http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/images/pb98351.jpgI met Ellen in Fall 1976 soon after arriving for graduate studies at York University in Toronto. I immediately enrolled in her course "Symposium on Political Theory." I remember being struck by the fact that Ellen was surprisingly young and full of energy for such an accomplished scholar -- one who radiated the radical awakening then taking place. We proceeded to study political theory from the pre-Socratics to Marx, focusing on primary sources, while applying historical materialist methods of inquiry. At that time Ellen was writing, together with her husband, Neal Wood, Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory (1978). I had studied ancient political theory before, but never like this! With the incorporation of class analysis the entire way in which thinkers like Plato and Aristotle were conventionally read was completely upended. I still remember this book as the work that affected me most in all of Ellen's writings. . . . Ellen emerged in these years as one of the most powerful and distinctive defenders and developers of classical Marxism. She synthesized in her analysis the humanist-historical Marxism of Thompson and Williams, the more historical-structuralist orientation of Anderson, and the political Marxism of Brenner. In the late 1980s and 1990s she launched a number of defenses of Marxism against, at first, the post-structuralist post-Marxism of figures like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (in her Deutscher Prize-winning book, The Retreat from Class [1986]), and, later, the so-called "analytical Marxism" of G.A. Cohen, John Roemer, and Jon Elster. The elegance of her style, combined with the power of her intellect, and her knowledge of history, made each of these truly devastating anti-critiques. . . . Among Ellen's significant contributions to MR during her period as coeditor was her critique of the loose conceptions of globalization floating about the left at the time, in which it was commonly supposed that the state would simply vanish -- views that she effectively challenged. This was to feed into her books The Origin of Capitalism (1999) and The Empire of Capital (2003). Ellen went on to write a number of other important works, mainly on the social history of political theory from ancient times to the present. But perhaps her most valuable book of all was her volume Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (1995). Because here one sees the central theme of all of her work -- the struggle of the demos against class inequality and capital.

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