[Fwd: Neal Wood, 1922-2003]

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

I missed any reference to this at the time.
Carrol

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Neal Wood, 1922-2003
Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2003 09:23:02 -0500
From: Richard Fidler <rfidler@xxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: Discussions on the Socialist Register and its
articles<SOCIALIST-REGISTER@xxxxxxxx>
To: SOCIALIST-REGISTER@xxxxxxxx

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