Editing Ontology:Q73 (section)

== Background ==

The Existentialist-Structuralist tradition is a purported group of philosophical frameworks claimed to exist by [[E:Q92|meta-Marxism]]. These philosophies all appear to be connected to each other by a particular set of shared themes, which is much more narrow than might otherwise be expected if they were in fact not related. These themes include "the subject" (existentialism), where language comes from and what effect it has (structuralist linguistics, poststructuralist frameworks), obsession with freedom and the capacity to do otherwise (existentialism, schizoanalysis, Foucauldianism), "your time" (Lacanian psychoanalysis, cybernetics), and reducing societal processes down to individual psychology (psychoanalysis, schizoanalysis at times). The thing that really identifies the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition is not simply seeing one of its associated themes, but the consistent quirk that finding one of them shortly leads to one of the others, as if none of them were actually separate.

It is currently unknown if critical theory is fully contained within the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition. Due to its connections with poststructuralist frameworks it would appear to overlap with the tradition at least partially. Another uncertain philosophy is Kantian ethics. This is thought to be a precursor to the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition but not formally part of it. There is a particular period of early Liberal-republican thought in the Enlightenment which is distinguishable as Liberal-republicanism, and far after that, there is a break around the time critical theory appears where the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition appears to start. Capital-E Existentialism appears to exist within a period in which the social sciences shifted from large scales toward small scales and began spawning smaller-scale political theories which did not operate the same way as traditional Liberal-republican theory.

In terms of hypotheses about why the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition would have come to exist, one possible hypothesis is that Existentialism is created when anarchists attempt to get into academia and create theories useful to anarchism, but all of the theories simply get co-opted and absorbed back into Liberal-republicanism as its own set of fully-compatible small scale models.