Wright's Writing

The fulfillment of the [Marxian] prophecy.— As capital has become more mobile internationally since the 1970s (the era of globalization),...

[Excerpt from this book.] There are delights and dangers in adopting a broad perspective on oneself and one’s society. Looking at the...

[Excerpt from this book.] A celebrated bureaucrat.— In the library today I happened to pass Harry Truman’s memoirs. Picked the book up...

On neoclassical economics.— Milton Friedman wrote a famous article in 1953 called “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in which he...

[From an email.] Jerry Coyne does not impress me [in this talk], although at least he seems less irrational and annoying than Daniel...

[Notes from my journal.] I'm reading Paulo Freire’s famous little book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), which is apparently...

Max Scheler’s Ressentiment (1912), while dated and silly in some respects, is worth reading. Scheler is a semi-Nietzsche in his...

[Old notes from my journal. See also this post.] Reading parts of a collection of essays published in 1978 called Anarchism, edited by J....

[Some notes I took a while ago. They may be kind of obvious, but I think it’s interesting to adopt something like Hegel’s perspective on...

Reading the Chomsky-recommended Political Economy and Laissez-Faire: Economics and Ideology in the Ricardian Era (1986), by Rajani Kanth....

Reading The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (2011), by Corey Robin. An elegant and erudite elaboration of...

L’enfer, c’est les autres?— Contrary to what Sartre pessimistically thought, if hell exists, it is not other people. It is the absence of...

[From an old journal entry.] Noam Chomsky is my intellectual conscience. I think about him every day, multiple times a day. He helps...

[This is an excerpt from Notes of an Underground Humanist.] You should read Peter Kropotkin’s essay “The State: Its Historic Role.”...

From Peter Marin: “Kant called the realm of [human] connection the kingdom of ends. Erich Gutkind’s name for it was the absolute...

​ According to Karl Marx, capitalism functions in such a way that its appearance differs from its essence. What happens in the...

Leftists are sometimes criticized for being condescending toward the masses, for arguing that they are prone to displaying "false...

What is the significance of the fact that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries certain (semi-fascist) sections of the...

I'm finally reading [in 2011] E. P. Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Query: why was England so...

It’s a cliché but it’s worth repeating: one cause of modern loneliness is the attitude of treating people as means to an end, namely...