Wright's Writing

[This article was published in The Philosophical Salon.] In Wilhelm von Humboldt’s book The Limits of State Action (1792), one of the...

[Published at Common Dreams.] “The Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history,” says Noam Chomsky. It seems...

[This article was published at Sublation and other venues.] Political discourse in the United States consists largely of lies and...

In the time of Trumpism, Michael Paul Rogin’s great book The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (1967) shouldn’t be as...

In case anyone is interested in the history of the Great Depression, particularly in Chicago, here's an excerpt from a chapter of my...

Sometimes as I read books I like to simultaneously summarize them, to facilitate the intellectual digestion. And also to post my notes...

These are interesting times. We have the "privilege" to be living in the era when centuries of capitalist evolution are approaching their...

I just finished reading Steve Fraser's masterful The Age of Acquiescence (2014), which compares the popular responses to America's two...

Many years ago, when I was a simple boy who thought he ought to know a lot about Hegel, I took masses of notes on his philosophy. Below...

[Student notes from ten years ago.] Reading Robert A. Brady’s classic Business as a System of Power (1943), which influenced Chomsky....

[An old student paper.] The conventional understanding of labor unions and their membership in the 1960s is of a conservative and...

As I frequently and tiresomely reiterate, academic writing tends toward sophistry, superficiality, and obscurantism. Personally, my...

[Notes from 2006.] Reading The Alchemist, the novel that has sold tens of millions of copies. “To realize one’s destiny is a person’s...

[As an undergraduate at Wesleyan University I wrote hundreds of essays not all of which, I think, are worthless. Here's a short one on...

Years ago I took some notes on Gabriel Kolko’s classic The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History 1900–1916...

(Also see these notes.) Reading Maurice Cornforth’s Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy (1965). A good book, not dogmatic or...

The following is the beginning of an essay I wanted to write years ago on the concept of pretentiousness, a phenomenon the ubiquity of...

[Random journal notes.] Reading Elizabeth Tandy Shermer’s Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (2013)....

[Old notes from my journal.] A lot of mainstream people would criticize me for immersing myself in leftist scholarship and journalism,...

On neoclassical economics.— Milton Friedman wrote a famous article in 1953 called “The Methodology of Positive Economics,” in which he...