Skip navigation
London Review of Books Christmas Books

Articles marked subscriber-only content are available to registered subscribers to the print edition of the London Review of Books. For information about subscribing to the LRB, click here. If you are already a subscriber and you wish to register for online access, click here.

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.

From the London Review dated 25 September 2008

Why It Matters

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. [ read more . . . ]

Selected bibliography

  • Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (2008)
  • Empire of Capital (2003)
  • The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (2002)
  • A Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509-1688 by Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood (1997)
  • In Defence of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda edited by Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster (1997)
  • Democracy against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (1995)
  • The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: An Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States (1991)
  • Peasant, Citizen and Slave: Foundations of Athenian Democracy (1988)
  • The Retreat from Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism (1986)

Search the web for Ellen Meiksins Wood: Google · Yahoo! · AltaVista · Wikipedia

In the LRB archive

Why It Matters · 25 September 2008