The dialectic does indeed work in strange and wondrous ways. Not so long ago it was thinkers on the political left who were among the more vocal and energetic proponents of the scientific study of society and culture, and thus were among the staunchest defenders of the ideal of objective knowledge. After all, the notion of false consciousness implies the possibility of an unfalse consciousness; just as it implies that we can, at least in principle, tell the difference between the two. It used to be the conservatives who expressed skepticism about objectivity, value-free inquiry and who repeatedly cautioned us against abandoning the traditionally accumulated wisdom of the past. Currently, many of the radicals are using the language and the arguments that belonged formerly to these conservatives; and so it turns out that those who defend the idea of an objective social science have become the establishmentarians-an interesting and curious turnabout, one that some sociologist of knowledge might well ponder. In addition to its animus toward a scientifically conceived anthropology, what impressed me about many of the pieces in Reinventing Anthropology-to be sure, not all the essays, but enough of them so that it gave the book a dominant tone-was the deep distrust of institutions (as though the mere fact of institutionalizing behavior somehow suppressed the spontaneity of the real self and was therefore something to be deplored) and, going along with this, a retreat (although I am certain the reinventors would consider it an advance) into the subjective, the personal and the relativistic. I suggested that the ideational source for much of this current radical ethos, whether writers are explicitly aware of their intellectual debt or not, lay in the writings of the young Marx (Marx the Hegelian philosopher of the essence of man rather than the more scientific mature Marx), particularly as these writings have been interpreted and elaborated upon by various modern-day European existentialists, phenomenologists, Frankfort School critical theorists and East European humanists. A prominent feature in the recent revival of interest in Marxism is, it seems, a certain greening of Marx. (Since one might draw a different impression from Diamond, Scholte, and Wolf's extended remarks, my discussion of Marx comprised one paragraph in a twelve-page essay.) Now these are hardly observations concocted out of thin air. Many scholars, and especially Marxist writers, have pointed out the different emphases in Marx and Marxism, differences which have yielded varied, even incompatible, traditions. Thus, Leszek Kolakowski, the exiled Polish Marxist and one of the leading contemporary spokesmen for humanism, writes (1972:12):