biography

Dr Marius S Ostrowski FRHistS FRSA is an ESRC Policy Fellow and Researcher at the Blavatnik School of Government. He is working with the 2024–25 Heywood Fellow, Lucy Smith, to explore the question of how government can be better at strategy, including the case for ‘national strategy’ to respond to the growing complexity and long-term nature of external challenges.

Marius is a social theorist, historian of ideas, and policy thought-leader, with over a decade of experience in academic and policy research. He was educated at the University of Oxford (BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics; MPhil in Political Theory; DPhil in Politics), and has held research fellowships at All Souls College, 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.

His research interests lie in the study of ideology and ideologies, focusing especially on how social contexts shape patterns of ordinary thinking and everyday behaviour. He also writes on the theory and history of social democracy, in particular its origins in interwar socialist reformist thought, and on progressive visions of European integration, including the prospects for a Europe-wide Universal Basic Income. He is the author of Left Unity: Manifesto for a Progressive Alliance (2020), Ideology (2022), and A Radical Bargain for Europe: Progressive Visions of a European Basic Income (with Dominic Afscharian, Viktoriia Muliavka, and Lukáš Siegel, 2024), as well as articles in Basic Income Studies, Contemporary European History, European Journal of Social Security, Historical Research, History of Political Thought, and Political Quarterly.

Marius’s recent work specialises in UK and European geostrategy, the role of skills in political economy, how to make democracies more resilient against social threats, and the ways society shapes how we think. Alongside his academic work, he was Head of Research for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Taxation, UK Parliament, as well as the founding Executive Director of the Lifelong Education Institute (London). He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Political Ideologies, and Convenor of the Progressive Historians Network supported by the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (Brussels) and the Renner Institut (Vienna).

Publications

Forthcoming

How We Think: Ten Ways Society Shapes Our Minds (Hodder & Stoughton, forthcoming 2026).

(with John-Erik Hansson) Bricolage in Intellectual History: A Modular Approach (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2025).

2024

(with Dominic Afscharian, Viktoriia Muliavka, and Lukáš Siegel) A Radical Bargain for Europe: Progressive Visions of a European Basic Income (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024).

Editorial: Ideology and the individual’, Journal of Political Ideologies 29(1) (2024), 1–25.

Making skills work: The path to solving the productivity crisis (City & Guilds and Lifelong Education Institute, 2024)

2023

Editorial: The ideological morphology of left–centre–right’, Journal of Political Ideologies 28(1) (2023), 1–15.

Europeanism: A historical view’, Contemporary European History 32(2) (2023), 287–304. Behavioural standards and learning outcomes in the English comprehensive school system (ResPublica, 2023)

Behaving to learn: Best practice lessons for the behavioural turn in English schools policy (ResPublica, 2023)

Hungry to learn: Lifelong Learning Pathways for the agri-food sector (Lifelong Education Institute, 2023).

2022

Ideology (Polity, 2022).

Editorial: Ideology studies and comparative political thought’, Journal of Political Ideologies 27(1) (2022), 1–10.

‘“Reform or revolution”, redux: Eduard Bernstein on the 1918–19 German Revolution’, Historical Research 95(268), 213–39 (2022).

(with Dominic Afscharian, Viktoriia Muliavka, and Lukáš Siegel) ‘The state of the UBI debate: Mapping the arguments for and against UBI’, Basic Income Studies 17 (2022).

From “noble patriotism” to the “republic of peoples”: Eduard Bernstein and the “national question” in Social Democracy’, History of Political Thought 43(3) (2022), 517–54.

(with Dominic Afscharian, Viktoriia Muliavka, and Lukáš Siegel) ‘Into the unknown: Empirical UBI trials as Social Europe’s risk insurance’, European Journal of Social Security 24(3) (2022).

(with Dominic Afscharian) Building Resilient Democracies: Challenges and Solutions across the Globe (Foundation for European Progressive Studies, 2022).

2021

Eduard Bernstein on Socialism Past and Present: Essays and Lectures on Ideology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

How (Not) to Form a Progressive Alliance: Lessons from the History of Left Cooperation’, The Political Quarterly 92(1) (2021), 23–31.

Social Democracy and “positive” foreign policy: the evolution of Eduard Bernstein’s international thought, 1914–1920’, History of Political Thought 42(3) (2021), 520–64.
                       
(with Dominic Afscharian, Viktoriia Muliavka, and Lukáš Siegel) The European Basic Income: Delivering on Social Europe (Foundation for European Progressive Studies, 2021).

2020

Left Unity: Manifesto for a Progressive Alliance (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).