Ralph Miliband was a Belgian citizen for the first years of his life. His Polish-Jewish parents had moved there in the 1920s; his father was a leather worker in Brussels. When the Nazis invaded in the summer of 1940, Ralph and his father walked to Ostend, and found a boat to England. His mother and younger sister remained in Belgium, where they survived Nazi persecution; after the war they were re-united - though 43 members of his wider family did not survive the war.
With only schoolboy English, Ralph, aged 16, joined Ealing Technical College, to take the equivalent of A-levels. His father worked as a furniture remover; they lived in one room, where Ralph studied. In 1941, he won a place at LSE - then in Cambridge - where he quickly came to the notice of Harold Laski. In 1942, after a year at the LSE, with a personal letter from Laski to Alexander, first Lord of the Admiralty - such a typical Laski touch - Ralph, though still a Belgian citizen, was enrolled in the British navy, and for the next three years served in destroyers and warships, listening to German radio intercepts. He was in a destroyer in the English Channel on D-Day. When he left the Navy in 1945, he saluted his commander at the bottom of the gangway, who promptly said: "Goodbye Miliband, don't vote Labour."
His return to the LSE brought him his expected first class honours, and for his doctoral thesis he took one of Laski's favourite subjects: French socialist ideas in the 1790s. Among his fellow impecunious contempories in Paris were Richard Cobb and George Rudé. Ralph was then given a junior teaching position in the department of government at the LSE, having first spent a term at Roosevelt College, Chicago, where Harold Washington, a future mayor of that city, was among his students.
Miliband never joined the Communist Party, unlike so many of his friends, repudiating Stalinism and always keeping his distance from sectarian groups. During the fifties he was a Bevanite within the Labour Party, and was closely associated with some of the leading members of the Victory For Socialism group, notably Ian Mikardo and Stephen Swingler. Towards the end of the decade he became associated with the Reasoner group around Edward Thompson and the present writer, whose ideas and practical attitudes he found congenial, and he became a member of the editorial board of the New Reasoner.
It was at this stage in his career that he began publishing what was to become a lengthy and highly influential series of articles and books. The first, in 1961, Parliamentary Socialism, was to become the major reference for debates on Labourism and social democracy in the 20th century.
At the end of the decade he published The State In Capitalist Society, probably the most discussed and debated of all his writings; its challenge to the dominant conventions exercised a major influence on political science and sociology. With Marxism And Politics (1977) and three further books in the eighties, he set a new agenda for a whole generation of scholars and activists on both sides of the Atlantic and in the third world.
The political turbulence of the sixties found Miliband among the first rank of the dissenters. In 1964 he became co-editor of the Socialist Register, and had just completed the editing of the 30th commemorative issue in the few months before his death. But he was never to be confined to his study. He was a leading speaker at the famous Oxford teach-in on the Vietnam war in 1965, and during the 1968 troubles at the LSE he was outstanding in his defence of the students' positions.
He left the LSE in 1972 to occupy the chair of politics at the University of Leeds, with whose outstanding Vice-Chancellor, the former Conservative Cabinet Minister Edward Boyle, he achieved a close and sympathetic rapport. Miliband resigned the Leeds Chair in 1978, and thereafter accepted a series of professorships in North America, including Brandeis University, York University in Toronto, and finally in the graduate school of the City University of New York.
Throughout the last three decades of his life, his intellectual influence steadily widened. There was a memorable exchange in the mid-seventies with Nicos Poulantzas in the columns of the New Left Review on the structure and character of the state; and he travelled to many parts of the world at the invitation of international conference organisers. His style of lecturing was impressive: lucid and informative, often impassioned, always enlightening, a reasoned statement of a highly radical analysis.
His home was an essential place of call for left-wing activists and intellectuals from all over the world, and among his friends he had numbered Isaac Deutscher, C Wright Mills, Marcel Liebman and Ruth First.
The proof copies of his latest book arrived during the last fortnight of his life. Socialism For A Sceptical Age, to be published by Polity Press, is both a sober reckoning and a hopeful prognosis of the prospects for socialism in the new world order. It is an indictment of capitalism and a practical argument for socialism in the world as it is, in Miliband's characteristic voice: measured, even austere, in confronting uncomfortable realities, yet deeply humane and optimistic.
Miliband married Marion Kozak in 1961: a woman who shared his political attitudes and who brought to him and the family the values, and the widening horizons, of the feminist movement. Family life was crucial to his emotional and political life; from his sister, Nan, his two sons, David and Edward, as well as their mother, he received spiritual sustenance, spirited argument and much comfort.
Ralph Miliband, born January 7, 1924; died May 21, 1994.
John Saville
Appreciation: Ralph Miliband
by Tony Benn
26 May 1994
The death of Ralph Miliband (obituary, 23 May) has deprived socialists everywhere of one of the greatest thinkers of his generation, and has stolen him from those who had the privilege of his friendship.
Ralph was a veritable giant of a man who had an almost unique capacity to understand - and explain - the world in which we live, and to open up a credible vision of what might be achieved if we set our minds to it, free from any sectarian pre-conceptions. Unlike some academics who keep themselves aloof from the daily business of politics, Ralph was always interested and wanted to be involved, once attending a tiny little seminar on the future of socialism which the Bristol South-East Labour Party had organised to encourage discussion.
I had first met him many years ago and attended the inaugural meeting of the Socialist Society in the early eighties, in which he was deeply interested. But our closest association dates from the time when he offered to bring together a small group of socialists to help me in the campaigns in which I was involved in the eighties.
We called it the Independent Left Corresponding Society and it met regularly; it was at one of those meetings that the idea of convening the Chesterfield Socialist conferences was first mooted. At those conferences, Ralph was always listened to with intense interest and respect, as later when the Socialist Movement emerged from the same beginning.
It is a great tragedy that in recent years there has been a virtual black-out - or vilification of - socialist writing and writers, for the books and articles produced by Ralph Miliband will, in retrospect, be seen to have illuminated contemporary politics in a way that few other commentators can rival. Happily he had completed his last book, Socialism In A Sceptical Age, sent it to the publishers before his death and spoke of it, with characteristic modesty, at his 70th birthday party held at his home earlier this year.
Ralph and Marion, and their sons David and Edward, were a very close family with a great capacity for making friends and we shall all be mourning, with them, the death of this lovely man.