OBITUARY : Ellen Meiksins Wood (1942–2016)

Ellen Meiksins Wood, a Professor at York University, Canada, died early this year. During the 1980s, when Marxism came under attack in the West, Ellen Meiksins Wood built a barricade to guard its intellectual existence. She systematically defended Marxism from the onslaught of postmodernism, and offered her own work as an example not only of the relevance of Marxism but also its creativity. From The Retreat from Class (1986) to her unfinished trilogy of A Social History of Western Political Thought, Wood built a formidable corpus of work that places her as one of the most important Marxist thinkers in the Anglophone world.