This two-day conference will examine each of these projects separately and together. One of the abiding paradoxes of Wright’s work is the gap between the two projects: the first focuses on class without utopia, while the second focuses on utopia without class. We will, therefore, first examine how the projects were so different, but also how they were connected. We will do this by exploring two themes that thread through his corpus: first, the relation between Marxism and Sociology and second the ideas behind Analytical Marxism. The challenge of this conference is to explore the tensions in thought reflected in his work, which certainly survive him, and so not to treat his work as finished.
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The conference consists of four panels: Marxism and Sociology, Class Analysis, Analytical Marxism, and Real Utopias. Each panel will be defined by the presentation of a paper followed by three discussants. The event is sponsored by the Havens Wright Center for Social Justice at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where Wright spent 42 years.