Erik Olin Wright

Wright died on January 23, 2019, from acute myeloid leukemia at a hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, aged 71.

In 2012, Wright was elected President of the American Sociological Association.

Wright's books include Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis (Cambridge, 1997), which uses data collected in various industrialized countries, including the United States, Canada, Norway, and Sweden. He was a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison until his death.

Throughout Wright's career, he was solicited by other universities to join their sociology faculty. One notable such recruitment attempt occurred at Harvard University in 1981. Among Wright's supporters were Harrison White, who respected Wright's work despite opposition to Wright's Marxist political commitments. Wright's opponents at Harvard included Daniel Bell and George Homans, as well as university president Derek Bok who purportedly blocked the department's attempt to recruit Wright. Harvard's attempt to recruit Wright coincided with its decision to deny tenure in 1981 to Theda Skocpol, a decision that was later reversed following controversy over accusations of gender discrimination.

Wright began making contributions to the intellectual community in the mid-1970s, along with a whole generation of young academics who were radicalized by the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement.

Erik Olin Wright (February 9, 1947 – January 23, 2019) was an American analytical Marxist sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, specializing in social stratification and in egalitarian alternative futures to capitalism. He was known for diverging from classical Marxism in his breakdown of the working class into subgroups of diversely held power and therefore varying degrees of class consciousness. Wright introduced novel concepts to adapt to this change of perspective including deep democracy and interstitial revolution.

Born on February 9, 1947, in Berkeley, California, Wright was raised in Lawrence, Kansas. His parents, M. Erik Wright and Beatrice Ann (Posner) Wright, were both psychology professors at the University of Kansas. He received two Bachelor of Arts degrees, the first with a social studies major at Harvard College in 1968 and the second with a history major at Balliol College, University of Oxford, in 1970. Wright completed a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1976 and joined the Department of Sociology at University of Wisconsin–Madison the same year.