Erik Olin Wright

Erik Olin Wright was a sociologist whose research joined Marxist class analysis to large cross-national comparative studies of inequality. Classes, first published by Verso in 1985, addresses the difficulty of applying a polarized model of owners and workers to the more complicated class structures of advanced capitalism. Wright develops his idea of contradictory class locations, places in the economy where authority, skill, and ownership produce mixed interests, then tests the framework through international survey evidence. Verso reissued the book in 2023 within the Erik Olin Wright Series. Wright held the Vilas Distinguished Professorship of Sociology at Wisconsin–Madison and organized the Real Utopias Project, which examined institutions capable of expanding democratic and egalitarian power. His other books include Class Counts, Interrogating Inequality, Envisioning Real Utopias, and Understanding Class. Across that work, empirical research and political possibility remain linked. Classes represents the earlier foundation of this program: it refines a contested concept, measures how class positions operate in actual societies, and asks what those structures imply for conflict, consciousness, and social transformation.