-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Neal Wood, 1922-2003 Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2003 09:23:02 -0500 From: Richard Fidler <rfidler at CYBERUS.CA> Reply-To: Discussions on the Socialist Register and its articles<SOCIALIST-REGISTER at YORKU.CA> To: SOCIALIST-REGISTER at YORKU.CA
Professor was a scrupulous political theorist
Toronto Globe and Mail, December 9, 2003
BY GINA BRIDGELAND AND BOB JONES The Canadian scholar Neal Wood was one of the most eminent political theorists of the postwar years. The professor at Toronto's York University, whose 10 books and many articles spanned the range of western political thought, from Socrates to communist intellectuals, has died in England. No one has demonstrated more effectively the possibility of uniting scrupulous scholarship withdeep political commitment.
Prof Wood's particular contribution was to locate political thought within its social and political context. He emphasized not just the contexts of "discourse" and high politics but social relations and processes, property forms and popular struggles, whether he was exploring St. Augustine's reaction against a heretical peasant movement or John Locke's connection with "agrarian capitalism".
Prof. Wood never made the mistake of suggesting that ideas could be predicted from the theorist's class or social position. He simply insisted that the questions confronting political theorists were historically constituted, posed in specific historical forms, in the context of specific social relations, practical activities, grievances, conflicts and struggles. To understand a thinker's answers required first understanding the questions and the conditions in which they arose.
This was not, in Prof. Wood's view, to make the history of political thought merely an antiquarian exercise. On the contrary, it provided a unique critical vantage point from which to judge our own contemporary realities and unchallenged assumptions. His approach has inspired an impressive cohort of younger scholars.
Born in Los Angeles on Sept. 10, 1922, Prof. Wood volunteered for the Royal Air Force, before the United States entered the Second World War. After four years in the RAF, he was drafted into the U.S. Air Force, and served in Italy. After the war, he studied at the University of California and Cambridge University. His PhD thesis, published as Communism and British Intellectuals (1959), remains a major reference point on the subject.
From 1958, Prof. Wood taught at Columbia University in New York, moving in 1963 to UCLA. In 1966, he took up a chair in political science in the recently established York University in Toronto. In 1967, Prof. Wood initiated York's now internationally respected graduate program in social and political thought. Together with John Pocock and Melvin Richter, he also founded, at York, the conference for the study of political thought, a scholarly society which developed an international membership.
Prof Wood was an inspiring, considerate and effective teacher who maintained an interest in the later careers of his students.
Like other Americans during the Vietnam War, he and his wife, Ellen Meiksins Wood, also a political theorist, became Canadians. Prof. Wood retired in 1988 and the couple settled in Britain 10 years later.
He died on Sept. 17. A memorial service was held yesterday at York University.
The Guardian News Service