Wright, Erik Olin

Erik Olin Wright is a radical sociologist working within the Marxist tradition. Raised in a family of academics in Kansas, Wright studied history and social science at Harvard and Oxford University before entering the sociology program at Berkeley in the early 1970s. Upon completing his PhD degree in 1976, he secured a position in the Sociology Department at the University of Wisconsin, where he has been ever since. Wright thus made his appearance on the intellectual scene in the mid-1970s, along with an entire generation of young academics who were radicalized by the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. What is remarkable about his career is not its initiation in Marxist debates—in this, it is not unlike many other careers of the “generation of '68”; rather, it is Wright's steady commitment to his research agenda for more than a quarter century, long after most of his peers had ended their dalliance with Marxist theory. Even more noteworthy is that, throughout this period, Wright has ceaselessly confronted mainstream sociology while at the same time carefully modifying his views in response to criticism. The result has been as unusual as it is significant: Over a long arc of theoretical innovation and conceptual clarification, Wright has quite successfully developed a nuanced and sophisticated version of Marxian class analysis and has managed to place it at the very core of contemporary social theory.

[Page 892]The Components of a Research Agenda. Wright's research agenda has been exceptionally clear and consistent. Throughout his career, he has been centrally concerned with interrogating the concept of “class” in Marxian theory. The bulk of this work has concentrated on how class operates as a mechanism for social differentiation in contemporary capitalism. In three successive book-length attempts, Wright has offered a careful discussion of the theoretical status of the term in Marxian theory and then proceeded to investigate how it maps on to contemporary society, mainly Europe and the United States. In addition to this component of his work, however, Wright has also expended considerable energy analyzing the importance of class on another axis in Marxian theory: its importance as a marker of qualitatively different social formations and a mechanism for the traversal from one historical epoch to another.

Class as a Mechanism for Social Differentiation. The trajectory of Erik Wright's theoretical innovations has been driven by a puzzle central to Marxism: how to marry the simple, polarized picture of class society to the empirically rich and quite diverse topography of capitalist societies—a puzzle that is most pointedly embodied in the problem of conceptualizing the “middle class.” Marxists insist that, in every social formation, agents are slotted into two basic groups: producers, who generate a social surplus, and exploiters, who usurp a portion of this surplus. Every social formation is therefore characterized by two fundamental classes of exploited and exploiters. But it is also the case that this simple polarized picture does not sit easily with the reality of modern society. It is easy to find agents who, while technically belonging to one of the two “classes,” also have features that set them apart from members of that same class. This is most famously exemplified in the case of professionals; while they do not directly control material productive assets, it strains our intuitions to slot them in the same category as workers on the production line. Wright's solution, which he briefly abandoned and then resurrected in a more nuanced version, is to conceptualize such members of social classes as simultaneously occupying locations in more than one class: they are in contradictory class locations, pulled in different and opposing directions (Wright 1978, 1985, 2000). The reason for this is that they reproduce themselves through mechanisms that include those typical of workers and those of capitalists. This allows Wright to move away from thinking of the middle class as a residual category, encompassing everyone who doesn't “fit” neatly into one of the two basic classes, to a category that is robustly defined.

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