When Erik Olin Wright “fell into Marxism” in the 1970s, it was “the only game in town” for a serious radical scholar.

By the 1990s this was no longer so, with Marxism retreating to the margins inside and outside the academy. Wright chose to stay. He set out to reconstruct a sociological Marxism by treating it not as a set of fixed ideas or as an idiosyncratic method, but as a distinctive set of questions and a conceptual framework for answering them.

Wright’s Marxism is ordinary social science, but guided by the pursuit of socialism.