ABSTRACT
Structuralism flourished in the 1960s as an attempt to apply the insights of linguistics to the study of the impersonal effects of social structures and political systems. Structuralism in general is an attempt to shift away from the humanistic viewpoint that people are self-directing, autonomous agents and to focus instead on the structures which give coherence, regularity and meaning to social interactions. In this chapter, the authors look in detail at structuralist social theory, starting with the methods developed in structural linguistics. They turn to consider how these methods came to be applied to social analysis in the writings of influential public intellectuals associated with structuralism, principally Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. Structuralism has sometimes been criticized as apolitical. The early structuralist Foucault details the possibility of a scientific method, labeled either ‘archaeology’ or ‘genealogy’, which can discern unconscious processes of social change. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Foucault moved away from structuralism.
