Ralph Miliband's unexpected death last month leaves a void on the socialist left in Britain comparable to those left a generation earlier by the loss of Isaac Deutscher or in 1988 by that of Raymond Williams.
Born into a Polish Jewish immigrant family in Belgium, Ralph arrived in Britain as a refugee from fascism in 1940. At LSE in 1941-43 he studied under Harold Laski, who provided not just an important stimulus for the concern with problems of pluralism and the state that Ralph was to elaborate in books (notably The State in Capitalist Society) and essays throughout his life, but also something of a role model, as a "public intellectual', combining theoretical work with active involvement in a wide range of causes.
The last years of World War 2 Ralph spent in the British navy, one of a generation of young servicemen who passionately experienced the war as anti-fascist and wanted a better post-war order.
In the late forties and early fifties, back at LSE and by now a Marxist - albeit a singularly undogmatic and independent minded one - he was involved briefly in an attempt to provide a socialist think-tank for the Bevanite wing of the Labour Party. The experience and its failure, were to convince him once and for all that the Labour Partv could never be transformed from within into an instrument for socialist politics.
They were also to provide the emotional charge behind his first enduringly influential book Parliamentary Socialism, with its searing contempt for the servility of the labourist tradition.
Ralph remained a stubbornly independent figure, respected by - and relating, sympathetically but critically, to - socialists of different hues: Labour left, Communist, Trotskyist.
In the late fifties he was an editor of New Reasoner, although unlike most of his colleagues he had never been a CP member. Disagreeing with the decision to submerge the journal into the original New Left ticular where the group that took over NLR in 1963 might take it, he and John Saville founded Socialist Register in 1964 as 'the first of a series of annual volumes of socialist analysis and discussion': its thirtieth issue was being printed at the time of his death. The venture aimed to be 'committed' without narrowness; to "present a wide range of ideas and arguments'; to 'place some emphasis on events in Britain, but...give each volume a pronounced international character'.
The thirty volumes - with contributors ranging from Deutscher, Mandel, Liebman, Sedgwick, Lowy or Wood to Thompson, Kolakowski, Gorz, Benn, Magdoff, Gamble or
NO to bosses' racist Europe. IT'S NOT ONLY the traditional popular British hostility to the socialist •UILOOK welfare and 4-page pull-out dismantling of the welfare state and the building of an imperialist fortress.