For more than a decade now French philosophical thought has tended to center around the work of two key figures, the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre and the structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss. In a wide variety of books and articles each man has directed his attention to the solution of specific problems ranging from nature of primitive kinship systems to the bases of modern revolution, and each has developed a methodology whose applications are said to be universal. So broad are the claims of each and so wide-ranging their presumed relevance that a host of lesser figures, from Communist Party theoreticians to academic linguists, have often felt obliged to place their own arguments with reference to these two grand systems of thought. Moreover, the disparity between the two has become increasingly evident since the publication by Levi-Strauss, in the final chapter of La Pens& sauvage (Paris, 1962), of a clear dissent from the methods and conclusions indicated by Sartre in his Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris, 1960).1 Indeed, as the dispute has been joined by a small army of imitators, apologists, and commentators, the entire affair has, to paraphrase one writer, occasionally taken on the appearance of an intellectual version of Gresham's Law, in which a strong ideology of dubious value is trying to drive out an only slightly less questionable ideology of apparently equal rank. There are those who look on this dispute as little more than a classic struggle between the camps of two aging French mandarins and their subalterns, a terribly continental sort of affair which others should strive to contain there. But for those who are less