Ralph Miliband

Who was Ralph Miliband?

Ralph Miliband was a Belgian-born British sociologist who was known as a prominent Marxist thinker. He has been described as "one of the best known academic Marxists of his generation", in this manner being compared with E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Perry Anderson.

Miliband was born in Belgium to working-class Polish Jewish immigrants. He fled to Britain in 1940 with his father, to avoid persecution when Nazi Germany invaded Belgium. Learning to speak English and enrolling at the London School of Economics, he became involved in left-wing politics and made a personal commitment to the cause of socialism at the grave of Karl Marx. After serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, he settled in London in 1946 and gained British citizenship in 1948.

By the 1960s, he was a prominent member of the New Left movement in Britain, which was critical of established Stalinist governments in the Soviet Union and Central Europe. He published several influential books on Marxist theory and the criticism of capitalism, such as Parliamentary Socialism and Marxism and Politics.