Structural Ideas in Marx and Freud: The Intellectual Precursors to Lévi-Strauss’s Structuralism

Every anthropology student meets Claude Lévi-Strauss before meeting the people who made him possible. His structural anthropology looks so complete, so self-contained, that it is tempting to treat it as though it appeared out of nowhere in the mid-twentieth century. It didn’t. Two thinkers who never called themselves anthropologists, and who were writing decades before Lévi-Strauss picked up a pen, had already convinced European intellectual life that the visible surface of life is not where the real explanation lives. Karl Marx looked at society and found an economic base hiding underneath. Sigmund Freud looked at the human mind and found an unconscious hiding underneath that. Lévi-Strauss borrowed the habit of looking beneath the surface from both of them, even while rejecting large parts of what each one actually argued.

Karl Marx: the economic base beneath everyday life 🔗

Marx’s central claim is that the way a society organises production determines almost everything else about that society. He called this economic organisation the infrastructure or base: the relations people enter into to produce food, tools, shelter, and goods. On top of this base, Marx argued, a society builds its superstructure: its legal system, its political institutions, its religion, and its dominant ideas. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s account of Marx’s historical materialism, the superstructure and the ideology it carries function to stabilise the economic structure that produced them in the first place, rather than existing independently of it.

This is a genuinely radical claim once you sit with it. It means that a country’s constitution, its marriage laws, or its dominant religious beliefs are not free-floating ideas that people simply reasoned their way to. They are, in Marx’s view, shaped by and answerable to the economic arrangements underneath them. Change the mode of production, and the legal and political superstructure will eventually shift to match it.

Social reality is not what it looks like 🔗

The part of this argument that matters most for structuralism is not the specific economics. It is Marx’s method. He insisted that you cannot understand society by simply asking people what they believe or by observing behaviour on the surface. Immediate consciousness, in his account, is not a reliable guide to social reality, because people’s beliefs are themselves products of the economic structure they live inside. To understand a society, you have to dig past what people say about themselves and identify the underlying structure generating those beliefs. This is precisely the move Lévi-Strauss would later make with kinship systems and myths: don’t trust what people say their customs mean, look for the structure operating beneath their awareness.

Structuralism as reductionism: the Marxian analysis of class 🔗

Marxian class analysis illustrates something anthropology students need to notice early: structuralist thinking tends toward reductionism. When Marx and later Marxist theorists analyse a society’s culture, art, religion, or law, they generally trace all of it back to one underlying cause: the economic base and the class interests attached to it. Bourgeois-guided superstructures, in this reading, are not neutral cultural products. They are ways the dominant economic class maintains its position, whether or not that is anyone’s conscious intention.

There is real explanatory power in this move. It lets you connect a legal reform, a religious revival, and a shift in popular art to a single underlying cause, which is intellectually satisfying and often illuminating. But it is also a narrowing move. A rich, varied cultural landscape gets reduced to expressions of a single structure: class relations built on economic production. Anything that doesn’t fit neatly into that base-superstructure model tends to get treated as a special case or ignored. This is the reductionist tendency that later structuralists, including Lévi-Strauss, would inherit in a different form: explain enormous cultural variety by reference to one small set of underlying structures.

Sigmund Freud: the unconscious mind and hidden structures 🔗

Freud’s contribution comes from a completely different direction, but it rests on the same basic move: what you can see is generated by something you cannot see. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory argues that visible human behaviour, from slips of the tongue to major life decisions, is generated by an unconscious mind that the individual has no direct access to. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, an unconscious mental process for Freud is not simply something a person happens to have forgotten for the moment. It is something that resists being brought into awareness at all, except through the sustained work of psychoanalysis.

This unconscious, in Freud’s account, is not empty. It is packed with desires, memories, and disturbing thoughts that the conscious mind has pushed out because they are unacceptable, frightening, or simply too much to deal with directly. Freud spent much of his career at the University of Vienna and later in his own Vienna practice developing techniques such as free association and dream interpretation specifically to get access to this hidden material, since direct questioning of a patient’s conscious mind could never reach it.

Behaviour as the visible tip of a hidden structure 🔗

The parallel with Marx is worth spelling out clearly. Marx says: don’t trust the superstructure, look at the economic base underneath it. Freud says: don’t trust conscious behaviour, look at the unconscious underneath it. In both cases, the visible layer of reality is treated as a kind of symptom or output, and the real explanatory work happens at a hidden, structural level that ordinary awareness cannot reach on its own. Both thinkers also insist that this hidden layer operates according to its own logic, regardless of what any individual believes about their own motives or their own society.

History versus synchrony: Marx, Freud and Lévi-Strauss compared 🔗

Here is where the story takes a genuinely important turn, and it is a distinction examiners like to test. Marx and Freud were both fundamentally interested in historical process. Marx traced how one mode of production gives way to another over centuries, from feudalism to capitalism, and predicted where that historical movement was headed next. Freud traced how an individual’s unconscious forms over the course of childhood development, shaped by specific events and stages that unfold through time. Both men were, in this sense, thinking diachronically: their explanations depend on sequences of change across time.

Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism does not work this way. His method is synchronic: it looks at a structure as it exists at one moment, as a complete system of relationships, largely setting aside how that structure came to be that way historically. This is not an idea Lévi-Strauss got from Marx or Freud. It came from linguistics, specifically from the Prague School of structural linguistics, whose key figures included Nikolay Trubetskoy and Roman Jakobson. Lévi-Strauss met Jakobson personally in New York during the Second World War, and it was this encounter that gave him the linguistic model he would apply to kinship, myth, and social organisation.

The Prague School linguists were interested in how sounds function as a system of oppositions, such as voiced versus voiceless consonants, rather than in tracing how each individual sound had evolved historically. According to a discussion of structuralist presuppositions published in Diogenes, Trubetskoy and Jakobson tried to account for historical change in language during the 1930s without abandoning the basic synchronic commitments of Saussurean linguistics. Lévi-Strauss himself, in Structural Anthropology, praised Trubetskoy for treating linguistics as a systematic, universal structure rather than as a collection of individual, historically contingent facts, which is exactly the contrast Lévi-Strauss wanted to draw with older, more historically minded approaches to culture.

Borrowing the tool, not the content 🔗

It’s worth being precise about what Lévi-Strauss actually took from this lineage. As one anthropology course text puts it, he borrowed Ferdinand de Saussure’s distinction between langue, the underlying grammar of a language, and parole, individual speech acts, and applied it to culture: just as speakers use grammar without being consciously aware of its rules, people follow social structures without consciously knowing they are doing so. He also borrowed the Prague School’s technique of analysing binary oppositions, the presence or absence of a feature, and used it to analyse kinship systems and myths instead of speech sounds.

Notice what did not survive the transfer. Marx’s specific claim that the economic base determines everything else is not part of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism; social structures, for him, operate within culture rather than mechanically producing it. Freud’s specific claim that the unconscious is a reservoir of repressed sexual and aggressive drives is also not what Lévi-Strauss means by unconscious mental structures; his version of the unconscious is closer to a shared, universal grammar of the human mind than to a personal, repressed history. What Lévi-Strauss kept from both men was the method, not the content: assume that visible reality is generated by an underlying structure, and go looking for that structure systematically.

Why this genealogy matters for anthropology students 🔗

Understanding this background changes how you read Lévi-Strauss. His structuralism is often taught as though it sprang fully formed from linguistics alone, but it also carries the intellectual habits of nineteenth-century thought: the conviction, shared across very different disciplines, that surfaces deceive and depth explains. Marx gave structuralism its confidence that culture rests on hidden, systemic foundations. Freud gave it the idea that people are not reliable narrators of their own behaviour. The Prague School gave it a rigorous, synchronic method for actually locating those hidden structures. Lévi-Strauss’s real originality lies in fusing a historical, sociological insight with a psychological insight and an ahistorical linguistic method into a single anthropological toolkit, even though the three sources point in genuinely different directions on the question of history.

What do you think? If Marx and Freud both cared so much about historical change, does dropping history from structuralist analysis lose something important about how cultures actually work? And when Lévi-Strauss says social structures operate unconsciously “though not in a Freudian sense,” is that unconscious doing real explanatory work, or is it just borrowing Freud’s authority without his theory?

References

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
2. https://iep.utm.edu/freud/
3. https://anthropology.ua.edu/theory/structuralism/
4. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/diogenes/article/structuralism-and-beyond-a-critique-of-presuppositions/66B10FB63D8FB9B02A3D7C8A22865A0C
5. https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/levistra.htm
6. https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Anthropology/Cultural_Anthropology/Cultural_Anthropology_(Evans)/03:_Anthropological_Theory/3.06:_Structural_Anthropology