Early Influences
The progeny of wealthy business family, Murray Levin took his bachelor's degree at Harvard College, the family's undergraduate alma mater, after completing his military service with the United States Navy, serving as a military attaché' to a vice admiral during WWII. (Levin remained an excellent tennis player until late in life, and his primary duty was playing tennis with the admiral.
At Harvard, he was vastly influenced by the ideas of professor Louis Hartz. Hartz believed that the lack of feudalism in America had created a situation in which only one creed, liberalism (in the classic sense), could be tolerated. Since there was no tolerance for collectivist-oriented systems like socialism, if the U.S. economic system were ever again to suffer a castatrophic failure such as that of the Great Depression, the U.S. might be imperiled by the lack of a viable, legitimate alternative such as socialism. Hartz's theories, as articulated in his 1955 book The Liberal Tradition in America, served the basis for Levin's own ideas. Levin took his master's and Ph.D. degrees at Columbia University.
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