Starting in the 1960s, critical liberal and more committed leftist scholarship in the social sciences and related humanistic fields of study expanded dramatically in the US. Yet obtaining funding from major extra-university patrons for such work remained difficult, partly because of the long-standing quest among scholars and their patrons for scientific legitimacy, which had often entailed a strong commitment to value-neutrality and a rejection of politicized and ideological forms of inquiry. Such a stance received support from many powerful patrons, including the National Science Foundation (a civilian agency), the Defense Department, and the large private foundations including Ford, and from major think tanks and research institutes, such as the RAND corporation and the Brookings Institution. Yet leftist scholarship did acquire support during the last third of the twentieth century from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), which during this period became, arguably, the most prominent and influential think tank on the ideological left. In his 1971 study Think Tanks, the prolific journalist Paul Dickson noted that though the Institute was not even a decade old, its impact on the political Left was already "considerable." A decade later, the distinguished writer and outspoken critic of US imperialism Gore Vidal suggested that while for many Americans it was a point of pride that they lacked a political ideology, "thoughtful citizens" had also begun to realize that the nation was lacking "political ideas." It was thus fortunate that the IPS was encouraging scholars to revive American politics with their creative ideas. And of special interest to the present paper, in the early 1990s historian James A. Smith claimed that the IPS's efforts to link ideas to action helped to mark the emergence of a new orientation in the world of think tanks, one that rejected a stance of disinterested and objective analysis in favor of explicitly partisan and value-laden inquiry. This paper examines the effort by IPS left-leaning architects to establish a program for the reconstruction of social inquiry in a manner that would facilitate the social reconstruction of society along lines they favored. Though various scholars were involved in this effort to rethink the social sciences, the most important figure in my analysis is Marcus Raskin, one of the Institute's founders and long-time leaders.