What is Structuralism? | Continental Philosophy

Lévi-Strauss, Barthes and Piaget

Structuralism was a school of philosophy that was at the forefront of the Continental philosophical tradition for a few short years in the 1960s. This time at the cutting edge, although brief, was critical; it marked a turning point, a bridge from the Existentialism that had dominated the Continental tradition since the Second World War into a new intellectual landscape that has often been captured under the labels Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism.

In this article, we are going to be looking at what Structuralism is, why it was so revolutionary and why it was so quickly outgrown.

Saussure

Structuralism can’t be understood without reference to the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. In a previous instalment, we looked at Saussure’s revolutionary reorientation of linguistics with Semiology or as it’s now known Semiotics. This work of Saussure made him the retroactive father of the Structuralist tradition. In the language of Thomas Kuhn, Saussure birthed the paradigm within which Structuralism worked and it was an exemplar of what a Structuralist analysis should look like.

In his posthumously published work Course on General Linguistics, Saussure made a number of important distinctions that laid the…