Neo Marxism gave the Myth of Cultural Integration a second youth. Its new vitality owed something to the use of a fresh point of departure rather than a parading of veteran anthropological arguments. For primitive society, in which the original Myth was grounded and from which it had been generalized to modern society, played no part in the genesis of‘upwards conflationism’. On the contrary, it was by examining the interregnum between primitive and modern societies (swept up, if not under the carpet, by downwards conflationists) that the notion of manipulated consensus germinated. This second version of the cohesion Myth went back, not to pre-literate society, but to the time of man's first glaring cultural imposition on other men – in Ancient Civilizations and the Middle Ages: not to the shared-cum-bindingness of traditional life, in its seamless totality but to the machinations of the first ideologists, that is, the clergy.

The mystification and obfustication deliberately diffused by the ‘legal–metaphysical class’, to secure privileges for itself, had long been emphasized by Diderot, Rolland, La Chalotais, Condorcet and Sièyes before it passed into Marx's own work (partly accounting for his early concentration on religion as a major form of alienation) and from there became one of the unifying themes in the diverse strands of neo-Marxist thought.

Thus many forms of neo-Marxism take as fundamental precisely that which the downwards conflationists had sedulously neglected – the role of power in the imposition of culture. What differentiates between the two versions of the Myth is not the end-product, which in both cases is a state of cultural integration, but how this is produced: here we are dealing with a manipulated consensus.