Gerald Larson sees Chattopadhyaya's writings on ancient Indian philosophies as the most interesting and sustained Marxist interpretation of Indian thought. Reviewing Chattopadhyaya's writings on Samkhya philosophy he observes, "Chattopadhyaya proceeds to reconstruct what the original Samkhya position was, claiming that the classical notion did not include Purusha, and that the most important notion in the Samkhya is Prakrti, citing pre-Vedic Tantra traditions of a matriarchal society to be the foundation of original Samkhya." But disagreeing with this conclusion of Chattopadhyaya he says, "To argue... for an archaic agricultural-matriarchal tradition of mother-right and a pastoral-patriarchal tradition of male dominance and then to trace in a direct one-to-one correlation of a Samkhya materialism to the former and a Vedanta idealism to the latter is clearly an oversimplification that reflects Chattopadhyaya's political ideology more than it does India's ancient cultural heritage." Concluding the review Larson avers "what begins as a refreshing anthropological methodology for studying ancient thought and culture is reduced to an ideological perspective designed to show that... private property and the state machinery are not eternal adjuncts to human existence..." and that "...the spiritualistic outlook is not innate in man".