Miliband, Ralph (1924–1994)

Adolphe Miliband was born in Brussels to Polish-Jewish parents and raised in a working-class community. He fled to England in 1940 and settled with his father in London, changing his name to Ralph. Early interest in socialism was reinforced by wartime life in the East End of London and youthful exposure to the work of Harold Laski. He entered the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1941, becoming Laski's intellectual protégé and a student activist. Following naval service, he completed his first degree, started doctoral research, and began teaching at the LSE. In 1972 he became professor in politics at Leeds University and held various part-time appointments in North America from 1978 through 1992.

Throughout his academic career, Miliband was politically active, initially in the Labour Party (where he supported the Bevanite Left) and later in the British New Left. He supported New Left Review, cofounded The Socialist Register, and helped form the Socialist Society as an independent, broad-based left-wing movement with red-green (i.e., left-wing and environmental) sympathies.

These political commitments convinced Miliband that teaching and research should contribute to socialist education. This is reflected in his first book, Parliamentary Socialism (1961), which critically dissected how the Labour Party's attachment to parliamentarism had prevented it from forming strong links to its base in the labor movement, limited its radicalism, and ensured that periods in office further weakened any radical policy commitments. [Page 416]Commitment to socialist education also prompted his most famous book, The State in Capitalist Society (1969), which offered a cathartic critique of the pluralist approaches to economic and political analysis dominant in the Anglophone world. It revealed the close connections between the state apparatus, state managers, and the political class and the interests of capital as mediated through direct personal connections, the nature of the ruling ideas, the role of schooling and the mass media, and broader structural constraints. It also triggered the famous Miliband-Poulantzas debate and helped set the research agenda on the slate in the 1970s and 1980s.

Miliband published four further books. Marxism and Politics (1977) was a general introduction to Marxism and its analysis of politics from Marx and Engels onward and covered many crucial theoretical and political issues. Capitalist Democracy in Britain (1982) developed the general insights of his first two books through a broader analysis of the dynamics of class power in Britain, offering insights into Thatcherism as well as earlier periods of Conservative and Labour rule. Class Power and State Power (1983) packaged various earlier essays and revisited the old question about the relative autonomy of the state, especially as reflected in the relationship between class power and state power. Finally, despite his terminal illness, he completed Socialism for a Sceptical Age (1994), which updated the case for a socialist alternative to the capitalist order.