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118 P. F. Lazarsfeld
Structuralism
There can be no doubt that in linguistics, anthropology and literary criticism
structuralism is an important issue. One could also point to concrete work which
would permit an attempt at a reasonable definition, but neither the work of
Uvi-Strauss nor the movement around Roland Barth belongs to the domain of
the present essay, and in sociology1 find no real traces. Piaget haswritten amono-
graph in which he argues that structuralism pervades all modern thinking in-
cluding the social sciences. When it comes to sociology, however, he hardly gives
any concrete examples. If for the moment, we leave out the study of small groups,
the only sociological reference Piaget makes is to the way Parsons uses the term
‘structure’.103 One sometimes has the impression that Piaget thinks that wher-
ever mathematical models are used they are by definition part of the structural
movement. But that would hardly contribute to clarification of the issue.
In fact the only type of this sociology I could find comes from sources outside
of France. When linguists classify various languages they often set up general
attribute spaces in which to locate the various languages. In so doing they
implicitly use the kind of substruction which has been discussed at the end of our
Section I. One American linguist even specitically stresses the ~arallel.~04
Another problem might also belong in a discussion of structuralism: the typol-
ogy of broad social and economic systems which has recently been revived. The
interest probably originates with Mam, who was much interested in describing
the historical phases of society which precede the origin of full-fledged develop-
ment of capitalism.Io5
Recent social change in underdeveloped countries has brought the problem
very much to the attention of social scientists. Wil these countries on their
way to modem industrialization develop forms of societies different from any
known before? If so, how can they be described without introducing a bias
which can come from the experience of Western social scientists. Kula has
suggested that something like an anthropology of Western industrial society
would be needed, written from the point of view of, say, an African social
scientist.106 The most intense work on this kind of social typology has been
made by Wittfogel in his work on Asiatic despotic societies. In his principal
publication he also reviews the history of this typological idea; his information is
instructive but probably biased because of his strong stand as a converted anti-
communist.107 It is interesting to note that historians have become interested in
this problem as witnessed by a collective work on feudalism which raises the
question of whether the type abstracted from European history also applies to
history of other The book by Eisenstadt on centralized bureauc-
racies, discussed in Section II, would also deserve re-analysing from this typo-
logical point of view.l0g
This concludes our review of the main efforts to develop what has become
known as social theory. We have been continuously forced to point to national
differences. This raises the question of what other variations between sociolo-
gists in different countries are noticeable. To this topic the next section is
dedicated.