Erik Olin Wright’s death is an incalculable loss. In the weeks leading up to his death, and in the time since, his students and others whose lives he touched have gathered their thoughts about what they learned from him using the hashtag #EOWtaughtme.

Reading through the remembrances, some common themes emerge: his intellectual rigor, his passion and devotion to teaching and mentoring, his ethical and political commitments, his fundamental human decency. What I learned from Erik can be summed up in two words: “contradiction” and “clarity.”

Erik’s life was defined by contradiction. Personally, he was serious but also silly. Professionally, he rose to the pinnacle of his discipline, while remaining somewhat of an outsider. Intellectually, his core theoretical contributions — contradictory class locations and real utopias — each embody contradiction.