Newcomers' Lives by Peter Unwin

Author:Peter Unwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408186220
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

Ralph Miliband

Political theorist, whose two sons competed to lead the Labour Party

June 10, 1994

Ralph Miliband, political scientist, died on May 21 aged 70. He was born on January 7, 1924.

Ralph Miliband, who served for 23 years as a lecturer at the London School of Economics and after that for six years held the chair of politics at Leeds, consistently stuck to a coherent, left-wing view of the world. In the Marxist tradition he saw class conflict as inevitably flowing from an industrial system based on the private ownership of capital. This led him into a highly influential discussion of the role of the State and its institutions which, he tirelessly argued, were deliberately used by the dominant ruling class to contain political pressures which might otherwise pose a threat to its own hegemony.

Yet he was in no sense a rigid Marxist, never a member of the Communist Party and a strong anti-authoritarian, hence his support for the student protest at LSE in the late 1960s. But no one could have been a less natural advocate of Dave Spart. An engaging and humorous companion, he was also an extremely good writer, something which even his critics on the orthodox Left, such as Dick Crossman, always conceded, and he had little patience with the more convoluted versions of left-wing (or any other) theory.

The book which made his name, Parliamentary Socialism (1961), is a model of cogency and clarity. Its thesis, the betrayal of the Labour movement by its elected leaders at Westminster, may have been a familiar one but it had seldom been deployed with quite such wit and contempt. His most considerable work is probably, however, The State in Capitalist Society (1972), which became a classic text for politics and sociology students of the 1970s. His last book, Socialism for a Sceptical Age, of which he saw the proofs just before he died, is due out later this year.

Born in Belgium, the son of a Jewish leather worker from Warsaw, Miliband made his way with his father from Brussels to Britain in 1940 (his mother and younger sister, with whom he was reunited after the war, were left behind). Initially attending Ealing Technical College, he won a place at the London School of Economics the attraction there being Harold Laski in 1941. But he spent only two years at LSE, in its wartime exile at Cambridge, before volunteering for the Royal Navy: it was thanks to Laski, who characteristically wrote a letter to his friend, the First Lord of the Admiralty, that despite still being a Belgian subject he was enlisted. In 1946 he returned to LSE, then back in Houghton Street, where he took his expected first and wrote a doctoral thesis on French socialist ideas in the 1790s (a subject always close to Laski’s own heart).

But Miliband himself never had any illusions about the imminence of socialist change. As late as 1988 he wrote that conditions would not exist for the coming to power of a government that would seek to bring about the radical transformation of the existing social order for several decades.

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