Structuralism began in linguistics with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. But many French intellectuals perceived it to have a wider application, and the model was soon modified and applied to other fields, such as anthropology, psychoanalysis and literary theory. This garnered in the dawn of structuralism as not just a method, but also an intellectual movement that came to take existentialism’s pedestal in 1960s France. John Sturrock, Structuralism and Since, Introduction.

As a method, the basics of structuralism consist of analyzing social events (speech, familial identity, and recounts of history, for example) to discover the synchronic structures that both underlie them and make them possible (language, kinship and narrative structure, respectively), which are then typically broken down into units, codes, rules of combination, etc. The essential theory underlying this method is that these structures are autonomous, and that their units are interdependent, because they are constituted through contrast with one another. So how we discursively conceive of ourselves, or anything, for that matter, is dependent on contexts found within historically contingent systems. John Sturrock, Structuralism and Since, Introduction.

Structuralism enjoyed much popularity, and its general stance of antihumanism was in sheer opposition to the Sartrean existentialism that preceded it. But in the 1970s, it came under internal fire from critics who accused it of being too rigid and ahistorical. However, many of structuralism’s theorists, from Michel Foucault to Jacques Lacan, continue to assert an influence on continental philosophy, and many of the fundamental assumptions of its critics, that is, of adherents of poststructuralism, are but a continuation of structuralism. John Sturrock, Structuralism and Since, Introduction.