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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Michael Newman, Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left (London: Merlin Press 2002)
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| THIS THOROUGH BOOK provides a fascinating account of the life, political concerns and involvements, and intellectual output of Ralph Miliband. It is based on access to Miliband's own archive of material, ranging from his youthful literary endeavours through his diaries and private correspondence to unpublished articles, drafts of later work, lectures, and, of course, published work; on interviews with his wife and sons, close friends, academic colleagues, political activists, and former students; on contemporary records and publications relating to Miliband and socialist politics; and on broader research into the changing national and international situation in which Miliband lived, worked, and struggled. As such it is not only the sole book devoted to Miliband's life and work but also a work that aims to provide a distinctive perspective, as the title indicates, on the politics of the New Left in Britain, Europe, and North America. |
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The book begins with Miliband's family history, his childhood background as a Polish Jew living in Belgium, his flight to Britain as a refugee from Fascism just before the Belgian defeat, his wartime career as a student, worker, and naval intelligence officer, and his immediate postwar experience as a student and political activist at the London School of Economics (LSE). This provides valuable insights into the ambiguities and complexities in his search for a personal and political identity as a socialist and secular Jew who was committed to developing an independent socialist and, later more explicit and elaborated, Marxist approach. |
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Based on Miliband's comments on the work of Laski, his mentor and early role model at the LSE, and other leading intellectual figures, Newman argues that his early political position can be described as left-wing democratic socialist. Its three defining features were: (a) political action must be grounded in working-class needs and demands; (b) agitation, demands, and protest are necessary for change to be accomplished; and (c) political organization is also required to provide focus and leadership for these struggles. Miliband's political activities initially developed in sympathetic parallel with his Laskian academic interests as a specialist in the history of ideas but the two strands became more closely integrated, if not fully convergent, as he began to ask whether ideas were more than a simple "reflection" of the era in which they were produced. Thus his PhD, which dealt with the marginalization of the menu people in the course of the French Revolution, emphasized that ideas had to be related to political forces and interests and that political programmes had to address economic interests, especially the system of private property. The Jacobins' failure to deal with the question of private property made life harder for the masses and this in turn made it harder to consolidate the basis for a real social revolution. This shift away from Laski's independent socialism towards historical materialism was shaped not only by his own studies but also by the deep influence of C. Wright Mills, who became a close friend and reinforced his interest in the political sociology of power, and his involvement in the rise of the New Left in Britain. |
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It is with this last influence that Newman's book begins to focus on his primary subject matter: Miliband's complex, ambivalent, evolving, often disenchanted, and sometimes mildly paranoid relationship to the New Left. Thus we read much about the personal, intellectual, political, and practical tensions and conflicts among the leading figures involved in the New Reasoner, the Left Review, the New Left Review, the Socialist Register, and many subsequent intellectual, educational, and political initiatives; about the politics of academic freedom and freedom of speech, the student movement at the LSE and in Britain more generally; about Miliband's growing disquiet and alienation from many of his colleagues (but not his many students) in the Department of Government at the LSE; about the continuing disputes in his immediate personal circle and on the Left more generally over Zionism, Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East; about Vietnam and American imperialism; about his underestimation of the importance of new social movements compared to the fundamental role of class conflict; about his views on the economic and political failures of communism and the collapse of actually existing socialism in the Soviet Union; about his distrust of alternative models of socialism in China and Cuba; about his personal troubles and worries about teaching in the USA; about his views on Reaganism and Thatcherism; and about much else besides. We also learn much about the research that went into Miliband's influential analysis of the limits of the parliamentary road to socialism in Britain; his subsequent growing interest in Marxist theory and the centrality of class, class conflict, and political organization; the background to his decision to write — and methodological approach to —The State in Capitalist Society (1969); the increasingly angry dispute between himself and Nicos Poulantzas (whom he never met); and his subsequent work on Marxism and Politics, Capitalist Democracy in Britain, Divided Societies, and Socialism for a Sceptical Age. Nonetheless the primary emphasis in these respects falls on the dynamics of the interaction between the personal and the political rather than on Miliband's academic and theoretical contributions for their own sake. |
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Thus Newman tends to be less instructive about the substance of Miliband's theoretical arguments than his difficulties in writing them — the main exception being in the chapter devoted to Miliband's timely, challenging, and cathartic work on The State in Capitalist Society and the ensuing debate with Poulantzas; less instructive about the effectiveness of his many educational and political initiatives than the difficulties he had in following them through — with the partial exception of the continuing story of the Socialist Register; less instructive about the substance of his teaching than the disjunction between the time and energy Miliband invested in his courses and his low estimation of the value of a purely university career; and less instructive about the positive themes in his later theoretical work than the increasingly negative reactions he received from friends, colleagues, and, eventually, sons for their "dinosaur"-like qualities. In part this reflects the nature of Newman's source material. For, given that he had unparalleled access to personal material, he has chosen to focus on Miliband as mensch and Miliband as homo politicus rather than on the broader political context of Miliband's postwar political and intellectual practice. |
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Thus Newman's study is inevitably Miliband-centred. It presents not only Miliband's personal and political history from a position highly sympathetic to his subject, but also the broader history of the Left from a Milibandian perspective. This is both the enormous merit and the basic weakness of the book. As someone who never met Miliband, I finished this book with a much better sense of what made him "tick" personally, politically, and theoretically. But I was also left with the impression of an incestuous political world shaped by personalities more than broad macro-political trends — and of a political world in which people appear with whom one is already assumed to be familiar personally, politically, and intellectually (which may be hard for those readers who did not live through the same political events). On the one hand, then, we learn less about the nature and significance of the New Left than of Miliband's problematic personal, political, and theoretical relationship to some selected aspects of a complex, heterogeneous, wide-ranging, and changing movement. On the other hand, as a work on Miliband himself, the book is unique. Thus, although Newman seems to leave much unstated, he still succeeds in giving us a unique insight into Miliband's complex personality. So read this book to learn about Miliband, but be prepared to lose sight of the New Left forest for the trees planted, nurtured, or uprooted by Miliband. |
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Bob Jessop
University of Lancaster |
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