The Intellectual History of Worker Education: An Interview with Edward Baring – Journal of the History of Ideas blog

Edward Baring is an intellectual historian of twentieth-century Europe and the Associate Professor of History and Human Values at Princeton University. He is the author of The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2019). His new book, Vulgar Marxism: Revolutionary Politics and the Dilemmas of Worker Education, 1891–1931 (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming December 2025), explores the history of twentieth-century Marxist thought through the lens of worker education. The first part of the book describes the educational infrastructure built by the German Social Democratic Party from 1880 to 1914. Baring then shows how prominent intellectuals of the interwar period—Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Hendrik de Man, Antonio Gramsci, and José Carlos Mariátegui—situated their work in relation to worker education and the failure of European revolutions in 1918. Baring discussed his forthcoming book with Sam Franz and Véronique Mickisch for the JHI Blog.