Structuralism

Last update: 29 Mar 2026 22:17
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.

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

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology
V. I. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale

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

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...]

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".]
Leif Weatherby, Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism [Review by Henry Farrell, which is fair and accurate of the half-or-so of the book I have read]