Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left by Michael Newman

Fiery rhetoric and icy irony of a life on the Left

Ralph Miliband (1924-94) wrote two books famous among left-wing students and intellectuals. His Parliamentary Socialism set out to prove that the Labour Party had abandoned socialism by adhering to parliamentary conventions. State in Capitalist Society demonstrated that capitalist control of the state was so comprehensive that partial reforms were impossible. The first book begged the question of whether Labour had ever been socialist in his stern sense; and the second seemed a little ungenerous to Victorian and Edwardian reformers, let alone those of 1945-50.

Ralph Miliband wrote well, but his greatest impact was as a speaker and lecturer: a passionate and moving orator with a mixture of high rhetoric and icy irony. In Marxism and Politics and his posthumous Socialism for a Sceptical Age, he came back to his mentor Harold Laski's last position: that both theory and justice demand a democratic socialist society. Bourgeois liberties were liberties, weapons needed by all. When he wrote about "the recovery of the political", I can't remember if I smiled or gave a dry cheer.

During the troubles at LSE in 1968-69, Miliband was asked by the student leaders to give seminars. He wrote to a friend: "What was very striking was first their lack of theoretical formation and then their thirst to know more". All his life, he believed that to find the correct theoretical formation would bring about a revolutionary transformation of society, not just of the LSE. It plainly did not dawn on Miliband that the students had acted first and looked for theoretical justification afterwards. Those were the days of "Hurry up with the soufflé, mother, or I'll miss the demo."

If this book is at times a "keep left" plod down memory lane, it is also a heartfelt tribute to a remarkable man. But few of the letters quoted at length between editors of Socialist Register and New Left Review are historical documents. I am sad more than angry at the lack of any reflection on how to reach out to their fellow-citizens. Their "working class" was a theoretical abstraction. Problems in the real world were seen as problems for Marxist theory, not as problems for people.

Miliband demanded a new working-class mass movement. For a while, that was to be the Socialist Society, which gathered at the call of Tony Benn. Miliband was snatching at a straw man to think that Benn could be the charismatic leader of a revolutionary movement rather than a vain, self-indulgent and mildly poisonous gadfly. But Benn and Miliband charmed each other.

This austere intellectual biography at times takes the editorial decisions of the Socialist Register as seriously as did the editors. But Michael Newman does allow a glimpse of a happy family life that shows human values surmounting ideological barriers. Despite his bitter scorn for Labour, Miliband was "enormously gratified" by his sons' achievements: one became an adviser to Brown; the other, now a minister, to Blair. Here is a paradigm of love and tolerance; but perhaps it is easier to tolerate strong differences when each regards the other's ideas as inherently ineffective, and therefore unthreatening.

The reviewer's book of political essays, 'Crossing Borders', is published by Continuum