Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Foucault himself foreswore the label ‘structuralist’, much as Albert Camus always insisted he had never been an ‘existentialist’ and didn’t really know what that was.8 But as Foucault at least would have been constrained to concede, it didn’t really matter what he thought. ‘Structuralism’ was now shorthand for any ostensibly subversive account of past or present, in which conventional linear explanations and categories were shaken up and their assumptions questioned. More importantly, ‘structuralists’ were people who minimized or even denied the role of individuals and individual initiative in human affairs.9 But for all its protean applications, the idea that everything is ‘structured’ left something vital unexplained. For Fernand Braudel, or Claude Lévi-Strauss, or even Michel Foucault, the goal was to uncover the deep workings of a cultural system. This might or might not be a subversive scholarly impulse—it certainly was not in Braudel’s case—but it does gloss over or minimize change and transition. Decisive political events in particular proved resistant to this approach: you could explain why things had to change at a given stage, but it wasn’t clear just how they did so, or why individual social actors opted to facilitate the process. As an interpretation of human experience, any theory dependent on an arrangement of structures from which human choice had been eliminated was thus hobbled by its own assumptions. Intellectually subversive, structuralism was politicall...