4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Karl Marx gave this absolutely statusquoist theory or ideology— which, as history shows, had certainly never carried complete conviction with the oppressed classes—the severest blow. To be precise, extricating human thought from the quagmire of theism, idealism and metaphysics, Marx urged upon the social scientists to exercise what C Wright Mills rather loosely calls ^the sociological imagination^: widespread problems, ranging from injustice, poverty and unemployment to crime, drug addiction, suicide and mental disorders, are to be attributed not to God and fate or to individual factors but to the social (to be precise, economic-political) structure; and the social structure is itself to be treated purely as a historical-human construct. Evidently, this was too dangerous an approach for the new bourgeois ruling class to tolerate, much less support. The ruling bourgeoisie had, therefore, to do something about it. Someone had to blur this revolutionary Marxian social perspective (of blaming the social order, even for apparently individual mishaps or misfortune) but without bringing God or fate in, certainly not through the front door. And the man who attempted this blurring and did it most audaciously, ingeniously, systematically, seductively and Godlessly, was Sigmund Freud. Marx and Freud^ Poles Apart Both Marx and Freud, as Erich Fromm (Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud, 1962) points out, went to the roots; that is, both doubted the apparent and did the unmasking, adopting a dialectical approach and stressing the liberating function of " truth'\ The point is well taken, but not much should be made of it. For Marx uncovered 'interests', while Freud thought of "motives', the difference behtg that while 'interests5 are directly knowable for being determi^d by No amount of methodological similarity (real w imputed) ca® obscure this, for the thing that really and ultimately counts is the con* elusions drawn, not methodology. And there is no doubt that Marx and