Structuralism refers to research undertaken in the social sciences, predominantly in France, between the 1950s and 1970s, which sought to understand various social phenomena as a “closed system” of elements. This approach derives from the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) in the early twentieth century, which argued that a language is to be understood in terms of its internal (phonetic, grammatical) rules of organization rather than its arbitrary semantic relationships to the external world. In the 1940s and 1950s, Structuralism was applied to anthropology by the anthropologist Claude LéviStrauss (1908–2009), who argued that society itself is organized according to forms of communication and exchange.
Later work by the so-called Post-Structuralists extended the Structural approach to psychoanalysis, literary theory, and philosophy. Michel Foucault (1926–1984) offered a structuralist analysis of political power, arguing that the social sciences seek to define—and thereby control—the individual in terms of their own internally ordered structure of knowledge, whereby the internal (political, epistemological) rules governing the use of concepts like “madness” or “criminality” similarly constrain the individual’s actual existence.
Structuralism’s relative neglect of the individual’s subjective experience, and its limited range of applications, stood in marked contrast to traditional phenomenological and existential analyses, and this criticism still shapes contemporary Continental philosophy
