What the thing is
Structuralism is a methodological approach in the social sciences.
It interprets elements of human culture by their relationship to a broader system, and works to uncover the structural patterns that underlie what people do, think, perceive and feel. The philosopher Simon Blackburn summarises it as the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations, and that behind local variations in surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract structure.
The term is ambiguous, and refers to different schools of thought in different contexts. Alison Assiter listed four ideas common to its various forms: a structure determines the position of each element of a whole; every system has a structure; structural laws deal with co-existence rather than change; and structures are the “real things” beneath the surface or appearance of meaning.
Where it came from
It originated in early 20th-century France and the Russian Empire.
The foundation was the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, followed by the Prague, Moscow and Copenhagen schools. Saussure put forward three related ideas. He separated langue, an idealised abstraction of language, from parole, language as actually used in daily life. He divided the sign into a signified, the abstract concept, and a signifier, the perceived sound or visual image. And because different languages use different words for the same things, he held that the link between them is arbitrary: signs gain meaning from their contrasts with other signs, and in his words, “in language, there are only differences ‘without positive terms.’” This set his approach apart from earlier ones that focused on the relationship between words and the things they designate.
The Prague school, with Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy, applied the idea to sound. Rather than list which sounds occur in a language, it examined how they relate, as a series of contrasts. In English, /p/ and /b/ are distinct phonemes because “pat” and “bat” differ only in that contrast.
After the Second World War, scholars in the humanities borrowed Saussure’s concepts for their own fields, and the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was arguably the first. Lévi-Strauss met Jakobson at the New School in New York during the war. His 1949 study The Elementary Structures of Kinship argued that apparently dissimilar forms of social organisation could be understood as permutations of a limited number of basic relations, and Structural Anthropology (1958) helped define the scope of the method. He went on to analyse myth, kinship and food preparation, and held that the “deep grammar” of society originates in the mind and operates unconsciously, through pairs of binary oppositions such as cooked and raw or culture and nature.
Structuralism rose to prominence in France in the 1960s, in the wake of the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre that had dominated European thought in the 1940s and 1950s. By the early 1960s some believed it offered a single unified approach to human life that could embrace all disciplines. Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida focused on applying it to literature, and Jacques Lacan blended Freud and Saussure to apply it to psychoanalysis.
What it gets right
It correctly identifies that meaning arises from relationships, not isolated elements.
What it gets wrong
It overextends synchronic analysis, ignoring historical change and individual agency.
Critics made the point in several ways. Structuralism has been faulted as ahistorical and as favouring deterministic structural forces over the ability of people to act. In literary criticism the danger is reduction: Catherine Belsey called it “the structuralist danger of collapsing all difference,” and a student might conclude that West Side Story is not really new because it shares the structure of Romeo and Juliet. Paul Ricoeur said Lévi-Strauss overstepped the limits of validity of the approach, and Cornelius Castoriadis argued that symbolic systems cannot be reduced to logical organisations built on the binary logic of oppositions. Anthony Giddens rejected the view that the reproduction of social systems is merely a mechanical outcome. Adam Kuper wrote that structuralism acquired something of the momentum of a millennial movement, with some adherents feeling they formed a secret society of the seeing in a world of the blind.
In anthropology, structural work fell out of favour in the early 1980s. D’Andrade suggests this was because it made unverifiable assumptions about the universal structures of the human mind, and criticism from Pierre Bourdieu turned attention to how cultural and social structures are changed by human practice. Even some who thought Lévi-Strauss at fault, such as the Biogenetic Structuralism group, held that a structural basis for culture must exist because all humans inherit the same brain structures.
Several of the figures linked to it kept their distance. Jean Piaget, who would better define himself as a constructivist, called structuralism “a method and not a doctrine.” Louis Althusser, often associated with structural Marxism, wrote that despite the terminological ambiguity the profound tendency of his and his colleagues’ texts was not attached to “structuralist” ideology.
Why it matters now
It remains the default grammar for analysing systems—from algorithms to fashion trends—despite its limits.
By the late 1960s its basic tenets came under attack from Michel Foucault, Derrida, Althusser and Barthes, who eventually came to be called post-structuralists, though elements of their work relate to and are informed by it. The student uprisings of May 1968 and the political turbulence of the period moved questions of power and political struggle to the centre of attention. By the end of the century structuralism was seen as a historically important school of thought, while the movements it spawned, rather than structuralism itself, commanded attention. It is less popular today than post-structuralism and deconstruction, though many of the assumptions of some of its post-structuralist critics continue structuralist thinking.
Is it worth your time
Yes—if you need to understand how meaning is built, not just what it says.
