Ellen Meiksins Wood

Ellen Meiksins Wood’s latest book is Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.

Happy Campers: G.A. Cohen

Ellen Meiksins Wood, 28 January 2010

‘Socialism’, Albert Einstein said, is humanity’s attempt ‘to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development’, and for G.A. Cohen ‘every market … is a system of predation.’ That is the essence of his short but trenchant and elegantly written last book – Cohen died last August. His object is to make what he calls a...

Why It Matters: Quentin Skinner’s Detachment

Ellen Meiksins Wood, 25 September 2008

Is it possible, Quentin Skinner asks, that an entire tradition of political thought, including the most influential conception of freedom in anglophone political theory in the past half-century, ‘has been insensitive to the range of conditions that can limit our freedom of action’? A reasonable question, one might think, not only about Isaiah Berlin’s influential defence of ‘negative’ against ‘positive’ liberty but about the whole tradition of liberalism. Yet Skinner’s own understanding of liberty is not immune to the same awkward question.

The central dynamic of global politics since 11 September 2001 has been the profound shift in the nature of American foreign policy. After the end of the Second World War, the United States...

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