Ellen Meiksins Wood
Meiksins Wood in 2012
Born	Ellen Meiksins (1942-04-12)April 12, 1942 New York City,New York, US
Died	January 14, 2016(2016-01-14) (aged 73) Ottawa,Ontario, Canada
Other names	Ellen Wood
Spouses	Neal Wood ​ ​ (m. 1968; died 2003)​ Ed Broadbent ​ (m. 2014)​
Academic background
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley University of California, Los Angeles
Thesis	Epistemological Foundations of Individualism (1970)
Academic work
Discipline	Political science
Sub-discipline	Political theory
School or tradition	Political Marxism
Institutions	York University
Notable works	The Retreat from Class (1986) The Origin of Capitalism (1999)
Notable ideas	Political Marxism
Influenced	Gáspár Miklós Tamás

Ellen Meiksins Wood (April 12, 1942 – January 14, 2016) was an American-CanadianMarxist historian, and one of the primary developers of the Marxist tendency known aspolitical Marxism.

Wood was born inNew York City on April 12, 1942, as Ellen Meiksins one year after her parents,Latvian Jews active in theBund, arrived in New York from Europe as political refugees. She was raised in the United States and Europe.

Wood received aBachelor of Arts degree inSlavic languages from theUniversity of California, Berkeley, in 1962 and subsequently entered the graduate program inpolitical science at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles, from which she received herDoctor of Philosophy degree in 1970. From 1967 to 1996, she taught political science atGlendon College,York University, inToronto,Ontario, Canada.^[1][2]

Along withRobert Brenner, Wood is credited as a founder ofpolitical Marxism, a rejection oforthodox Marxism which focusses on non-teleological approaches to historical change and capitalist development.^[3]

Meiksins Wood's many books and articles were sometimes written in collaboration with her husband,Neal Wood (1922–2003). Her work has been translated into many languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Romanian, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Of these,The Retreat from Class received theDeutscher Memorial Prize in 1986.^[4] Wood served on the editorial committee of the British journalNew Left Review between 1984 and 1993. From 1997 to 2000, Wood was an editor, along withHarry Magdoff andPaul Sweezy, ofMonthly Review, the socialist magazine.

In 1996, she was inducted into theRoyal Society of Canada, a marker of distinguished scholarship.^[5] She and Neal Wood divided their time between England and Canada until he died in 2003.^[6]

In 2014, she marriedEd Broadbent, former leader of theNew Democratic Party of Canada, with whom she lived inOttawa and London for six years until her death from cancer at the age of 73.^[6][7]

• Wood, Ellen Meiksins (1972).Mind and Politics: An Approach to the Meaning of Liberal and Socialist Individualism. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins (1978).Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in Social Context. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins (1986).The Retreat from Class: A New 'True' Socialism. London; New York: Verso; Schocken Books.
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins (1991).The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States. London; New York: Verso.
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins (1995).Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins (1997).A Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509–1688. London; New York: Pluto Press; NYU Press.
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins (1997).Peasant‑Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy. London; New York: Verso.
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins (1999).The Origin of Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press.
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins (2002).The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London; New York: Verso Books.
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins (2003).Empire of Capital. London; New York: Verso.
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins (2008).Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. London; New York: Verso.
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins (2012).Liberty & Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from the Renaissance to Enlightenment. London; New York: Verso.

• Brenner debate
• The Origin of Capitalism

Interviews

• "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", by Christopher Phelps.Monthly Review, Vol. 51, No. 1 (May 1999).
• Downloadable radio interview on the origins of capitalismArchived November 12, 2020, at theWayback Machine.

Book reviews

• "Happy Campers" book review ofWhy Not Socialism? by G.A. Cohen,London Review of Books, Vol. 32, No. 2 (January 28, 2010) [Retrieved April 18, 2010]
• "Why It Matters" book review ofHobbes and Republican Liberty, by Quentin Skinner.London Review of Books, Vol. 30, No. 18 (September 25, 2008) [Retrieved April 18, 2010]

Obituaries

• Marxism loses a passionate championArchived August 18, 2021, at theWayback Machine byAlex Callinicos,Socialist Review, 410 (February 2016).
• Remembering Ellen Meiksins Wood by Vivek Chibber,Jacobin (January 2016).
• Frances Abele, George Comninel and Peter Meiksins, 'Socialism and democracy: the political engagements of Ellen Meiksins Wood',Studies in Political Economy: A Socialist Review, 97 (2016), 320-36,https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07078552.2016.1249124

• 1942 births
• 2016 deaths
• 20th-century American historians
• 21st-century American historians
• American Marxist historians
• American people of Latvian-Jewish descent
• American women political scientists
• American political scientists
• American political philosophers
• American women historians
• American emigrants to Canada
• Writers from Ottawa
• Canadian Marxists
• Women Marxists
• American critics of postmodernism
• Canadian critics of postmodernism
• Deaths from cancer in Ontario
• Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada
• Jewish American historians
• Jewish socialists
• Marxist theorists
• Deutscher Memorial Prize winners
• UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science alumni
• University of California, Los Angeles alumni
• Academic staff of York University
• 20th-century American women writers
• 21st-century American women
• Academic staff of Glendon College

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