Ellen Meiksins Wood

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
Nationality	American Canadian
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-Canadian Marxist historian, and one of the primary developers of the Marxist tendency known as political Marxism.

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

Wood received a Bachelor of Arts degree 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 her Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1970. From 1967 to 1996, she taught political science at Glendon College, York University, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.^[1][2]

Along with Robert Brenner, Wood is credited as a founder of political Marxism, a rejection of orthodox 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 the Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1986.^[4] 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 socialist magazine.

In 1996, she was inducted into the Royal 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 married Ed Broadbent, former leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, with whom she lived in Ottawa and London for six years until her death from cancer at the age of 73.^[6][7]

• 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 capitalism Archived November 12, 2020, at the Wayback Machine.

Book reviews

• "Happy Campers" book review of Why 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 of Hobbes 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 champion Archived August 18, 2021, at the Wayback Machine by Alex 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