Few terms have had more complex fortunes than “alienation” and “intellectuals”; few at this time are more modish and less clear. It would be instructive to devote an entire paper to tracing their histories and plotting all their variations in present usage; it would be no less enlightening to determine just why these two concepts are so often coupled. Perhaps the single most important reason is to be found in the numerous attempts to classify and explain the great modern revolutions, particularly those of France and Russia. These have been frequently characterized as qualitatively different from all those that preceded them. Inspired by, or producing in their course, total ideologies, these revolutions have produced a new style of politics. Its origins and patterns of development have received increasingly close scrutiny. Among the most consistently favored hypotheses has been that linking revolution to intellectuals. This theory need not be phrased as did Burke and Taine, who seem to have believed that the world would be spared great political convulsions, if only there were no radical intellectuals, subverting by their impractical speculations, the bases of society and politics. Tocqueville, whose views are occasionally confounded with those of Burke and Taine, did assert that thorough-going revolutions cannot occur without the existence of a general theory about the nature of the good society, a theory that cannot be realized except by changing completely, and possibly violently, the status of persons and property under the existing order (1).

Il convient de justifier en quelques mots ce titre prétentieux qui paraît attribuer à M. Lévi-Strauss des idées franchement philosophiques. A en juger par les résultats, fort instructifs, d'une récente discussion de principes (1), il est pourtant clair qu'il serait prématuré de considérer 1' «anthropologie structurale» comme un courant philosophique moderne (du «non-sens» par exemple), qui chercherait à se frayer un chemin au détriment de courants de pensée existants. La démarche structuraliste se propose plutôt de servir à un regroupement de différentes sciences qui se tenaient jusqu'alors jalousement à l'écart l'une de l'autre, en déployant une compréhension globale et cohérente de l'homme et en s'efforçant autant que possible de transcender les façons propres aux sciences humaines pour les replacer dans le cadre d'une science de la nature. Laissons a cette demarche les limites qu'elle s'est elle-même fixées et gardons-nous de lui faire dire plus qu'elle ne veut. Il n'est pas interdit toutefois de comprendre ces nouveaux principes dans leur signification la plus large, en laissant aux sociologues de métier le soin de vérifier leur efficacité au sein des données empiriques. Examinons done les circonstances dans lesquelles apparaît le terme d' «esprit» et son importance pour les sciences humaines en tant que telles.

I must start with a personal disavowal. This essay employs an explicitly Lévi-Straussian procedure but it is not intended as a guide to wider aspects of Lévi-Strauss thought. Although I feel reasonably safe with Lévi-Strauss's concept of structure, I am quite out of my depth when it comes to the related but subtler notion of esprit. Lévi-Strauss's esprit appears in sundry guises. In 1952, originally in English, he/it was a personalized “human mind”, an uninvited guest who took his place around the conference table among a group of American linguists and anthropologists (1); in the earlier chapters of La pensée sauvage he is perhaps the bricoleur—handiman—who is busy contriving culture from the junk of history and anything else that comes to hand (2); at the conclusion of Le cru et le cuit (3), in more abstract and more serious vein, esprit seems to be a kind of limiting characteristic of the human brain mechanism and appears as part of an extremely involved interchange relationship in which it (esprit) is the causal force producing myths of which its own structure is a precipitate. Elsewhere again (4) esprit seems to correspond to that very mysterious something which is a mediator between “praxis et pratiques” and which is described as « le schème conceptuel par l'opération duquel une matière et une forme, dépourvues l'une et l'autre d'existence indépendante, s'accomplissent comme structures, c'est-à-dire comme êtres à la fois empiriques et intelligibles ».