concluding section of the book, Strauss explored the implica-
tions of his historical-critical work for Christian theology.
He argued that it is contradictory and untenable to attribute
divine predicates to a single person, Jesus, but not to the en-
tire species, humanity. It is humanity as a whole in which
the infinite incarnates itself.
The book was an immediate sensation and provoked a
century-long “quest for the historical Jesus” involving much
controversy over the New Testament sources and the histori-
cal inferences legitimately to be drawn from them. It is often
regarded as a watershed in the development of New Testa-
ment criticism, as well as the earliest significant statement of
the importance of the eschatological element in the preach-
ing of Jesus. Even though Strauss made concessions to his
critics in two later editions of the book, he bitterly withdrew
these in the final, fourth edition after being denied a profes-
sorship. For a brief period in the late 1830s, he identified
himself with the Young Hegelians by contributing to Arnold
Ruge’s journal Hallische Jahrbücher, but he soon became dis-
illusioned with their political radicalism.
Even though theologically radical, Strauss was always
politically conservative and unhappy with the revolutionary
tendencies in German society that erupted in 1848. “A na-
ture such as mine was happier under the old police state,”
he once wrote. He briefly engaged in political affairs as a
member of the Württemberg Landtag but resigned after a
parliamentary dispute. He wrote several biographies of well-
known historical figures, and in 1864 published a more pop-
ular Life of Jesus for the German People, which he expected
would bring him acclaim but did not. He became increasing-
ly more nationalistic and a supporter of German unification
under Bismarck.
In his last book, The Old Faith and the New (1873),
Strauss set forward his own worldview, which he believed to
be representative of his time. He argued that an educated
person can no longer be Christian but can be religious in the
sense of having a piety toward the cosmos. He proposed a
humanistic ethic compounded with his own conservative so-
cial views. The book was attacked by Christians but even
more savagely by the young Nietzsche, who thought it to be
the epitome of German cultural philistinism.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The standard German collection of Strauss’s works is Gesammelte
Schriften, 12 vols., edited by Eduard Zeller (Bonn, 1876–
1878). Only three of Strauss’s books are readily available in
English. A new edition of George Eliot’s famous translation
of the fourth German edition of The Life of Jesus Critically
Examined, edited, with critical notes and an introduction, by
Peter C. Hodgson (Philadelphia, 1972), discusses and com-
pares the various editions of the work. In Defense of My “Life
of Jesus” against the Hegelians (Hamden, Conn., 1983) is a
translation, with a very useful introduction, by Marilyn C.
Massey of several of Strauss’s polemical writings defending
his famous work. The third is The Christ of Faith and the Jesus
of History: A Critique of Schleiermacher’s The Life of Jesus,
translated and edited, with an introduction, by Leander E.
Keck (Philadelphia, 1977). A New Life of Jesus, 2 vols., was
translated anonymously in 1865 (London), and The Old
Faith and the New, translated by Mathilde Blind, appeared
in 1874 (New York); both these works have long been out
of print. The most extensive and eloquent discussion of the
significance of Strauss’s Life of Jesus for nineteenth-century
theology and biblical criticism is found in Albert Schweitzer’s
famous work The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study
of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, translated by William
Montgomery, 2d ed. (London, 1911). A useful short discus-
sion of Strauss’s significance for the Young Hegelians appears
in William J. Brazill’s The Young Hegelians (New Haven,
1970). The best biography of Strauss in English is by Horten
Harris, David Friedrich Strauss and His Theology (Cam-
bridge, 1973).VAN A. HARVEY (1987 AND 2005)STRUCTURALISM [FIRST EDITION]. In
their widely read anthology of this topic, Richard T. De
George and Fernande M. De George (1972) note that “bibli-
ographies on structuralism can be virtually endless if one suc-
cumbs to the temptation to include everything related to the
topic,” but they claim that the following authors “are almost
certain to be included in any list of structuralists” (p. vii):
Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman
Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Louis Al-
thusser, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan. This may be
so, but the term structuralism was not used before 1950, and
each of the last three individuals named has repudiated the
label. Moreover, the list need not begin with Marx; my own
favorite protostructuralist is Giambattista Vico (1668–
1744). My problem, therefore, is to indicate the core of the
structuralist position within a very wide range of variation.
The De Georges’ formula can serve as a starting point: “An
enterprise which unites Marx, Freud, Saussure and modern
structuralists [is]... the attempt to uncover deep struc-
tures, unconscious motivations, and underlying causes which
account for human action at a more basic and profound level
than do individual conscious decisions” (p. xii).
HISTORY OF THE TERM. The word structure has a much lon-
ger academic history than does structuralism. The sympo-
sium papers edited by Roger Bastide (1972) explore the use
of structure in linguistics, ethnology, art history, economics,
politics, law, psychology, psychoanalysis, social psychology,
sociology, and history throughout the present century. But
that was not the beginning. The ambitious prospectus for
Herbert Spencer’s system of philosophy which dates from
1858 refers to “The Inductions of Sociology—General facts,
structural and functional, as gathered from a survey of Socie-
ties and their changes” (Rumney, 1934, p. 300). What Spen-
cer had in mind was that human societies are naturally exist-
ing whole units which can be directly observed out there in
the real world. The sum of the individual members of such
a society is not just an aggregate crowd but a self-sustaining8748 STRUCTURALISM [FIRST EDITION]