Lucien Sebag made an attempt to combine Structuralism and Marxism on the ground that Marx was seekig “total” forms or schemata which go beyond those economic factors exclusively stressed by traditional Marxism. The result was that Sebag denied the absolute causality of the economic factor which, for him, formed only a part of a much wider schema.

Louis Althusser’s attempt was more important. He tried to restore the scientifically rigorous character of Marxism, to stress its independance of Hegel and of the whole previous philosophical tradition, and to found it on a socio-economic structure of which man himself is only a part.

He replaced traditional causality between the infrastructure and the superstructure by a more complicated, multiform causality. This attempt was criticized because of its unilateral, arbitrary interpretation of Marxism as an exact science, and its tendency to discard Man.

The paper concludes by criticizing stucturalism as a whole for the same reason, i. e. ignoring Man, together with history and evolution. It is true that Piaget and Sebag tried to reconcile structuralism with some sort of historicism, through a more accurate definition of Man as envisaged by structuralism. However, this defence was not utterly convincing. Structuralism did not sufficiently take into account the factors of movement, change and activity. It stressed Man in his “static” condition, when he is acted upon, instead of being active.

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