Paul Sweezy, 93; Scholar of Marxist Economics

The possibility that Paul Sweezy would one day be recognized as America's leading radical economist seemed unlikely early in his life: His father was a Wall Street investment banker whose income afforded Sweezy a privileged education at such bastions of the ruling class as Philips Exeter Academy and Harvard University. But his family wealth, he would later acknowledge, was what gave him the freedom to spurn capitalism and carve a path to its polar opposite.

Sweezy, 93, who died of congestive heart failure Feb. 28 in Larchmont, N.Y., went on to write "The Theory of Capitalist Development," an introduction to Marxist economics published in 1942 and still used in many college courses. At the end of that decade, he co-founded Monthly Review, the nation's most influential socialist journal for more than 50 years.

The man John Kenneth Galbraith called the "most noted American Marxist scholar" of the second half of the 20th century conceived the Monthly Review at a particularly inauspicious time -- the late 1940s, when McCarthyism was heating up the political climate. The first issue featured an article by Albert Einstein titled "Why Socialism?" Subsequent issues relied on equally well-known left-leaning authors, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Jean-Paul Sartre and Fidel Castro and Malcolm X.

Through more than 100 articles and 20 books, Sweezy became the defining voice of Marxism in North America, revered by several generations of leftists as "the living proof," The Nation's Daniel Singer once wrote, "that, even in the very heart of imperialism it was possible to resist and to stick to one's principles."

Sweezy, columnist Alexander Cockburn wrote in the current issue of Nation, "wasn't at all like Marx in demeanor. Karl was hairy, bohemian and cantankerous, whereas Paul, godlike in his good looks, radiated an amiable and dignified calm.... Reading Marx, you feel you're getting to the truth of the matter, and it was the same with Sweezy. He wrote and taught with extraordinary clarity."

Born in New York City, Sweezy was the youngest of three sons of Everett B. Sweezy, who started as a sweeper in a local bank but rose to the position of vice president of First National Bank of New York, and Caroline Wilson, a member of the first graduating class at Baltimore's Goucher College.