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After the last world war, in the late forties through the fifties, the significant Western thinkers were preoccupied with the anxieties and uncertainties that the Western literate cultures experienced in societies, where long-nourished traditions of nurture and conduct had collapsed catastrophically. Everything was put to question and the concern was largely with the existential vicissitudes of the self and persons in their social contexts and milieu interne. From Sartre's emphasis on mauvais fois, Melanie Klein's on guilt, Erikson's on Identity, to the more phenomenological writings of Martin Buber, Binswanger and Rollo May, the primary issues are the same. Western man's—especially the intellectuals' (or whom Julien Benda neatly styled 'des clercs') unease with himself and his created and given social structures reached a veritable pitch of furor and dismay. The irony and the paradox of this ferment resulted in the advent of The Beatles, the Hippies, the Flower People, and the Student Revolution.
Gradually and vociferously, in the sixties and seventies, a shift in the concerns of the 'intellectuals' began to organize itself, through the researches and writings of such diverse thinkers as Professor Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, and Louis Althusser, to mention only a few. The question changed from the why and what of things, persons and thoughts, to their how and wherefore. Structuralism is perhaps the one global concept that covers these highly specialized researches. The time of the enlightened and self-conscious intellectuals was past now. What mattered was 'field work', be it in primitive cultures (à la Lévi-Strauss) or in the written texts (à la Lacan, Foucault and Derrida).
The book under consideration is the latest exposition of these epistemological concerns and self-searchings. Where there were angst and doubt and questioning before, we have multidisciplinary apprehensions, critical re-evalu