Recent analyses have sought to clarify Crawfurd's agenda in his writings on race and, at this time, when he had become prominent in a young and still fluid field and discipline. Ellingson demonstrates Crawfurd's role in promoting the idea of the noble savage in service of racial ideology. Trosper has taken Ellingson's analysis a step further, attributing to Crawfurd a conscious "spin" put on the idea of primitive culture, a rhetorically sophisticated use of a "straw man" fallacy, achieved by bringing in, irrelevantly but for the sake of incongruity, the figure of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.