Saussure and the structure of language
Structuralism starts with the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. His Course in General Linguistics (1916), compiled by students after his death, argued that linguists should study langue, the shared system of rules, rather than parole, individual acts of speech. A sign pairs a sound-image (the signifier) with a concept (the signified); the bond between them is arbitrary, and a word means what it does through its differences from other words. Saussure also urged studying language as a system at one moment (synchronically) rather than through its history (diachronically). Roman Jakobson of the Prague School went on to analyze sounds as bundles of contrasting features, an approach that shaped research on language development.
From anthropology to the humanities
Claude Lévi-Strauss carried Jakobson's method into anthropology. The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) treated the incest taboo and marriage exchange as a system of relations between groups, and Structural Anthropology (1958) argued that very different myths share structures that transform binary oppositions such as raw and cooked. In 1960s France structuralism displaced the subject-centered philosophy of existentialism. Roland Barthes decoded advertising and popular culture in Mythologies (1957), Jacques Lacan claimed the unconscious is structured like a language, and Louis Althusser offered a structural reading of Marx. Jean Piaget's Structuralism (1968) defined a structure by wholeness, transformation and self-regulation and tied the idea to his theory of cognitive development.
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Criticism and post-structuralism
Critics charged that structuralism erased history and human agency and struggled to explain why structures change. In Of Grammatology (1967) Jacques Derrida argued that signifier and signified never lock together, so meaning keeps slipping, and proposed deconstruction; Michel Foucault and the later Barthes also questioned the stability of structures. This work, labeled post-structuralism, laid groundwork for debates about postmodernism. Still, thinking in terms of relations and systems lives on in semiotics, cultural studies, cognitive science, sociology's debates over structural functionalism, and Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital.
FAQ
- How does structuralism differ from post-structuralism?
- Structuralism looked for stable systems of difference that generate meaning; post-structuralism holds that such systems can never be fixed and that meaning keeps shifting with context and interpretation.
- Why was structuralism so popular in 1960s France?
- Historians point to a reaction against existentialism's focus on the individual subject, hopes of extending linguistics' scientific success to other fields, and the rise of star thinkers such as Lévi-Strauss.
Sources reviewed: 2026-10-26
References
- Saussure, F. de (1916). Cours de linguistique générale (C. Bally & A. Sechehaye, Eds.). Paris: Payot.
- Lévi-Strauss, C. (1949). Les structures élémentaires de la parenté. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
- Jakobson, R., & Halle, M. (1956). Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton.
- Lévi-Strauss, C. (1958). Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon.
- Barthes, R. (1957). Mythologies. Paris: Seuil.
- Althusser, L. (1965). Pour Marx. Paris: Maspero.
- Lacan, J. (1966). Écrits. Paris: Seuil.
- Derrida, J. (1967). De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit.
- Piaget, J. (1968). Le structuralisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
- Dosse, F. (1991–1992). Histoire du structuralisme (2 vols.). Paris: La Découverte.