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The Life and Work of Erik Olin Wright
The Life and Work of Erik Olin Wright
Abstract Submissions Closed
Wednesday, 24 February 2021: 17:45-20:00
Location:
Language: English
Session Type: Oral
Invited Session
Internationally renowned sociologist Erik Wright has been lauded across the planet as scholar, teacher, colleague, and human being. He left us with an intellectual legacy that has two strands: class analysis and the exploration of real utopias. On the one hand, starting with his dissertation in 1976, he advanced novel Marxist frameworks for the study of class – frameworks that he elaborated and tested in social surveys conducted in more than 15 countries, culminating in 1997 with the book Class Counts. On the other hand, starting in 1991, he began a seemingly different project to discover actually existing institutions, organizations and visions that exemplified socialist values of freedom, equality and solidarity, what he called real utopias. The project has so far given rise to a series of 6 investigations of real utopias – associational democracy, market socialism, recasting egalitarianism, deepening democracy, basic income grants, and gender equality. They are all based on conferences at the Havens Center in Madison, Wisconsin (recently renamed the Havens Wright Center) and published by Politics and Society and Verso. Wright wrote two programmatic assessments, one in 2010, Envisioning Real Utopias and a second one, intended as a guide to “strategic logics” to transform capitalism, completed only a few months before he died: How to be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century (Verso, 2019 forthcoming).
Common Session endorsed by RC44 Labor and Labor Movements, RC02 Economy and Society, RC20 Comparative Sociology
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