He located political ideas within social relations, property forms, and popular struggles, writing on topics as variant as the British Communist Party, John Locke, Aristotle, Edmund Burke, and Augustine of Hippo.
Born in Los Angeles on 10 September 1922, Wood volunteered for the Royal Air Force (RAF) before the United States entered the Second World War.
From 1955 to 1957, he did research at the University of Cambridge for his Doctor of Philosophy degree, which received from UC Berkeley.
He retired from York in 1988, and settled in England a decade later, where he died of cancer in Devon on 17 September 2003.
[citation needed] His final book, a jeremiad against the direction of his country of origin entitled Tyranny in America: Capitalism and National Decay, appeared posthumously in 2004.