Ralph Miliband: a review of his biography

Susan Watkins, on his classic 1979 essay on the role of the individual in history, ‘Political Action, Determinism and Contingency’:  


"Miliband pinpoints the inadequacy of classical Marxist thought on the question—its lazy reliance on a few famous formulations. He carefully unpicks the argument that, if not Napoleon—or Hitler, or Stalin—the times would have thrown up another similar figure, with the same results; and that the role of such ‘accidents’ as character can only be to accelerate or delay the general course of development. 


Instead, he urges, we need to conceptualize two different, but interrelated, historical processes: ‘transgenerational’ changes taking place over centuries—the shift from feudalism to capitalism, for instance—in which contingencies will indeed have only a minor effect;  and ‘generational’ history, at the level of decades, where individual interventions—Lenin in 1917—may have a decisive impact. 


In a transgenerational perspective, the Bolshevik revolution will ‘work its way into the tissue of time’: Lenin loses his importance. 


Yet if these long-range processes suffuse generational history, they do not negate it. For nobody really worries about the posterity of twenty generations hence and ‘there is enough “openness” in generational history to make the actions of individuals count, and their involvement meaningful’."




http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2438




http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=700&issue=129