Wright's Writing

Years ago I took some notes on Gabriel Kolko’s classic The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History 1900–1916...

[From Notes of an Underground Humanist.] How is mass inhumanity possible?— When I ask myself how it’s possible that so many white...

Just a quick note: I recently posted a long summary of and commentary on Georg Lukacs' masterpiece The Destruction of Reason, which has...

Marxism is right, and postmodernism is stupid. That's the thrust of a paper I've uploaded to academia.edu, which actually consists of...

(Also see these notes.) Reading Maurice Cornforth’s Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy (1965). A good book, not dogmatic or...

In history, few topics can be more relevant to our own world than the origin of capitalism. Ellen Meiksins Wood's book on that subject...

[Excerpts from this book.] Collectivism comes in both noble and evil forms. In the former, the principle of the individual is paramount;...

Sometimes I like to read about contemporary philosophy and science, to escape the dreariness and intellectual semi-sterility of writings...

[Notes from 2008.] Reading Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. It’s wonderful to think that the publication (in...

[The following are lecture notes I wrote, based mainly on Eric Foner's classic Reconstruction. As I found out, they were more than a...

I recently read a book by Chris Bambery called The Second World War: A Marxist History (2014) and decided it was good enough to take...

[From this book.] The more one experiences the world, the more one understands how difficult it is to be “successful” and have integrity...

[Student notes.] You should read Lance Hill's The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. Gives a compelling...

[From an email.] …Of course it's true that every event in history depends on contingencies. [I had said the Russian Revolution depended...

[The following is a vignette I wrote years ago when studying for my Master's in philosophy. I was taking a class in contemporary...

In an age when the State is daily demonstrating its willingness, or rather its extraordinary eagerness, to brutally repress dissent and...

Here are some excerpts from a review article of a book I’m reading called Slaughterhouse (1997), by Gail Eisnitz: [....] The agony starts...

Richard Lewontin’s article “The Evolution of Cognition: Questions We Will Never Answer” is excellent. It counsels skepticism about...

[From 2008.] Reading Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, which is about his experiences with post-encephalitic, Parkinsonian patients. It’s a good...

The following is the beginning of an essay I wanted to write years ago on the concept of pretentiousness, a phenomenon the ubiquity of...