The fall of 'scientific materialism' in 1989-91 continues to reverberate, and has reached literary criticism. Hegelian-Marxist etatisme saw economic integration and the formation of the modern state sanctifying national canons. In the 1960s the prevailing view of the post-Scott novel was the neo-Marxist one of David Craig in Scottish Literature and the Scottish People, 1961, explaining its nineteenth-century marginality as the consequence of a commercial popularity which diluted the complexities of Scottish life. In this, the Scott-Gait novel was seen as attempting to reconstitute history, but its subsequent direction was either (via Carlyle) towards the British mainstream, or towards Kailyard sentimentalism and obscurity. Contrasted with this, Cairns Craig in his energetic interpretation questions the very notion of historical centrality. Surveying novels from George Douglas Brown and John Buchan, via Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Neil Gunn to Allan Massie, Muriel Spark, Alasdair Gray and James Kelman, Craig sees a void where the congealed politics of history ought to be. Adopting Alasdair Maclntyre's identification of morality with community, and applying to this Colin Kidd's theme of a 'genuine' national history suppressed by British Whiggism in the later 18th century, he identifies a tendency in the modern Scots novel to plunge through a 'thin1 history to mythology via anthropology or psychology: