Marius Ostrowski

Dr Marius Ostrowski FRHistS FRSA was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1988. He is an award-winning social researcher and policy thought-leader with over 15 years of experience in universities and think tanks. He has built up a portfolio career, moving from being a political theorist in Oxford to a historian in Florence, then leading a new education thinktank in London – and back to Oxford as a strategy and systems analyst.

Marius is a Senior Research Fellow at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. He was educated at the University of Oxford, taking a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (2007–10), an MPhil in Political Theory (2010–12), and a DPhil in Politics (2012–17). He has held research fellowships at All Souls College and the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford; the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute, Florence; and the Centre for Research into Ideas and the Study of Political Ideologies, University of Nottingham.

Marius specialises in the study of ideologies, and his work explores how ideas and ideologies emerge, gain influence, and shape the systems in which we live and act. He has published over 30 articles, books, and policy reports on a wide range of topics, from the theory of social democracy to the history of the Weimar Republic, from UK national strategy to the birth of the European Union, from the political economy of skills to how we can make democracies more resilient against the threats posed by the current polycrisis.

His books include Left Unity (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020), in which he argues for greater cooperation between the progressive forces in society; Ideology (Polity, 2022), which develops a ‘social-morphological’ approach to understanding how ideology shapes our everyday lives; and A Radical Bargain for Europe (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), in which he sets out several alternative visions for a Europe-wide universal basic income.

Since 2017, Marius has also led a multi-year project of publishing the collected writings of the foundational German social-democratic thinker Eduard Bernstein, translated into English for the first time (with Palgrave Macmillan). The series so far comprises three volumes: Eduard Bernstein on Social Democracy and International Politics (2018); Eduard Bernstein on the German Revolution (2019); and Eduard Bernstein on Socialism Past and Present (2021). A fourth volume, Eduard Bernstein on Trade Unionism and the Mass Strike, is forthcoming in 2027.

Marius’s most recent book, How We Think: Ten Thinker-Types to Understand Ourselves and Those Around Us (Hodder Press, 2026), explores how our social experiences become reflected in our patterns of ordinary thinking.