Dear Erik
Thank you for your work and the generosity with which you shared it. I learned a lot from you not only from your books and articles but also from your posts in your blog. Your guide to reading Poulantzas and your syllabi have been particularly helpful for me. You threw light into many difficult problems. Reading you is always a pleasure and a first reference in whatever you wrote about, given the quality of your framing and treatment of problems. Thank you for showing how enriching a sociological perspective can be, by linking new development to the classics and working in theory all the way to empirical facts. With all the contingencies in this highly complex universe, it has been a great luck to have a great mind like yours paving the way for structural marxists. Greetings from Argentina.
Dear Erik, thank you for being you. Your are widely loved and admired. Beyond consciousness and awareness and agency, one of the most redeeming features of our brief human state is our ability to experience and create meaning, including feelings and expressions of love, solidarity, compassion, in addition to flying kites, building stuff, exploring new things, or exploring social life and taking the time to consider why it has exhibited the properties and tendencies we observe and what to do about it. I remember your consistent kindness, helpful insights, and always compassionate spirit and they are a part of me and the lives of so many others. I remember your words of encouragement when I shared news of the birth of my first child ten years ago, several years after leaving Madison. And I have contemplated in last few days your reflections while observing and trying to make sense out of my own father's terminal illness. However fleeting, our lives continue to carry meaning for those who know and love us and it is this aspect of our lives that is celebrated and which survives us. Our relationship with you doesn't end. I only know you as one of too many graduate students who have passed through Madison WI during a fleeting moment of human history. But I know enough to thank you for being who you are and to pass on my strongest expressions of love, friendship, and thanks. Jonathan
Hi Erik, and greetings from Ireland. I've been following your blog, and astounded by your courage. We appeared together in an edited collection last year from Lauren Langman and David Smith, and seeing my name on the same page as yours is a career highlight that will be hard to beat. I WhatsApp'd a photo of it straight to my wife and parents, and I don't think I did that when my first book arrived. I was hooked on Marx from day one - it was what converted me to sociology. I spent years working on ecology, and your work finally gave me the tools to explore class and inequality. It is a permanent feature of my work now, and there are many more who owe you a similar debt. We met many years ago in Ireland when you were president of the ASA - I was terrified but needn't have been. You were interested and questioning, and you gave me confidence during a difficult time when finishing my phd. I'm in the middle of a book you edited on social class from 2005 which featured John Goldthorpe and Richard Breen, and trying to explain the rise of the 1% in terms of rentierism and a binary class model of earned vs unearned income. This is all influenced by your work on the systemic nature of social class. I just wanted to write and thank you for your work, for this blog, and to wish you all the best. I'm sorry we did not get to talk more. Eoin.
Dear professor Erik Olin Wright, I am sad that we will not be able to meet, but I want to say this: as a researcher in training, I have found your scholarly work profoundly influential. The Real Utopias project is the center of my interest, and as a researcher in training in the discipline of Futures Studies, I am trying to incorporate all your and your colleagues' insights into my work.
By all accounts, I have seen and heard that you are a bright, warm and caring person, someone concerned about making this world a fairer, sustainable, democratic, and overall better place.
I will tell you this: if it is within my life's possibilities, I will do my best to live by and develop knowledge using your contributions as a central reference. Your words in this post are both beautiful and saddening beyond words. José Saramago said: "The good and evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and balanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves or ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim that this is the much talked of immortality.” At least for the foreseable future, your spirit, kindness and generosity will remain here, with us, trying to build a better future.
Your work and your life have made a mark in this universe, and though our existence is ephemeral, you can be sure that yours was meaningful. Go well, my heart is with you.
Farewell Erik, hard as it is to embrace this word. Your influence on me has been indelible. I remember the very first moment we met in Madison. You asked me, "do you like the white stuff?", warning me of the snow that would soon fall and transform the world. And now you become stardust. You will fall like snow on my world. Thank you, thank you. Go well.
Dear Erik, you will not remember me. I presented a paper together with a colleague of mine, Hayriye Erbas, on class structure in a Turkish town in the VIIth International Conference of the comparative Project on Class Structure and Class Consciousness, Granada, Spain, July 24-26, 1991. Your work on class helped sociologists all over the world to conceptualize inequality in their societies comparatively and to fight inequality using your vision of socialism. When a friend shared your 5th of January 2019 entry, I learned about "your strange state of existence" with deep sadness, and shared it with my mostly Turkish FB friends with following comments in Turkish: "Nur içinde, ışık içinde yatacak birisi çok emek verdi sosyoloji bilimine ve insanlar arasında eşitlik sağlama mücadelesine". As someone contributing to the development of sociology and to the struggle for equality be in eternal light in the state of complexity and in the dissipated state hereafter.
I am so upset to hear the news of your illness and prognosis. I remain grateful to you for the seriousness with which you read my work when I was a graduate student. And I recall with great pleasure the discussions we had on topics like “clender.” You and your work really helped me to find my place in the field when I was a young scholar, and I know that there are so many others for whom this is the case. Thank you!
Dear Erik, I wanted you to know how much I value you personally, your Real Utopias contribution and your writing. I have valued our discussions over the years, your hospitality in Wisconsin and your vitality and wisdom. I still remember the conference in Wisconsin on UBI which influences me today. Recently I co-taught a course in Paris on the Future of the Left and used your material on what it means to be a socialist today. I am so deeply sorry to hear about your condition and send all best wishes to you and your extended family. Thinking of you so much at this time. With the fondest regards, deepest respect and profound admiration Ed
Dearest Erik, you have been such an important person in my life: a friend, a mentor, a guiding intellectual presence, a north-point on the compass of my political imagination, and an inspiring model of a socially-engaged scholar and deeply kind human being.
You walk a few steps ahead on that path down which we all must follow shortly. In the time still allotted me I will endeavour as much as my abilities allow to continue the work and spirit of the Real Utopias project. It was your life’s work, and is now mine. At the personal level you touched so many people’s lives with your generosity and kindness. And at the macro-level you helped move forward the great struggle of our times – towards a reimaginging of a just, democratic socialist alternative. We all see a little further and a little clearer now from our perch atop your shoulders. I can hardly bear to imagine a world without you in it. Yet some small comfort resides in the fact that I know that as long as I can read and write I will invariably hear your voice in my head, and as long as I see attempts to build alternative democratic structures in the world, I will feel your presence in them.
Thank you for your work and the generosity with which you shared it. I learned a lot from you not only from your books and articles but also from your posts in your blog. Your guide to reading Poulantzas and your syllabi have been particularly helpful for me. You threw light into many difficult problems. Reading you is always a pleasure and a first reference in whatever you wrote about, given the quality of your framing and treatment of problems. Thank you for showing how enriching a sociological perspective can be, by linking new development to the classics and working in theory all the way to empirical facts. With all the contingencies in this highly complex universe, it has been a great luck to have a great mind like yours paving the way for structural marxists. Greetings from Argentina.