Shortly before his death in 1970 Lucien Goldmann reflected on the work he had done in the past twenty-five years. His goal had been the development of a dialectical method for the analysis of literary creativity which would lead first to a scientific sociology of knowledge and from there to a dialectical study of human reality in general.1 Although his efforts were cut short, Goldmann did leave a theoretical model which has applications far beyond the sociology of literature. In what follows, I will describe the model Goldmann referred to as genetic structuralism, and I will show how its creator was able to use it to generate several provocative hypotheses on the relations between human consciousness and social organization.