Erik Olin Wright passed away yesterday, just months after being diagnosed with advanced Leukemia. In the early days after his diagnosis, he had put the finishing touches on his book How to be an Anti-Capitalist for the Twenty-First Century, due to be released later this year.

The book would surely not have been his last, had he lived. Though Erik was seventy-one, an age at which most academics’ thoughts turn toward retirement, he had no such intentions. “I plan to be ‘professing’ right till the end,” he used to quip. He was still incredibly active, churning out work, supervising PhDs, traveling, and lecturing.

Even though he leaves us an enormous oeuvre spanning more than forty years, it is an agenda abruptly cut short. Those of us who knew and loved him have lost a dear friend. And the Left, showing signs of a revival after years of retreat, has lost one of its most brilliant intellectuals.