Paul Sweezy, 93; Marxist, economist, Harvard teacher
NEW YORK -- Paul Sweezy, a onetime economist at Harvard University who became a leading voice of Marxism during the Cold War, died Saturday in Larchmont, N.Y. He was 93.
Mr. Sweezy cofounded the Marxist journal The Monthly Review in 1949. He edited and wrote about 100 articles for the journal, which currently has a monthly circulation of about 7,000. Other contributors included Albert Einstein, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jean-Paul Sartre, Che Guevara, and Joan Robinson.
Mr. Sweezy wrote more than 20 books, including a well-known collaboration with Paul Baran, "Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order" (1966). Throughout his career, he argued that government and working people had to cooperate to overcome what he saw as capitalism's limitations.
Born in New York City, the son of a J.P. Morgan banker, Mr. Sweezy attended Philips Exeter Academy and Harvard University, where he was president of the Harvard Crimson.
While working on his doctorate at Harvard, Mr. Sweezy had as a mentor famed economist Joseph Schumpeter, the preeminent defender of free enterprise who lauded the "creative destruction" of vibrant capitalism. Their friendship deepened even as their economic viewpoints diverged.
As the Great Depression lingered, Mr. Sweezy became an advocate of greater government control of the economy. "I became convinced that mainstream economics of the kind I had been taught at Harvard had little to contribute toward understanding the major events and trends of the 20th century," he later wrote.
Schumpeter and Mr. Sweezy's debates became legendary in some circles at Harvard. One, titled "The Future of Capitalism" and held at a packed hall at the Littauer Center, was retold decades later in Newsweek by Nobel laureate and MIT professor Paul Samuelson, setting the scene as one "back in the days when giants walked the earth and Harvard Yard."
"Unfairly, the gods had given Paul Sweezy, along with a brilliant mind, a beautiful face and wit. With what William Buckley would desperately wish to see in the mirror, Sweezy laced the world," Samuelson wrote.
Samuelson called them "foxy Merlin" (Schumpeter) against Mr. Sweezy's "young Sir Galahad."
"The neat parrying and thrust . . . all made more pleasurable by the obvious affection that the two men had for each other despite the polar opposition of their views."
During World War II, Mr. Sweezy worked in the research department of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.
He later returned to Harvard as an instructor, but failed to secure a tenured position and left the university in 1946.
In the 1950s, during the height of McCarthyism, the New Hampshire attorney general accused Mr. Sweezy of subversive activities after he refused to turn over some lecture notes. The case ended up in the Supreme Court, which ruled in Mr. Sweezy's favor.
According to The New York Times, Mr. Sweezy leaves his first wife, Nancy, and his second wife, Zirel; three children, Samuel, Lybess and Martha; two stepchildren, Jeffrey and Jennifer Dowd; seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this obituary. 
