Structuralism

It is important to understand structuralism not only in and for itself but also as a precursor to poststructuralism and ultimately to postmodern social theory. Structuralism came to be most highly developed in France (and hence is often called French structuralism). Its greatest flowering involved, at least in part, a backlash against the humanism, and especially the existentialism (Sartre was the major exponent of this perspective), that was so pervasive in post-World War II France. Humanists such as Sartre gave considerable attention to individuals and afforded them a great deal of autonomy and agency. Structuralists turned this perspective on its head by focusing on the structures that they saw as the true base of the social world. Instead of having autonomy and agency, people were seen as being impelled, if not determined, by structures.

The roots of structuralism are not in sociology but, rather, are traceable to various disciplines.

Many structuralists focus on what they believe are the deep underlying structures of society. For example, Karl Marx focuses on the underlying economic structures of society that he sees structuring not only the economy but much of society. For the economy and the larger society to change, these structures need to be uncovered, understood, and transformed. Later structural Marxists (Althusser, Poulantzas) came to see Marx as a structuralist as evidenced by his concern with the largely invisible economic structure of a capitalist society. It is this concern with underlying invisible economic structures and a rejection of empirical analysis that makes structural Marxism a form of structuralism.

Other thinkers focus on the underlying structures of the mind, especially those found in the unconscious. Sigmund Freud was a leading exponent of this idea and thought it was important not only to understand these underlying [Page 805]structures but also to uncover them and their operations in order to allow people to deal better with the impact of these structures on their thoughts and actions. Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst who took the ideas of Freud and combined them with those of Saussure to develop the idea that the unconscious is structured in the same way as language. This position sees language as pivotal in the formation of the individual and also as central to the way in which the unconscious mind is structured.

Still others define structures as the models they build of social reality. One example of this is Pierre Bourdieu. Although generally considered a poststructuralist, Bourdieu exhibited elements of structuralism in his theory on habitus and field by asserting that structures can exist in the social world itself independent of language and culture.

Finally, a fourth group, such as anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (often referred to as “the father of structuralism” [Kurzweil 1980:13]), can be seen as being concerned with the dialectical relationship between structures of the mind and the structures found in society.

Although it arose in a number of different disciplines (Marx [as well as the structural Marxists] in political economy, Freud in psychiatry, and Lévi-Strauss in anthropology, among many others), the greatest interest in and development of structuralism is to be found in linguistics, especially the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). However, the field of linguistics in general, and Saussure in particular, has had a profound impact outside the field of linguistics. They helped give rise to the linguistic turn, or a shift in focal concern from social to linguistic structures, that has altered many of the social sciences.

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