Many geographers felt that positivism and structural Marxism dehumanized the human being.

They are influenced by structural Marxism, the Annales School, and institutionalism among others and sought to present the emergence of new economic (and hence, social) forms in terms of tensions existing within old arrangements.

By the 1980s the Grand Theory was reformulated and included theories such as; critical theory, structuralism, structural Marxism, and Structuration Theory, all influenced human geography.

Other proponents of structural Marxism were the sociologist Nicos Poulantzas and the anthropologist Maurice Godelier.

Many of Althusser's students broke with structural Marxism in the late 1960s and 1970s.

In a 1971 paper for Socialist Register, Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski undertook a detailed critique of structural Marxism, arguing that the concept was seriously flawed on three main points:

Kolakowski further argued that, despite Althusser's claims of scientific rigor, structural Marxism was unfalsifiable and thus unscientific, and was best understood as a quasi-religious ideology.

This gave rise, in France, to the "structuralist movement", which spurred the work of such thinkers as Louis Althusser, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, as well as the structural Marxism of Nicos Poulantzas.

Although in other areas of human geography a number of new approaches were invigorating research, including quantitative spatial science, behavioural studies, and structural Marxism, these were largely ignored by political geographers whose main point of reference continued to be the regional approach.

Strains of neo-Marxism include: critical theory, analytical Marxism and French structural Marxism.