A free copy of my book
In June I published the book version of my Ph.D. dissertation, bearing the ungainly title Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in...
Wright's Writing
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- Jun 13
- 30 min
Origins of the European state system
Reading Charles Tilly’s classic Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (1992). Taking notes on it for myself, but also for...
- Sep 8, 2021
- 11 min
Excerpts from "Battle Cry of Freedom"
In an effort to escape the dreary drumbeat of daily news, I'm reading James McPherson's mammoth Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era...
- Sep 1, 2021
- 4 min
The "paradox" of American freedom and slavery
[Old student notes on the early United States.] Quoting Edmund Morgan, in his famous 1972 article “Slavery and Freedom: The American...
- Aug 22, 2021
- 16 min
Eleven Theses on Socialist Revolution
The good folks at DSA (of which I'm a proud member) were kind enough to publish the following article recently in their online...
- Jun 26, 2021
- 49 min
On the inhumanity of Illinois's government in the 1930s
In case anyone is interested in the history of the Great Depression, particularly in Chicago, here's an excerpt from a chapter of my...
- Jun 22, 2021
- 12 min
The secret history of automation
Here are some notes on an unjustly neglected book by the great Marxist David F. Noble (social historian of technology) called Progress...
- Jun 11, 2021
- 74 min
Marxism and the solidarity economy
Another excessively long blog post. I recently published a long article ("Marxism and the Solidarity Economy: Toward a New Theory of...
- Jun 10, 2021
- 22 min
Introduction to my forthcoming book
If all goes well, I'll be publishing a book sometime in the not-too-distant future. It'll be called something like Popular Radicalism and...
- Apr 5, 2021
- 30 min
The rise of right-wing libertarianism since the 1950s
Sometimes as I read books I like to simultaneously summarize them, to facilitate the intellectual digestion. And also to post my notes...
- Sep 24, 2020
- 4 min
A despairing rant
These are interesting times. We have the "privilege" to be living in the era when centuries of capitalist evolution are approaching their...
- Sep 11, 2020
- 35 min
The history of tax increment financing in Chicago
Here's a very dry paper I wrote for a class in 2012. I thought I should know more about urban public policy, so I decided to research the...
- Sep 10, 2020
- 12 min
DuBois's "Black Reconstruction"
W. E. B. DuBois’s great work Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880, published in 1935, isn’t a very easy read. But it’s important as...
- Sep 8, 2020
- 22 min
From Steve Fraser's "The Age of Acquiescence"
I just finished reading Steve Fraser's masterful The Age of Acquiescence (2014), which compares the popular responses to America's two...
- Sep 5, 2020
- 5 min
The commodification of education
David Noble's essay "Digital Diploma Mills," written in the 1990s, is a brilliant and still timely critique of the automation and...
- Sep 4, 2020
- 35 min
The Workers' Bill
Here's the last section of chapter 6 of my dissertation on the unemployed in Chicago during the Depression. The previous two sections are...
- Sep 3, 2020
- 54 min
On the Unemployed Councils and the Chicago Workers' Committee
The last chapter of my dissertation on the unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression is, I think, more interesting than the...
- Aug 23, 2020
- 25 min
The radical dimensions of mass consciousness, part 2
Here's the sequel to this post, from the last chapter of my Ph.D. thesis. It's just an excerpt. The main point of it is to argue against...
- Aug 23, 2020
- 45 min
The radical dimensions of mass consciousness, part 1
I'm kind of a "vulgar Marxist." In this respect, I suppose I'm a lot like people in the American ruling class, except that their values...
- Aug 21, 2020
- 53 min
Homeless men in the Great Depression
Here's another over-long blog post. It's a chapter from my dissertation, on homeless men during the Great Depression. I'm not sure it's...