The Post-Structuralist Turn and Its Paradoxical Legacies for History

The renewal within sociology and anthropology during the late 20th century had a relatively limited immediate impact on mainstream historical writing. This was largely because it reached fruition just as post-structuralism posed a more radical challenge to all human sciences. For anthropologists, post-structuralism critically questioned the power relationship between researcher and subject—an issue less pressing for historians studying the past. Meanwhile, the linguistic philosophy of Jacques Derrida and the genealogical work of Michel Foucault shifted theoretically minded historians’ interests away from sociology toward linguistics and philosophy, making history appear to have more in common with textual analysis than social theory.

The ‘cultural turn’ should, in principle, have dismantled historical and sociological grand narratives by exposing the constructed nature of truth claims. Disciplines have indeed become more reflexive about their origins in specific, prejudiced historical contexts. Paradoxically, however, postmodern descriptions of a transition from the modern to the postmodern often mirror earlier modernization narratives. The conviction that we inhabit a new, disorienting epoch defined by a ruptured spirit revives the idea of history progressing through distinct ages. As noted in a compendium of post-structuralist historical sociology, scholars disoriented by the loss of modernism naturally react with “nostalgia for old totalities.”

Foucault himself demonstrates a significant, if unacknowledged, debt to the sociological canon. His seminal work, Discipline and Punish (1975), employs a functionalist logic to explain the rationalization of punishment, arguing people internalize norms to become self-regulating subjects. Similarly, The Order of Discourse (1971) describes institutions as constraining through prohibition and division. His emphasis on the repetition of acts within regulatory discourses finds echoes in Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity. Although Foucault’s later work on sexuality allowed more room for self-creation, placing him closer to Anthony Giddens, he still confined this agency to privileged individuals within societal “interstices” during periods of epochal shift.

Post-structuralism most directly threatened labour history and Marxist class analysis by arguing that class was a linguistic construction, not an expression of an underlying social entity. In 1983, Gareth Stedman Jones re-evaluated Chartism, arguing its language was that of older radicalism, not a new class consciousness. Patrick Joyce, in works like Visions of the People (1991), shifted from Parsonian sociology to post-structuralism, replacing class with populism. Yet he struggled to fully break from sociological foundations, as his analysis retained notions that populism arose from an existential experience of poverty and a need for order, inadvertently preserving the concept of an epochal transition as an external explanatory force.

For historians of women and ethnic minorities, the divorce between social history and post-structuralism was less absolute. These scholars often blended Foucault’s insights on power and discourse with quasi-Marxist theories of ideology. For instance, Herman Lebovics produced both a classical Marxist analysis and a cultural study of French identity, maintaining that the idea of “true France” served capitalist interests. Similarly, critiques like Harold Mah’s of Robert Darnton’s “Great Cat Massacre” rejected fixed symbolic meanings while functionally arguing the story ultimately served to neutralize discontent—a vestige of functionalist thought.

The impact on the Annales School was subtler, where a revived emphasis on mentalities was more significant than pure post-structuralism. While François Furet emphasized political identities in his revisionist history of the French Revolution, a modernization subtext often remained. In Germany, Hans-Ulrich Wehler defended modernization theory as the best tool to understand historical dynamics, a stance arguably reinforced by the collapse of communism. Younger cultural historians critiqued his normative assumptions but often drew upon a reworked, rather than discarded, sociological tradition, demonstrating the persistent, if transformed, dialogue between history and social theory.