2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST concepts of Marxism; we publish this article in the hope that it would be the starting point for such a debate. Sudipta Kaviraj's article on the status of Marx's theoretical writings on India also raises very important theoretical questions. His basic contention is that throughout Capital and its preparatory writings, Marx's theoretical object was to elucidate the laws of motion of capitalism "through a structral picture of its interdependent parts". In explaining particular elements of this picture, Marx, often by way of contrast, referred to particular elements in pre-capitalist societies like India. But while the elements in the structural picture of capitalism necessarily constituted a coherent whole, the contrastive elements drawn from precapitalist societies were not supposed to do so. To imagine, as many Marxist scholars do, that by putting together Marx's remarks about pre-capitalist societies, we can construct a structural picture of such societies is to misread completely Marx's theoretical intentions. The references to pre-capitalist societies do not, first of all, constitute positive descriptions; moreover the logical relations between these references are not necessarily intentional. In other words, the status of such references is campletely different from the status of Marx's descriptions of the elements of the capitalist structure. In an area where much of the discussion has been concerned either with the empirical validity of Marx's particular observations or with the theoretical plausibility of alternative attempts to extract coherent structural pictures from Marx's scattered remarks, Kaviraj's paper presents a strinkingly different reading of Marx and deserves serious notice. The argument that the traditional dichotomy between materialism and idealism is a false dichotomy and that Marx transcended this dichotomy through his concept of "social praxis" is not a new one. What is new in Rubensiein's book on Marx and Wittgenstein is his attempt to find similarities between the two by arguing that Wittgenstein, like Marx, transcended this traditional dichotomy in his Philosophical Investigations^ and therefore achieved a "uniquely sociological means of understanding action and ideas". Madhu Prasad's review, article is a critique of this position, It restores Marx to his materialist moorings and underlines the fundamental difference between Marx and Wittgenstein on the question of ontological primacy. The other review article by Prabbat Patnaik on Professor Sukhamoy Chakravarty's R C Dutt Memorial Lectures on Marx, Marshall and Schumpeter is also concerned with recapitulating the distance between Marx and Schumpeter and questioning whether -we can justifiably talk of a Marx-Schumpeter tradition in growth theory, albeit in opposition to the Mill-Marshall tradition.