[1][2] Wrong was the author of several books, including two essay collections containing articles first published in cultural, intellectual, political and scholarly journals in the United States, Canada, and Britain.
He harvested wheat during WWII (a foot condition having kept him out of active military service) and earned a bachelor's degree from University of Toronto in 1945.
[5] Wrong's 1961 article, "The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology," criticized the limitations of structural functionalism employed by Talcott Parsons.
Parsons, in Wrong's view, had eliminated "the resistance...to the demands of society offered by the Freudian id and even by the rational calculating ego.
For example, Jennie M. Hornosty criticized the book for its lack of discussion of class conflict, digression into peripheral issues, and weakness on the social-structural variants of power.
In his book Power... Wrong argued:It has been argued that, like "freedom" or "justice" – those "big words which make us so unhappy", as Stephen Dedalus called them – "power" is an "essentially contested concept", meaning that people with different values and beliefs are bound to disagree over its nature and definition.
It is claimed therefore that there cannot be any commonly accepted or even preferred meaning so long as people differ on normative issues as they are likely to do indefinitely, if not forever.