Structuralism
Last update: 21 Apr 2025 21:17
First version: 9 February 2003
Intellectual trend of the middle of the twentieth century, originating in
linguistics, influential in the humanities and some parts of the social
sciences. Now extinct, though not without descendants.
See also:
Historical Materialism;
Linguistics;
Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, etc.;
Semiotics;
Social Construction
of Reality;
Sociology
Recommended, big picture:
- Ernest Gellner, "What Is
Structuralisme?" in his Relativism and the Social
Sciences
- Steven Cassedy, Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern
Literary Criticism and Theory [The, as it were, subterranean influence
of modern poetry on literary theory, especially early structuralism. Online]
- Leonard Jackson, The Poverty of Structuralism [Largely
concerned with attempted or purported applications to literature. It does,
however, explain why structuralism fell out of use in linguistics more
clearly than any other book I've seen (aside from books on linguistics).]
- J. G. Merquior, From Prague to Paris: A Critique of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought
- Thomas G. Pavel, The Feud of Languages: A History of
Structuralist Thought = The Spell of Language: Poststructuralism
and Speculation
Recommended, close-ups, secondary sources:
- S. Robert Ramsey, The Languages of China [In particular, ch. 7 on the reconstruction of the sound system of 7th century Chinese (roughly, the Tang dynasty)]
- Dan Sperber
- Rethinking Symbolism
- On Anthropological Knowledge
- Ivan Strenski, Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century
History: Cassirer, Eliade, Levi-Strauss and Malinowski
- Sebastiano Timpanaro, "Structuralism and Its Successors",
ch. 4 in his On Materialism
Not altogether recommended:
- Jean Piaget, Structuralism
[Translation of Le Structuralisme (No. 1311 in the series "que
sais-je?"), which suffers from the translator's ignorance of mathematical
terminology — whether in French or in English or both, I don't know. It
also suffers, I have to say, from Piaget's definite mis-understandings of
higher mathematics. For instance, according to his definition of a
mathematical structure, operations must be reversible, i.e., every operation
must have an inverse, and, consequently, there must be an identity operation or
transformation — one that leaves everything just as it was. But this is
to identify "structure" with "group," and most algebras are not groups. Dynamical systems, for instance, are monoids, which means
they have an identity transformation but do not need to have, and in most cases
do not have, inverses. So either dynamical systems, and indeed most algebras,
are not "structures" (in which case, what are they, and why should we confine
our attention to structures so called?), or Piaget's definition of structure is
grossly inadequate. Similarly when he says that arithmetic, under Peano's
axioms, is "self-regulating", I have no idea what he means. — I should
perhaps add that I respect Piaget's work in psychology greatly, and admire his
attempts to make sense of ideas like structuralism for a broad audience. But
if even he stumbled so badly...]
To read:
- Jan M. Broekman, Structuralism: Moscow --- Prague --- Paris
- Raymond Boudon
- The Uses of Structuralism
- "The Freudian-Marxian-Structuralist (FMS) movement in
France: variations on a theme by Sherry Turkle," Revue
Tocqueville, vol. II, no. 1 (Winter 1980), pp. 5--24
- Dosset, History of Structuralism [in 2 vols.]
- Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, "From Information Theory to French Theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the Cybernetic Apparatus", Critical Inquiry 38 (2011): 96--126
- Roman Jakobson, On Language
- Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism
- Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind [One can infer,
from Gellner's essay cited above, that the unnamed translator of this book is
in fact one E. Gellner, who, as he tells us, failed high school French
— "which is quite an unusual distinction in itself".]