Erik Olin Wright received his PhD from the University of California,
Berkeley, and has taught at the University of Wisconsin since them. His
academic work has been centrally concerned with reconstructing the Marxist
tradition of social theory and research in ways that attempt to make it more relevant
to contemporary concerns and more cogent as a scientific character of class
relations in developed capitalist societies. Since 1992 he has directed the Real
Utopias Project, which explores a range of proposals for new institutional
designs that embody emancipatory ideals and yet are attentive to issues of
pragmatic feasibility. His principle publications include The Politics of
Punishment: A Critical Analysis of Prisons in America; Class, Crisis and the
State; Classes; Reconstructing Marxism (with
Elliott Sober and Andrew Levine); Interrogating Inequality; Class Counts;
Comparative Studies in Class Analysis; and
Deepening Democracy: Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance (with Archon
Fung). He is married to Marcia Kahn
Wright, a clinical psychologist working in community mental health, and has two
grown daughters, Jennifer and Rebecca.
I have been in school
continuously for more than fifty years; since I entered kindergarten in 1952,
there has never been a September when I wasn’t beginning a school year. I have
never held a nine-to-five job with fixed hours and a boss telling me what to
do. In high school, my summers were always spent in various kinds of
interesting and engaging activities – traveling home from Australia where my
family spent a year (my parents were Fulbright professors at the University of Western
Australia); music camp (I played a viola); assisting in a lab. And in college,
it was much the same: volunteering as a photographer on an archaeological dig
in Hawaii; teaching in a high school enrichment programme for minority kids;
travelling in Europe. The closest thing to an ordinary paying job I ever had
was occasionally selling hot dogs at football games in my freshman year in
college. What is more, the ivory towers that I have inhabited since the
mid-1960s have been located in beautiful physical settings, filled with
congenial and interesting colleagues and students, and animated by exciting
ideas. This, then, is the first fundamental fact of my life as an academic: I
have been extraordinarily lucky and have always lived what can only be
considered a life of extreme privilege. Nearly all of the time I am doing what
I want to do; what I do gives me a sense of fulfillment and purpose; and I am
paid well for doing it.
Here is the second fundamental fact of my academic life: since the early
1970s, my intellectual life has been firmly anchored in the Marxist tradition.
The core of my teaching as a professor has centered on communicating the
central ideas and debates of contemporary Marxism and allied traditions of
emancipatory social theory. The courses I have taught have had names like
Class, State and Ideology: An Introduction to Marxist Sociology; Envisioning
Real Utopias; Marxist Theories of the State; Alternative Foundations of Class
Analysis. My energies in institution building have all involved creating and
expanding arenas within which radical system-challenging ideas could flourish:
creating a graduate programme in class analysis and historical change in the
Sociology Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; organising an
annual conference for activists and academics, now called
RadFest, which has been held every year since 1983. And my
scholarship has been primarily devoted to reconstructing Marxism as a
theoretical framework and research tradition. While the substantive
preoccupations of this scholarship have shifted over the past thirty years, its
central mission has not.
As in any biography, this part of facts is the result of a trajectory of
circumstances and choices: circumstances that formed me and shaped the range of
choices I encountered, and choices that in turn shaped my future circumstances.
Some of these choices were made easily, with relatively little weighing of
alternatives, sometimes even without much awareness that a choice was actually
being made; others were the result of protracted reflection and conscious
decision making, sometimes with the explicit understanding that the choice
being made would constrain possible choices in the future. Six such junctures
of circumstance and choice seem especially important to me in shaping the
contours of my academic career. The first was posed incrementally in the early
1970s: the choice to identify my work primarily as contributing to Marxism
rather than simply using Marxism. The second concerns the choice, made just
before graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, to be a
sociologist, rather than some other ist.
The third was the choice to become what some people describe as multivariate
Marxist: to be a Marxist sociologist who engages in grandiose, perhaps
overblown, quantitative research. The fourth choice was the choice of which
academic department to be in. This choice was acutely posed to me in 1987 when
I spent a year as a visiting professor at the University of California,
Berkeley. I had been offered a position there, and I had to decide whether I
wanted to return to Wisconsin. Returning to Madison was unquestionably a choice
that shaped subsequent contexts of choice. The fifth choice has been posed and reposed
to me with increasing intensity since the late 1980s: the choice to stay a
Marxist in this world of post-Marxisms when many of my intellectual comrades
have decided for various good, and sometimes perhaps not so good, reasons to
recast their intellectual agenda as being perhaps friendly to, but outside of,
the Marxist tradition. Finally, the sixth important choice was to shift my
central academic work from the study of class structure to the problem of
envisioning real utopias.
To set the stage for this reflection on choice and constraint, I need to
give a brief account of the circumstances of my life that brought me into the
arena of these choices.
Growing Up
I was born in Berkeley,
California, in 1947 while my father, who had received a PhD in psychology
before World War II, was in medical school on the GI Bill. When he finished his
medical training in 1951, we moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where he became the
head of the programme in clinical psychology at Kansas University (KU) and a professor
of psychiatry in the KU Medical School. Because of antinepotism rules at the
time, my mother, who also had a PhD in psychology, was not allowed to be
employed at the university, so throughout the 1950s she did research on various
research grants. In 1961, when the state law on such things changes, she became
a professor of rehabilitation psychology.
Life in my family was intensely intellectual. Dinner table conversation
could often revolve around intellectual matters, and my parents were always
deeply enthusiastic and involved in their children’s school projects and
intellectual pursuits. My mother would carefully go over term papers with each
of us, giving us both editorial advice and substantive suggestions. We were
members of the Lawrence Unitarian Fellowship, which was made up of, to a
substantial extent, university families. Sunday morning services were basically
interdisciplinary seminars on matters of philosophical and social concern;
Sunday school was an extended curriculum on world religions. I knew by about
age ten that I wanted to be a professor. Both of my parents were academics.
Both of my siblings became academics. Both of their spouses are academics.
(Only my wife, a clinical psychologist, is not an academic, although her father
was a professor.) The only social mobility in my family was interdeparmental.
It just felt natural to go into the family business.
Lawrence was a delightful, easy place to grow up. Although Kansas was a
politically conservative state, Lawrence was a vibrant, liberal community. My
earliest form of political activism centered on religion: I was an active
member of a Unitarian youth group called Liberal Religious Youth, and in high
school I went out of my way to argue with Bible Belt Christians about their
belief in God. The early 1960s also witnessed my earliest engagement with
social activism. The civil rights movement came to Lawrence first in the form
of an organised boycott of a local segregated swimming pool in the 1950s and
then in the form of civil rights rallies in the 1960s. In 1963
I went to the Civil Rights March on Washington and heard Martin Luther King Jr.’s
I Have a Dream speech. My
earliest sense of politics was that at its core it was about moral questions of
social justice, not problems of economic power and interests.
My family, also, was liberal, supporting the civil rights movement and
other liberal causes: but while the family culture encouraged an intellectual
interest in social and moral concerns, it was not intensely political. We would
often talk about values, and the Unitarian Fellowship we attended also stressed
humanistic, socially concerned values, but these were mostly framed as matters
of individual responsibility and morality not as the grounding of a coherent
political challenge to social injustice. My only real exposure to a more
radical political perspective came through my maternal grandparents, Russian
Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States before World War I and lived
near us in Lawrence, and my mother’s sister’s family in New York. Although I
was not aware of this at the time, my grandparents and the New York relatives
were Communists. This was never openly talked about, but from time to time I
would hear glowing things said about the Soviet Union, socialism would be held
out as an ideal, and America and capitalism would be criticised in emotionally
laden ways. My cousins in New York were especially vocal about this, and in the
mid-1960s when I became more engaged in political matters, intense political
discussions with my New York relatives contributed significantly to anchoring
my radical sensibilities.
My interest in social sciences began in earnest in high school. In
Lawrence it was easy for academically oriented kids to take courses at the
University of Kansas, and in my senior year I took a political science course
on American politics. For my term project I decided to do a survey of children’s
attitudes toward the American presidency and got permission to administer a
questionnaire to several hundred students from grades 1-12 in the public
schools. I then organised a party with my friends to code the data and produce
graphs of how various attitudes changed by age. The most striking finding was
that, in response to the question, “Would you like to be President of the
United States when you grow up?” there were more girls who said yes than boys
through third grade, after which the rate for girls declined dramatically.
By the time I graduated from high school in 1964, I had enough
university credits and advanced placement credits to enter KU as a
second-semester sophomore, and that is what I had planned to do. Nearly all of
my friends were going to KU. It just seemed like the thing to do. A friend of
my parents, Karl Heider, gave me, as a Christmas present in my senior year in
high school, an application form to Harvard. He was a graduate student at
Harvard in anthropology at the time. I filled it out and sent it in. Harvard
was the only place to which I applied, not out of inflated self-confidence but
because it was the only application I got as a Christmas present. When I
eventually was accepted (initially I was on the waiting list), the choice was
thus between KU and Harvard. I suppose this was a “choice” since I could have
decided to stay at KU. However, it just seemed so obvious; there was no angst,
no weighing of alternatives, no thinking about the pros and cons. Thus, going
to Harvard in a way just happened.
Like many students who began university in the mid-1960s, my political
ideas were rapidly radicalised as the Viet Nam War escalated and began to
impinge on our lives. I was not a student leader in activist politics, but I
did actively participate in demonstrations, rallies, fasts for peace, and endless
political debate. At Harvard I majored in social studies, an intense interdisciplinary
social science major centering on the classics of social theory, and in that
programme I was first exposed to the more abstract theoretical issues that bore
on the political concerns of the day: the dynamics of capitalism, the nature of
power and domination, the importance of elites in shaping American foreign
policy, and the problem of class and social change. I found all of this
intellectually exciting, and wrote numerous term papers on these kinds of
macrosociological issues, but these themes did not constitute for me an
overriding intellectual preoccupation as an undergraduate. I wrote my senior
thesis not on problems of political economy, classes, and the state but on a
social psychological theme: the causes and effects of student leaves of absence
from universities. I conducted a survey on this problem and analysed the data
using punchcards in order to understand the conditions under which leaves of
absence would have a positive or negative impact on the students involved. The
thesis was well received, but one would be hard to put to find any hint of
radical sensibilities in it.
As graduation approached in 1968 I faced a problem
confronted by most healthy American males of the time: how to cope with the
prospect of being drafted. It was impossible to get a conscientious objector deferment from my draft
board in Kansas since I could not prove that I was a long-standing member of a
pacifist religious group. I knew people who become expatriates, and others who
were prepared to go to jail rather than be drafted. I was unwilling to make either
of these sacrifices. Instead, I decided to enroll in a Unitarian seminary – the
Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley – and thus get a ministerial
deferment. I enrolled in
the seminary not out of a deep and abiding commitment to the ministry as a
possible vocation – that never occurred to me as something I would actually do –
but because it was the only way I could think of at the time to keep out of the
army in the context of the Viet Nam War. The enrollments at seminaries,
especially in Unitarian seminaries, increased dramatically in the late sixties.
When I received a scholarship to study history at Balliol College, Oxford,
I therefore organised a way to be formally enrolled in the seminary while
taking courses at Oxford. I made a point of specialising in the English Puritan
Revolution under the tutorship of Christopher Hill so that if the draft board
ever questioned this arrangement I could show that I was studying something
connected to religion.
After two extraordinary years of wallowing in intellectual pleasures at
Oxford, I returned in the fall of 1970 to the United States and entered the
Unitarian Seminary in Berkeley. This is when the decisive choices through which
my academic identity would be forged began.
Becoming a Marxist: Accountability
and Eclecticism
When I entered the seminary
I was already quite radicalised intellectually and politically. The general
terms of political debate in England were more permeated with Marxian-inspired
ideas than was generally the case in the United States. At Oxford, under the
stimulating guidance of Steven Lukes, I had read much more thoroughly a range
of Marxist work than I had earlier and wrote a series of papers on various
Marxist themes, including my first paper on the problem of class. Still, in
1970 I would not have said that the central focus of my scholarly work was the
reconstruction of Marxist approaches to understanding social and political
questions. That changed in the course of the next few years.
At the seminary I had two crucial formative experiences. First, I
initiated and then led a seminar at the Berkeley Graduate Theological Union
called Utopia and Revolution. Fifteen or so students from various seminaries
participated in the seminar in which we read and energetically debated
socialist, Marxist, anarchist, and various strands of utopian literature. This
was the first extended academic context in which I was involved where the
primary motivation was not simply the scholarly task of clarifying ideas and
weighing the intellectual merits of arguments but, rather sorting out our
political vision and thinking about how to connect our concrete activities to a
broad agenda of social change. The seminar was an exhilarating experience.
Thirty years later I still teach a graduate seminar in the same spirit –
Envisioning Real Utopias.
The second critical experience was a year-long internship as a student
chaplain at San Quentin Prison. Every week I would drive from Berkeley to the
prison north of San Francisco and spend the day in the Protestant chaplain’s office
talking to prisoners. This was the height of the militant period of the Black
Panthers, and many black prisoners in San Quentin were highly politicised. When
prisoners would come to me and ask me to pray with them, I would send them to
the real chaplain saying that he was better at that. Very quickly it became
known among prisoners that I was a sympathetic ear for political discussions,
both about the conditions in the prison and about broader issues in American
society. Through The prisoners I met, I became involved in an activist
organisation called the Prison Law Project, which linked radical, mainly black,
prisoners with left-wing lawyers and was devoted to challenging prison
conditions through litigation and other forms of activism. In the context of my
work with the Prison Law Project and my role in the prison, I decided with my
friends in the project to write a book about San Quentin, which eventually
became published as the Politics of
Punishment in 1973, about half of which was written by myself, and the rest
by prisoners and others connected with the Prison Law Project.
The Politics of Punishment was
by far the most ambitious piece of writing I had ever attempted. I remember
when the book was finally done saying that my respect for even very bad books
had increased since I now knew how much work they entailed. Writing the book
was also the first context in which I had to navigate the analytical
imperatives of serious scholarly exposition with the political imperatives of
popular accessibility and political relevance. I discovered that I could do
academic work that was not just fun intellectually but that had moral and
political aspirations as well.
In January 1971, the rules of military conscription changed and a
lottery replaced the previous system. When the first lottery was conducted, I
received a good number – somewhere above 250 as I recall – and since the
expectation was that no one with a number above the low 100s would be drafted
in 1971, I gave up my seminary student deferment and decided to enter graduate
school in sociology.
Although I was formally enrolled as a graduate student in the Berkeley
Sociology Department, the real core of my intellectual formation occurred in
what might be called the Bay Area Student Run University of Radical
Intellectual Thought. Almost from the start, I was heavily involved in a series
of organisations and activities that brought radical students together across
departments within the University of California and across universities within
driving distance:
·
I regularly attended a Bay Area-wide political
economy seminar loosely linked to the Union for Radical Political Economies
that usually met at Stanford in which problems in Marxist political economy
were discussed. Over the years, I presented a number of papers in that seminar,
including the earliest version of my work on rethinking the concept of class.
At one seminar I laid out the problem of the “middle class” in which I
described the class location of managers as ambiguous because of the way they combined
relational attributes both of workers (they did not own the means of
production) and of capitalists (they dominated other employees). Bright O’Laughlin,
an anthropologist at Stanford, suggested that these kinds of locations might
better be thought of as contradictory rather than merely ambiguous, and thus
the term for my contribution to the analysis of the middle class was born:
contradictory locations within class relations
·
I was part of the founding editorial collective
of Kapitalistate, a journal devoted
to debates over Marxist theories of the state organised by the Marxist economist James O’Connor, then at San
Jose State University. The collective involved students and
unattached intellectuals from all over the San Francisco Bay Area and, through
reading and commenting on papers, it linked us to students in Europe
(especially Germany) and other places in the United States (especially
Wisconsin). Through my involvement in the journal collective, I read a paper on
state theory written by Roger Friedland and Costa-Esping Anderson, at the time
sociology graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, sent them detailed
comments, and ended up coauthoring with them the final published version of the
paper. Through them I became linked to students at Wisconsin and began to think
of the Wisconsin Sociology Department as an exciting place.
·
I was heavily involved in founding an
organisation of socialist-oriented academics called the Union of Marxist Social
Scientists, which was organised to increase dialogue among activists and
left-oriented academics academics. Its main activity was an annual conference
held each spring at a summer camp called Camp Gold Hollow in the Sierra
foothills, which was attended by several hundred people from up and down the
West Coast. By the mid-1970s this conference became a politically charged venue
in which students, a scattering of faculty, grassroots activists, and militants
from various sectarian Marxist-Leninist quasi-parties gathered to debate
theoretical and political matters. At the last camp I attended, in the spring
of 1976, my work on social class was denounced in a large meeting by members of
the League for Proletarian Socialism (a self-styled Maoist group) for
reflecting “petty bourgeois socialism.” That annual conference is the direct
ancestor of RadFest.
·
In order to enable students to get formal
academic credit for the kinds of study groups in which we were involved. I
involved a number of faculty members in the Berkeley Sociology Department to
act as passive sponsors of a series of student-organised on-going graduate
seminars exploring debates in radical theory. One of these – Current Controversies
in Marxist Social Science – met continuously for four or five semesters and
formed the basis for several courses I subsequently taught when I became a
professor.
Through these activities I
discovered that there existed an on-going, energetic intellectual tradition in
which one could be a radical critic and engage in careful, rigorous,
intellectually sophisticated academic work. The attraction was as much
intellectual as political. The debates were exciting and demanding. When we
read [] Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas, Elmar Altvatar, Perry Anderson, Claus Offe, []
Gramsci, [] Habermas, James O’Connor, Barry Hindiss and Paul Hurst, Goran Therborn,
and the other writers in the Marxist renaissance we felt we were at the cutting
edge of ideas, really learning something important and gaining depth. These
texts were usually hard, and it took work to sort them out, but this also was
part of the attraction: we were not doing something easy. There were many
people joined together in the effort, and the dialogue created a sense of
common purpose and community.
Some people in these circles were deeply involved in self-styled
Marxist, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, or Trotskyist parties, but most were not.
Generally, most people in my intellectual circle saw party activists as
disruptive, as infusing self-righteous dogmatic styles of argument into
theoretical debates. Many of us were or had been activists in specific
movements – the antiwar movement, the student movement, the prison rights
movement – but above all, this intellectual community was academic: mostly
graduate students and a few faculty engaged in the project of forging a new
Marxist social science in the university.
That the intellectual anchor of debates in this community was Marxist,
there can be no doubt. Still, not everyone who participated in these activities
called themselves Marxists. Among radical intellectuals of the early 1970s many
people saw their work as drawing from the Marxist tradition or being inspired
in various ways by that tradition without defining their central goal as
contributing to the reconstruction of Marxism. One can use Marxism without being
a Marxist.
Most of what I have published, if you strip away the rhetorical parts
that proclaim how the work tries to contribute to Marxism, could almost as well
have been written in the softer spirit of having a Marxist inspiration. I could
have framed my arguments by saying something like “the Marxist tradition is a
rich and interesting source of ideas. We can learn a lot from it. Let’s see
where we can go by taking these traditional notions of class and massaging
them, changing them, combining them with Weberian and other elements in various
ways.” I could have cast my class analysis this way without invoking any
commitment to Marxism per se as a tradition worth reconstructing.
Many sociologists in the late 1960s and early 1970s, radical intellectuals
of my generation, made that kind of choice. Consider Theda Skoepol’s early
work, especially States and Social
Revolutions. This book could have been written as a Marxist work with no
real change in any substantive thesis. It could have been written as a book
that was amending and reconstructing certain weaknesses in the Marxist
tradition, particularly its inattention to the problem of state capacity and
state breakdown, in order to rebuild and strengthen that tradition. Instead she
chose, for reasons that she would have to explain in her own set of
intellectual and personal coordinates, to treat the book as a dialogue with the
Marxist tradition but firmly, rhetorically, outside it. I made the opposite
choice. The question is, why did I do this, what was my thinking behind it?
Let me give you a vignette that I think helps to reveal what’s at issue
here. In 1986 I gave a talk in Warsaw called “Rethinking Once Again, Alas, the
Marxist Concept of Class.” In the talk, I discussed such things as contradictory
class locations, exploitation in Soviet-type postcapitalistic society, the role
of control over different kinds of assets for constructing new kinds of
exploitation, and so on. Afterward, the first question was the following: “Professor
Wright, I find your ideas very interesting and very compelling. I think there
is a lot to be discussed about them, but why do you call this Marxist? Why deflect attention from what
you are really talking about by saying that this has anything to do with
Marxism?” What is at issue here is a dramatic difference in the contexts for
pursuing radical intellectual work. In the Polish context of 1986, to declare
that this was a reconstruction of Marxism meant something utterly different
from what the same words mean when they are declared in the context of American
sociology. In Poland, to reconstruct Marxism in the 1980s was to salvage an
ideology of state repression. In the United States, to embed one’s work in a
rhetoric of reconstructing Marxism means, in contrast, to declare one’s
solidarity with struggles against capitalism, class inequality and oppression.
Thus, I think the first motivation behind the declaration of my work as
contributing to Marxism centers on a point in the sociology of knowledge. What
does it mean to define one’s work as integral to an oppositional current within
an established set of institutions? This is very close to what sociologists
talk about when they talk about “reference groups.” What really was at stake to
me was the nature of the constituency or audience to whom I wanted to feel
accountable. Whose criticisms did I want to worry about, and whose did I want
to simply be able to dismiss?
These psychological issues are an important part of what is at stake in
making the choice to see my work as embedded in the Marxist tradition, as
contributing to the reconstruction of that tradition rather than simply drawing
on it. Defining my work this way establishes to whom I am accountable, whose
opinions are going to matter. The issue of reference group, however, is not
just psychological, since reference groups are also social networks that
dispose of real resources and impose real pressures of various kinds. Choosing
a reference group, then, has the effect of creating a set of constraints that
one faces in the future.
In the decision to describe my work as contributing to Marxism, then,
there is a kind of Ulysses and the Siren story at work (to use a metaphor
elaborated by Jon
Elster). It is an attempt, however imperfect, at blocking certain
pressures of cooptation that one experiences once one enters a profession. It
is an attempt to make life more difficult for oneself. The same holds true for
feminist sociologists today. Some feminists say that their work is contributing
to feminism as such. Rather than just contributing to sociology inspired by
feminism, they see their work as contributing to building feminist theory. Such
declarations make life more difficult, since you could say most of the same
things without framing your agenda in this more provocative manner. Making one’s
life more difficult in this way, however, is not a sign of masochism; it is a
strategy that makes it harder to slide inadvertently into a theoretical and
intellectual practice that is overwhelmed by its professional acceptability.
The pressures for mild, nonconfrontational, acceptable scholarship are
enormous, and situating one’s work firmly in a radical oppositional current is
one way of partially neutralising those pressures.
There is another side of the choice to building Marxism as an
intellectual tradition rather than simply using it that entered my own
decisions and that has become increasingly important in my subsequent on-going
decision to stay in Marxism rather than to become, as is more fashionable these
days, post-Marxist. This second aspect of the choice raises issues in
philosophy of science rather than sociology of knowledge. What is the best way
to contribute to the enhancement of our knowledge of social life? Is the most
productive strategy to work within what one considers the best available
paradigm, or is it better to take a more eclectic approach, avoiding any strong
commitment to a single perspective but instead picking and choosing from
different traditions as is appropriate for different particular questions one
might ask? In a somewhat overstylised way we can contrast two stances toward
these issues: a stance that places great value on ambitious programmes for
theoretical coherence and integration in the form of a sustained paradigm and a
stance, sometimes referred to as a more empiricist approach, that argues that
what we want to do is deeply and intensively describe the world while
eclectically drawing from different sorts of ideas as we see fit for different
problems.
My view on this contrast of intellectual practices is not the
conventional one for someone who is committed to a paradigmatic view of
knowledge in his own work. Most people who are committed to some kind of effort
at building strong paradigms are antieclectic: eclecticism is viewed as the
enemy of paradigm building. I believe, to the contrary, that there is a
constructive symbiotic relationship between paradigm-mongers and carefree
eclectics. The optimal intellectual terrain for radical theory – or for any
sociological knowledge, for that matter – is a mixture of people who are
committed eclectics and people who are committed paradigmists. If I could snap
my fingers and make every radical intellectual a committed Marxists, I wouldn’t
do it. I think it would be bad for Marxism and certainly bad for the Left. If I
could snap my fingers and make everybody a committed eclectic, if that’ snot an
oxymoron, I would also not do it. Eclecticism is in a certain sense parasitic
on committed paradigms. To be an effective eclectic, there must be other
scholars around who are worrying obsessively about how to rebuild paradigms and
maintain the maximum coherence possible within them. But if that’s what
everyone did, it would be a constraint on the possibility of effectively
reconstructing paradigms because the puzzles and worries and anomalies that a
reconstructive project faces often come from the insights generated by the
eclectics.
The environment of intellectual work that I see as optimal, and that I
try to achieve to the extent possible in the intellectual settings within which
I work, thus values an intellectual pluralism in which no one is
holier-than-thou about metatheoretical principles. Dialogue between the doubts
of the eclectics and the commitments of the paradigmists strengthen both. These
issues hold for contemporary feminism as well as Marxism. In the feminist
tradition radical feminism is crucial for healthy feminism, even though I think
radical feminism is not the most plausible version of feminism. Still, it would
be a shame for the feminist tradition if radical feminists were somehow
persuaded to abandon the most radical and extreme forms of feminism. Similarly
for the socialist tradition of intellectual work, it is important to have a
body of scholarship and intellectual work that remains committed to rebuilding
rather than simply drawing from the Marxist tradition.
Becoming a Sociologist: Fuzzy
Disciplines and Intellectual Pluralism
The second choice in the early 1970s that helped forge my academic
identity was the fateful decision to become a sociologist. When I entered
sociology, I saw it more as a platform on which to do my work than as a
discipline to which I felt any commitment as such (although I have to admit
that over time my sense of loyalty to the field has grown considerably). As an
undergraduate I majored in an interdisciplinary social science programme
(social studies), after which I studied history for two years at Oxford. I
currently participate actively in an academic network sponsored by the
MacArthur Foundation in which most participants are economists, and since 1975
I have been on the editorial board of the journal Politics and Society, which has stronger roots in political science
than in sociology. I see myself as a social scientist and social theorist
rather than a capital S Sociologist. Why, then, did I choose sociology as an
academic home?
Of all the social sciences, sociology seemed to me to be the least
disciplinary; it had the fuzziest boundaries. But even more significantly,
sociology has valued its own marginal traditions in a way that other social
sciences don’t. Even anti-Marxist sociologists recognise the importance of Marx
as one of the intellectual founders of what has become sociology. All graduate
courses in theory contain at least some reading of Marx. There are economics
departments in which the name Marx would never be mentioned. The only social
science discipline that might have served as well as sociology was political
science, and I suppose if I had been at some other university I might have
become a political scientist. But at Berkeley I felt that sociology was a more
congenial place in which to be a radical, and in general I now think political
science tends to be somewhat less hospitable to radicalism because of the tight
relationship between political science and the state. Political science is a
breeding place for governmental advisers and policy analysis, and that aspect
of political science at a discipline would be a constraint that I did not want
to choose. So, I chose sociology.
Becoming a Multivariate Marxist: Legitimating Marxism and Careerism
Very quickly in graduate school, even in a place like Berkeley, it
becomes clear where the intellectual core of sociology as a discipline lies. Having
decided to be a sociologist and having as a mission the reconstruction of
Marxism as social science, I saw a crucial task of my work as trying to
increase the credibility of Marxism within the academy, and I felt that
quantitative research was a good way to accomplish this. As I wrote in 1987,
reflecting on my early theoretical ambitions: “I originally had visions of
glorious paradigm battles, with lances drawn and the valiant Marxist knight unseating
the bourgeois rival in a dramatic quantitative joust. What is more, the fantasy
saw the vanquished admitting defeat and changing horses as a result.”
My decision to launch a series of projects involving large-scale data
gathering and sophisticated statistical analysis was not driven by any
epistemological conviction that these techniques generated deeper insights or
more reliable knowledge. Indeed, on that score I have generally found that I
learn more from good qualitative and historical research than from quantitative
research. But I felt that, at that point in the history of Marxism in sociology
(the mid-1970s), establishing the credibility of Marxism using a quantitative
methodology had the greatest chance of making a difference in the intellectual
space Marxists could occupy within the academy. I also just like playing with
numbers and was pretty good at it.
This decision to pursue quantitative research was also bound up with
particular personal relations in graduate school. My closest friend at Berkeley
was an Italian student, Luca Perrone. Luca was a sophisticated European
intellectual, at ease with the various theoretical currents of left-wing
thought, but also enthusiastic about quantitative research. He was the perfect
kindred spirit with whom to forget a quantitatively oriented Marxist research
programme. My first publication engaged with Marxism was written with Luca, a
long theoretical essay published in Italian in 1973 comparing the conception of
the state and politics in the work of Talcott Parsons and Nicos Poulantzas, and subsequently, my
first quantitative publications in class analysis, including my first American Sociological Review (ASR) article in 1977, were also written jointly with
him. As we approached the end of our time together in Berkeley we wanted to
concoct a long-term project that would enable us to continue working together –
a project that would bring me regularly to Europe and Luca to the United
States. A large well-funded cross-national quantitative study on social class
seemed a good way to do this. Tragically Luca died in a skindiving accident in
1971 and, thus, did not live to see the results of our early collaboration.
To be honest, there was also, from the start, a darker side to the
appeal of quantitative research. All academic disciplines, as institutions,
contain a system of rewards and sanctions that channels work in particular
directions, and there were clearly more resources to be had through
quantitative research. I was very ambitious as a young scholar – ambitious in
my search for what I considered to be the ”truth,” but also ambitious for
status, recognition, influence, world travel. Embarking on a line of research
anchored in conventional survey research thus offered tangible rewards.
I cannot reconstruct exactly what the balance of these motives were in
the mid-1970s when I did my dissertation research, a quantitative study of
class structure and income determination, or in the late 1970s when I began my
twenty-year comparative project on class structure and class consciousness. But
whatever the balance between grantsmanship and intellectual purpose, the choice
to direct my research in this way was enormously consequential, and not always
in ways to my liking. It resulted in a narrowing of askable questions and a
divergence between much of my best theoretical work and my empirical research.
Originally, the idea in 1978 when I began the comparative class-analysis
project was to do a survey of class structure and class consciousness in the
United States, Italy, and Sweden. This was meant to be a brush-cleaning
operation: settling and clarifying a range of empirical issues before returning
to the problems I cared about the most – the state, politics, social change.
But quickly the project expanded as scholars in various other countries asked
to join the research, leading eventually to surveys more or less replicated in
more than a dozen countries. This enlarged scale of the enterprise created a
set of expectations and commitments that could not be easily (or responsibly)
abandoned, and yet the work did not always yield intellectual insights in
proportion to the time and resources the project absorbed.
Choosing a Department:
Professional versus Intellectual Sociology
I
initially went to the University of Wisconsin without a great deal of thought
and deliberation. Through my involvement in Kapitalistate,
I had made friends with a number of graduate students there, and through them
various faculty in the department became aware of my work even before I was on
the job market. In 1975, I was asked by the department to apply for an
assistant professorship and was quickly offered a job even before I went for an
interview, so I never really went on a national job search to explore all
options. In 1987, however, I was offered a job at the University of
California in Berkeley and spent a year there “trying it out.” By the spring of
1988, I was clearly faced with a genuine, unmistakable choice, a choice laden
with “road not taken” potentials.
Here is how, at the time, I characterised the big difference between
these two departments in the late 1980s. If you think of the famous people in
the Berkeley department what comes to mind are titles of books: TVA and the Grass Roots, Alienation and Freedom, Habits of the Heart, Mothering. When you think of the famous
people in the Wisconsin department what comes to mind is the journals in which
they publish, the topics that they pursue, the datasets they have developed:
the ASR and American Journal of Sociology, mobility and status attainment, the
Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, log-linear analysis. Wisconsin was an
article-writing department and Berkeley a book-writing department.
This contrast between the two departments is also reflected in the nature
of their graduate programmes: at Wisconsin a significant number of graduate
students write dissertations that are spin-offs in one way or another from
large, on-going research projects. The model of education is that of an
apprenticeship, and while students are expected to do original and innovative
work, many do so within the context of some professor’s research shop. At
Berkeley, it is quite rare for students to play this apprenticeship role.
Students are expected to be autonomous intellectuals; dissertations are
supposed to be first drafts of books; it is rare that dissertations are in any
direct way derivative from the data and projects of their advisers.
In agonising about the choice of where to be, I stylised the contrast between
these two setting by saying that Berkeley was one of the leading intellectual departments
in which I would be on the discipline-oriented wing, whereas Wisconsin was one
of the leading discipline-oriented departments in which I would be on the
intellectual wing. Which of these settings, I thought, do I want to be in?
Which would provide the most creative context for my future work? The irony was
that although I actually found the intellectual climate of Berkeley more
comfortable in many ways than that of Wisconsin, I felt that I would be more
challenged and pushed in more interesting ways if I was more an intellectual
maverick in a disciplinary department than a disciplinary maverick in an
intellectualised one. I felt that at that point in history and at that point in
my life, perhaps, the creative tension would be more constructive in Madison.
At Berkeley I would be constantly contending with postmodernist currents that
argued for the centrality of culture for everything and the impossibility of
explaining anything. In Madison I would be arguing for the importance of an
open and dialectical perspective on the relationship between social change and
social action and the need for unconventional voices in sociology. So, I
returned to Wisconsin, although I have retained close ties to Berkeley and
frequently return to give talks.
In the years since that choice, the two departments have converged
somewhat. I recently did a ministudy of dissertations done at Wisconsin and
Berkeley since the 1960s in order to better characterise the two departments.
Berkeley has been fairly consistent over the entire period: 75-90 percent of
dissertations in each decade used qualitative methods. At Wisconsin there has
been sharp change: from the 1960s through the 1980s, roughly 70-80 percent of
dissertations were quantitative. In the 1990s this dropped to just over 50
percent. This methodological shift in dissertation research reflects a change
in the composition of faculty and, more broadly, in the intellectual culture of
the Wisconsin department.
Staying a Marxist
When I became politically
radicalised and first began my intellectual work in the late 1960s, Marxism
really was the only game in town: if you were a serious intellectual and really
wanted to develop theoretical groundings for radical critique of the status
quo, in some way or another you had to find a home in or make peace with the
Marxist tradition, whether or not you then used the label as a
self-designation. Marxist theorising was at the cutting edge of sophisticated
intellectual debate, and, while Marxism never became part of the academic
mainstream, there was a certain intellectual cachet in calling oneself a
Marxist within the academy. In sociology, Marxism was treated as a real rival
to more mainstream tradition, so even though most sociologists disagreed with
me, I felt that my ideas were taken seriously.
Beginning in the mid-1980s and accelerating in the 1990s, Marxism became
increasingly marginal to academic life and intellectual debate. It is not that
Marxist ideas have disappeared – many in fact have become absorbed into the
mainstream – but rather that Marxism as an intellectual terrain is no longer
the site of wide-ranging, energetic, innovative theoretical work. Particularly
since the “fall of Communism,” to many people Marxism now seems an archaic
discourse, and discussions of exploitation, class struggle, revolution, and
socialism seem faintly ridiculous rather than hard-edged, nuanced challenges to
the status quo. Many radical intellectuals who, in the early 1980s, firmly
identified their own work with Marxism now no longer do so. They have not
necessarily become self-described ex-Marxists and certainly not rabid
anti-Marxists – as happened in the 1950s when the exit from Marxism was deeply
bound up with anti-Communism – but they no longer see the reconstruction of
Marxism as a pressing, or even relevant, task.
I have remained stubbornly working inside of Marxism and continue to
work for the reconstruction rather than abandonment of this intellectual
tradition. I do so, above all, because I continue to believe that many of the
core ideas of this tradition are indispensable for any project of emancipatory
social change. Specifically, the diagnosis of capitalism as a system of
emancipatory social change. Specifically, the diagnosis of capitalism as a
system of oppression built around class and exploitation, and the normative
vision of a radically egalitarian democratic alternative to capitalism, are
fundamental insights integral to Marxism. While I no longer see Marxism as a
comprehensive theoretical paradigm capable of constituting a general theory of
history and society, I still believe that the Marxist tradition contains a
coherent framework of ideas that can provide a solid grounding for a socially
engaged research programme.
I have not, however, pursued this goal simply as an individual project
of my own. To sustain these commitments and the hope to accomplish these goals
requires embedding oneself in a particular set of social network, a particular
circle of people whose work one reads, with whom one discusses issues, and
whose judgements matter. A reference group is not just an impersonal audience
defined by some social category; it is also a circle of people with names and
addresses who constitute the active, ongoing basis for the intellectual
interactions and support that spur one’s own intellectual development.
In my case, there are two such concrete reference groups that have
anchored my work since the 1970s. The first is a group of scholars that was at
the core of an intellectual current known as analytical Marxism in the 1980s.
The group has a less high-blown name that it gave to itself: the NBSMC – the No-Bullshit
Marxism Group. The NBSMG is a group of a dozen or so philosophers,
economists, sociologists, political scientists, and historians from five
countries that has met every September in London, Oxford, or New York for a
three-day conference from 1979 to 2000 (and, since then, once every two years).
Many of the names associated with the NBSMG over the past two decades are
relatively familiar – Pranhab Bardhan, Sam Bowles, Robert Brenner, G.A. Cohen,
Josh Cohen, Jon Elster,
Adam Przeworski, John Roemer, Hillel Steiner, Robert van den Veen, and Philippe
van Parijs. The term “analytical” in analytical Marxism reflects its
central intellectual style: bringing the concern with conceptual precision,
clarity, and rigour that is characteristic of analytical philosophy to bear on
Marxian themes. Substantively, the central mission of the group was initially
to explore systematically the theoretical and normative foundations of a series
of pivotal Marxian ideas: exploitation, class, the theory of history, economic
crisis. Subsequently, the preoccupations became less narrowly focused on
Marxist concepts and more broadly directed toward the normative concerns with
equality and social justice.
The group was initially formed around discussion of G.A. Cohen’s
extraordinary book Karl Marx’s Theory of History:
A Defence ([NJ: Princeton, 1978. Princeton University Press]). I read this
book in the summer of 1979 (while in the process of adopting a baby in Costa
Rica) and was completely blown away by it. This book is by far the most
rigorous and profound book on Marx’s work that I have ever read, and certainly
the book that has most influenced the way I think about Marxism. I wrote a long
review essay of the book with Andrew Levine that was published in New Left Review in 1980. Cohen read it,
and invited me to attend the 1981 NBSMG meeting. I was invited back in 1982 and
have been a member of the group since then.
For the first fifteen years or so, the group met in the same room every
year and ate at the same restaurants. Mostly, we only saw each other during
this three-day period. For me it was like a little chunk of the year snipped
out, reserved for this special world. I had the rest of the year, then the
three-day no bullshit meeting in London.
Most years, of the ten or eleven people who attended a meeting about
half presented papers. These got distributed five or six weeks in advance and
were generally read quite carefully by participants. At the meeting itself,
someone other than the author would introduce and comment on a given paper.
Roughly an hour and a half or so would be spent demolishing/discussing the
paper in a no-holds-barred manner. The intellectual style was intense and
analytically exhausting. To an outsider, many of the discussions might seem
destructive, but I think that impression would be mistaken. The interactions
involved a particular form of intellectual aggressiveness that is not
inherently invalidating; the very act of taking each other’s work so seriously
is itself an affirmation of respect and support. An outsider wouldn’t really
see this. Many people looking at this behaviour would think this was a
gladiatorial combat in which death was the only possible outcome. But from the
inside it can be an enormously exciting setting for coming to terms with the
subtle problems and gaps in one’s ideas and gaining insights about the inner
workings of other people’s work.
The group is, as one might predict, all men. We have had discussions in
the group from time to time about gender issues, both as a topic – I presented
a paper on Marxism and feminism at one meeting – and as an issue in the group’s
composition. For better or worse, nobody in the group knew well any women
scholars who both shared an interest in the substantive topics about which we
were concerned and engaged those topics in the intellectual style that marked
the group. It was probably also the case, I suppose, that many members of the
group felt that the kind of intensity of the group would be harder to sustain
if it was gender mixed. In any event, no women have been recruited as members
of the “club,” although several have been invited to attend at various times.
In these terms the NBSMG raises important, and troubling, issues in the
sociology of gender. Networks of this sort are crucial sites where productive
intellectual development occurs, where ideas are forged and refined. While the
NBSMG does not control any financial resources – it gives no grants and
everyone always pays for his own travel and expenses – nevertheless as a
vigorous interpersonal network of intellectual exchange, it is influential and
valuable. Undoubtedly the gender composition of the network both reflects the
historically marginalised role of women intellectuals in the Marxist tradition
and contributed in some way to sustaining such gender inequality.
From the early 1980s to the late 1990s, the NBSMG was the organised reference
group that mattered most to me. When I wrote papers in that period, the ghosts
who sat in the back of my room and periodically jumped up to tell me that what
I had written was ridiculous, and made me worry about whether I got it right,
were mainly from this group (and some kindred spirits to this group). The group
has unquestionably given my work a particular direction and cast because I have
to worry, by virtue of this reference group, about certain issues while others
seem less pressing.
Gradually, in the course of the 1990s, the intellectual agendas and
theoretical commitments of many of the membres of the group changed. Two participants
– Jon Ester and
Adam Przeworski – decided to leave the group, feeling that in the context of busy
schedules it no longer served their needs in a useful way. A number of others
felt that while the normative issues at the core of group, especially a radical
egalitarian stance toward issues of social justice, remained central to their
work, the specific preoccupation with Marxism as a source of ideas and debates
for advancing that normative agenda was no longer so important. By the year
2000, several people in the group expressed the sentiment that perhaps it was
time to end the annual gathering, but we voted to continue, as much because of
the value we all placed on the fellowship and durability of the group as on its
intellectual pay-offs. The 2001 meeting was scheduled for New York in
mid-September but had to be cancelled because of the 9/11 attacks. When we met
the following year, September 2002, we decided to move to an every-other-year
cycle. At the moment, it is uncertain whether this is simply a gentle way of
incrementally ending the group or whether it will continue in a less energetic
way. In any event, the drift in its intellectual priorities and the decline in
its intensity have reduced its role as an anchor for my academic work.
My second reference “group” has, if anything, increased in salience over
time. It consists of a single person, Michael Burawoy, a professor of sociology at Berkeley. Michael
and I have read nearly every page that either of us has written in the past
twenty-five years or so. He is constantly reminding me not to lose sight of the
ultimate point of it all by becoming preoccupied with analytical rigour at the
expense of political relevance; I am constantly telling him to be more precise
in his formulations, to be clearer about the underlying logic of the conceptual
distinctions he makes. Our intellectual styles are quite at odds with one
another in many ways. He does ethnographic research of an extraordinary
fine-grained character; my research has been quantitative, typically
obliterating much of the nuance and texture of the subjects I study. He is
generally skeptical of claims about “objective” truth; I have generally
defended rather conventional philosophical views of the scientific aspirations
of Marxism and sociology. We have discussed these issues and their bearing on
our respective work while walking my dog in the woods, biking the hills of
Marin County, and looking for open restaurants in Moscow. In the late 1980s,
this dialogue took the form of a series of published exchanges between the two
of us in the 1987 and 1989 issues of the Berkeley
Journal of Sociology. (The first of these exchanges is reprinted in my 1990
book, The Debate on Classes; the
second appears as chap. 9 in Interrogating
Inequality). Subsequently, we coauthored a number of papers, most recently “Sociological
Marxism” in the Handbook of Sociological
Theory. As of 2003, we began the process of trying to write a book together
based on this paper. This idea is to reflect on the past twenty-five years or
so of empirical research and theoretical development within Marxist-inspired
social science and identify what we feel to be its enduring, robust core. Our
hope is to elaborate a distinctive sociological Marxism around this core. The
particular way in which personal loyalty and closeness is combined with
intellectual difference in our relationship has been for me a vital source of
intellectual challenge and encouragement. It is also, surely, at least part of
the personal dimension of “staying” Marxist.
Envisioning Real Utopias
In my work with Burawoy, we have
identified the robust core of the Marxist tradition as consisting of two
theoretical clusters: first, a diagnosis of capitalism, both of the ways it
imposes harms on people and of its logic of development and reproduction; and
second, an account of the possibilities of a radically democratic, egalitarian
alternative to capitalism. Class analysis pervades both of these: the analysis
of class and exploitation is central to understanding how capitalism works, and
the transformation of class relations is central to understanding a future
beyond capitalism.
For two decades, from the mid-1970s until the mid-1990s, most of my
scholarly work was dominated by the first of these theoretical clusters, above
all, by the problem of strengthening the Marxist concept of class as a tool for
studying capitalist societies. Except for occasional essays, I had given
relatively little attention to the problem of emancipatory alternative to
capitalism. It now seems urgent to grapple with this issue. With the end of the
cold war and the rise of capitalist triumphalism, this second theoretical
cluster of the Marxist tradition has lost much of its credibility even among
critics of capitalist society. For all of their oppressive flaws, the existence
of the statist economics of the USSR and elsewhere were a practical
demonstration that alternatives to capitalism were possible. Marxist critics of
those societies could then make a plausible argument that what these societies needed
to become socialist was a radical democratic transformation. By the early 1990s
those arguments no longer seemed credible to most people.
In this historical context, as my work in the Comparative Class Analysis
Project was winding down in the middle-1990s and I faced the question of what
research to pursue next, I decided to embark on what has since become the Real
Utopias Project. The project directly grew out of my interactions with my
closest colleagues at Wisconsin, Joel Rogers. Joel is deeply engaged in both
the theoretical and practical problems of progressive policy reform, ranging
from issues of reinvigorating democratic institutions (he was the central
founder of the New Party in the 1980s) to the problem of creating new labour market
institutions that advance both economic equality and productive efficiency. He
coined the expression “high road capitalism” to describe this endeavour and
characterise the strategy of reform as “paving the high road and closing off
the low road.” I wanted a project that would be relevant to this kind of
pragmatic concern with change within the limits of existing possibilities while
also advancing the traditional Marxist concern with understanding alternatives
outside of those limits. I initially called this endeavour “society by design”
but felt a bit squeamish about the elitist social engineering tone of the
expression. On a Sunday morning dog walk together (which we have done nearly
every Sunday when both of us are in town since the late 1980s), Joel suggested
that I call this enterprise “designing realistic utopias.” Soon this became the
Real Utopias Project. As in many intellectual enterprises, getting the brand
name right helped a lot in giving the project greater coherence and focus.
The idea of the project is to investigate systematic proposals that
attempt both to embody emancipatory values and to take seriously the problem of
institutional feasibility. The project is organised around a series of
international conferences at which specific proposals are elaborated and
debated. Each conference has resulted in the publication of a book containing the
proposal and a range of the commentaries. The first of these books, published
in 1995, revolved around work by Joel Rogers and Joshua Cohen on the problem of
associative democracy. Subsequent books have dealt with market socialism (John Roemer, 1996),
asset redistribution within capitalist markets (Sam Bowles and Herbert Gintis, 1999),
empowered participatory governance (Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright,
2003), and universal basic income and stakeholder grants (Bruce Ackerman, Ann Alstott, and Philippe van
Parijs, 2004).
My academic career embodies a series of deep, probably unresolvable
tensions: tensions between radical egalitarian values and elite academic
professionalism; between the commitment to Marxism as a vibrant intellectual
and political tradition and the fear of being trapped in indefensible, outmoded
assumptions; between being relevant to real struggles and devoting my energies
to refinements of abstract concepts. These tensions are impossible to escape,
at least for me, but I hope in the end that they have been creative tensions
that have pushed my ideas forward and kept me from sliding into comfortable
complacency.
Bibliographie
Books in the Real Utopias Project
Volume 1. 1995. Associations and Democracy, compiled by
Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, with contributions by Paul Q. Hirst,
Ellen Immergut, Ira Katznelson, Hein Klug, Andrew Levine,
Jne Mansbridge, Claus Offe, Philippe Schmitter, Wolfgang Streeck,
Andrew Szasz and Iris Young. Edited and introducted
by Erik Olin Wright.
Volume 2. 1996. Equal Shares: Making Market Socialism Work,
compiled by John Roemer, with contributions by Richard J. Arneson, Fred Block, Harry Brighouse, Michael Burawoy,
Joshua Cohen, Naney Folbre, Andrew Levine, Mieke Meurs,
Louis Putterman, Joel Rogers, Debra Satz, Julius Sensat,
William H. Simon, Frank Thompson, Thomas E. Weisskopf, Erik Olin
Wright. Edited and introducted by Erik Olin Wright. London: Verso.
Volume 3. 1999. Recasting Egalitarianism: New Rules for
Equity and Accountability in Markets, Communities and States. compiled by Samuel Bowles and Herbt Gintis, with contributions by Daniel M. Hausman, Erik Olin Wright, Elinor Ostrom,
Andrew Levine, Harry Brighouse, David M. Gordon, Paula England, John E. Roemer,
Karl Ove Moene, Michael
Wallerstein, Peter Skott, Steven N. Durlauf, Ugo Pagamo, Michael R.
Carter, Karla Hoff. Edited and introduced by Erik Olin Wright.
London: Verso.
Volume 4. 2003. Deepening Democracy: Innovations in
Empowered Participatory Governance, compiled by Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, with contributions by Rebecca Neaera Abers, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Joshua Cohen, Patrick Heller, Bradley C. Karkkainen, Rebecca S. Krantz, Jane
Mansbridge, Joel Rogers, Craig W. Thomas, T.M. Thomas
Isaac. London: Verso.
Volume 5. 2005. Redesigning Distribution: Basic Income and
Stakeholder Grants as Cornerstones of a More Egalitarian Capitalism,
compiled by Bruce Ackerman, Ann Alstott, and Philippe van Parijs,
with contributions by Barbara Bergmann, Irv
Garfinkle, Chien-Chung Huang, Wendy Naidich, Julian LeGrand, Carole Pateman,
Guy Standing, Stuart White, Erik Olin Wright. London: Verso, in
press.
Other books referred to in the essay
Cohen, G.A. 1978. Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wright, Erik Olin. 1973. The Politics of Punishment: A Critical
Analysis of Prisons in America. New York: Harper and Row; New York: Harper
Colophon Books.
------. 1978. Class, Crisis and the State. London: New
Left Books. Translations in Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean.
------. 1985a. Clss Structure and Income Determination.
New York: Academic Press.
------. 1985b. Classes. London: Verso.
------. 1990. The Debate on Classes. London: Verso.
------. 1994. Interrogating Inequality. London: Verso.
------. 1997. Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class
Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Student edition published
2000.
Wrigt, Erik Olin, Elliott Sober, and Andrew Levine. 1992. Reconstructing Marxism: Essays on Explanation and the Theory of History.
London: Verso. Portuguese translation, 1993.
Preface
ALAN SICA | Introduction: What Has 1968 Come to Mean?
ANDREW ABBOTT | Losing Faith
JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER | The Sixties and Me: From Cultural Revolution to Cultural Theory
MICHAEL BURAWOY | Antinomian Marxist
CRAIG CALHOUN | My Back Pages
PATRICIA HILL COLLINS | That’s Not Why I Went to School
KAREN SCHWEERS COOK | The Sociology of Power and Justice: Coming of Age in the Sixties
JOHN A. HALL | Life in the Cold
PAOLO JEDLOWSKI | Becoming a Sociologist in Italy
HANS JOAS | A Pragmatist from Germany
KARIN KNORR CETINA | Culture of Life
MICHEL MAFFESOLI | Dionysus and the Ideals of 1968
WILLIAM OUTHWAITE | From Switzerland to Sussex
SASKIA SASSEN | Always a Foreigner, Always at Home
LAURENT THÉVENOT | The Two Bodies of May 1968: In Common, in Person
BRYAN TURNER | The 1968 Student Revolts: The Expressive Revolution and Generational Politics
STEPHEN TURNER | High on Insubordination
STEVE WOOLGAR | Ontological Disobedience-Definitely! {Maybe}
ERIK OLIN WRIGHT | Falling into Marxism; Choosing to Stay
Index
ALAN SICA | Introduction: What Has 1968 Come to Mean?
ANDREW ABBOTT | Losing Faith
JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER | The Sixties and Me: From Cultural Revolution to Cultural Theory
MICHAEL BURAWOY | Antinomian Marxist
CRAIG CALHOUN | My Back Pages
PATRICIA HILL COLLINS | That’s Not Why I Went to School
KAREN SCHWEERS COOK | The Sociology of Power and Justice: Coming of Age in the Sixties
JOHN A. HALL | Life in the Cold
PAOLO JEDLOWSKI | Becoming a Sociologist in Italy
HANS JOAS | A Pragmatist from Germany
KARIN KNORR CETINA | Culture of Life
MICHEL MAFFESOLI | Dionysus and the Ideals of 1968
WILLIAM OUTHWAITE | From Switzerland to Sussex
SASKIA SASSEN | Always a Foreigner, Always at Home
LAURENT THÉVENOT | The Two Bodies of May 1968: In Common, in Person
BRYAN TURNER | The 1968 Student Revolts: The Expressive Revolution and Generational Politics
STEPHEN TURNER | High on Insubordination
STEVE WOOLGAR | Ontological Disobedience-Definitely! {Maybe}
ERIK OLIN WRIGHT | Falling into Marxism; Choosing to Stay
Index
