Ellen Meiksins Wood

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This Source

Ellen Meiksins Wood (born 1942 in New York City) is a Marxist scholar.

Biography

Wood was born Ellen Meiksins one year after her parents, Latvian Jews active in the Bund, arrived in New York from Europe as political refugees from fascism. She was raised in the United States and Europe.

Wood received a B.A. in Slavic languages from the University of California, Berkeley in 1962 and subsequently entered the graduate program in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, from which she received the Ph.D. in 1970. From 1967 to 1996, she taught political science at Glendon College, York University in Toronto, Canada.

She has written many books and articles, some conjointly with her husband, Neal Wood (1922-2003). Her writing is characterized by theoretical sophistication, a forceful style, and advocacy of socialism. Her book The Retreat from Class received the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1988.

Wood served on the editorial committee of the British journal New Left Review between 1984 and 1993. From 1997 to 2000, Wood was an editor, along with Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy, of Monthly Review, the independent socialist magazine.

In 1996, she was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada, a marker of distinguished scholarship. She now resides in England.

Books

Sole Author

• Mind and Politics: An Approach to the Meaning of Liberal and Socialist Individualism, (University of California Press, 1972).
• The Retreat from Class: A New 'True' Socialism, (Schocken Books, 1986) (ISBN 0-8052-7280-1) and (Verso Classics, January 1999) reprint with new introductionv (ISBN 1-8598-4270-4).
• The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, (Verso, 1992) (ISBN 0860915727).
• Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge University Press, 1995) (ISBN 0-5214-7682-8) Excerpt available here
• Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy, (Verso, February 20, 1997) (ISBN 0-8609-1911-0).
• The Origin of Capitalism, (Monthly Review Press, 1999).
• The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, (Verso, 2002) (ISBN 1-8598-4392-1)
• Empire of Capital, (Verso, 2003) (ISBN 9781859845028) & paperback (Verso, 2005) (ISBN 1844675181)

Co-Authored with Neal Wood

• Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in Social Context, Oxford University Press, 1978.
• A Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509-1688, New York University Press, 1997.

Co-Edited Collections

• In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda, ed. with John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review Press, 1997.
• Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution, ed. with Robert McChesney and John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review Press, 1998.
• Rising from the Ashes? Labor in the Age of "Global" Capitalism, ed. with Peter Meiksins and Michael Yates, Monthly Review Press, 1998.

Publications Available Online

• "C.B. MacPherson: Liberalism, And The Task Of Socialist Political Theory", The Socialist Register, Vol.15, 1978, pp. 215-240. Critical evaluation of the thought of C. B. Macpherson.
• "Liberal Democracy And Capitalist Hegemony: A Reply To Leo Panitch On The Task Of Socialist Political Theory", The Socialist Register, Vol. 18, 1981, pp. 169-189. On socialist political theory.
• "Marxism Without Class Struggle?", The Socialist Register, Vol. 20, 1983, pp. 239-271.
• "The Uses and Abuses of 'Civil' Society,", The Socialist Register, Vol. 26: The Retreat of the Intellectuals, 1990, pp. 60-84.
• "Ralph Milband, 1924-1994", Radical Philoshopy, issue 68, Autumn 1994. Homage to Ralph Miliband
• "A Chronology of the New Left and its Successors, or: Who's Old-Fashioned Now?", The Socialist Register, Vol. 31: Why Not Capitalism?,
1995, pp. 22-49.
• "Modernity, Postmodernity, or Capitalism?", July-August 1996.
• Issues of class and culture: an interview with Aijaz Ahmad,, Oct. 1996
• "Back to Marx,", Monthly Review, Vol. 49, No. 2, June 1997.
• "Labor, the State, and Class Struggle,", Monthly Review, Vol. 49, No. 3, July-August 1997.
• "A Note on Du Boff and Herman", Monthly Review, Vol. 49, No. 6, November 1997. A note on globalization.
• "Class compacts, the welfare state, and epochal shifts: a reply to Frances Fox Vixen and Richard A. Cloward - New Press, p.13, 1997", Jan. 1998.
• "The Communist Manifesto After 150 Years,", Monthly Review, Vol. 50, No. 1, May 1998.
• "The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism,", Monthly Review, Vol. 50, No. 3, July-August 1998.
• "Capitalist Change and Generational Shifts,", Monthly Review, Vol. 50, No. 5, October 1998.
• "Kosovo and the New Imperialism", Monthly Review, Vol. 51, No. 2, June 1999.
• "Unhappy Families: Global Capitalism in a World of Nation-States", Monthly Review, Vol. 51, No. 3, July-August 1999.
• "The Politics of Capitalism", Monthly Review, Vol. 51, No. 4, September 1999.
• "A Critique of Eurocentric Anti-Eurocentrism", solidarity-us.org, 2001

Interviews Available Online

• "Interview with Ellen Meiksins Wood - Democracy & Capitalism: Friends or Foes?", New Socialist Magazine, Vol. 1, Issue 1, January-February 1996.
• "An interview with Ellen Meiksins Wood - co-editor of 'Monthly Review'", Interview by Christopher Phelps in Monthly Review, May 1999.
• Downloadable radio interview on the origins of capitalism

Notes

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia © 2001-2006 Wikipedia contributors (Disclaimer)
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Thursday February 07, 2008 at 17:21:10 PST (GMT -0800)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation