, if not Parisian, habitus.
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