ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the rationale of the conscious, partially organized structuralist movement with its recognized masters and committed disciples, research centers and institutes, and niches in university curricula. It considers the need for a structuralist movement in economics. The chapter examines those bodies of thought that have developed spontaneously and independently here and there over the spectrum of the disciplines sharing an analytic approach or outlook that can be identified as structuralist; that is, abstracting from the structuralist movement, the character of structuralist thought will be specified, with Jean Piaget’s psychology taken as its prototype. Piaget has strong ideas as to the substantive content of the epistemology he envisages as a bridge overarching the disciplines. The structuralist idea confronts and breaks away from the neoclassical conception of man and mind.
