Co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies, George L. Mosse Program in History, and the Department of History.
In this talk, Edward Baring will examine the conditions that shaped the spread of Marxism around Europe and later the world in the first decades of the twentieth century. He argues that the project of mass worker education furnished an institutional and intellectual infrastructure that informed how Marxist theory was adapted to new contexts. Examining the rise of this educational project in the decades before World War I in Germany, Professor Baring uses it to re-read the work of Rosa Luxemburg, Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, and Antonio Gramsci. He will then turn to the early reception of Marxism outside of Europe, focusing on the work of José Carlos Mariátegui in Peru.
Edward Baring is Associate Professor of History and Human Values at Princeton University. He is the author of The Young Derrida (Cambridge, 2011), Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy (Harvard, 2011), and Vulgar Marxism: Revolutionary Politics and the Dilemmas of Worker Education (Chicago, forthcoming 2025).
