Anson Gilbert Rabinbach (June 2, 1945 – February 2, 2025) was an American historian of modern Europe and the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University.

[7] His father Gabriel was engaged in the German Revolution of 1918–19, briefly lived in Birobidzhan (the autonomous Jewish region of the Soviet Union), and upon immigrating to the United States was associated with the Yiddish-language communist newspaper Morgen Freiheit.

"[15] Nazi culture and ideology, he held, were thus "flexible enough to allow for a significant degree of plasticity and ambiguity without challenging the central precepts of the movement and the regime.

[18] This interest culminated in Rabinbach's 900-page The Third Reich Sourcebook (2013) co-edited with Sander Gilman, which covered almost all aspects of society in Nazi Germany, from the cult of the leader and racial theory, to antisemitism and sexuality, to industrial policy and the use of mass media.

Rabinbach showed that the idea that human power was converted into work like an engine significantly influenced both capitalist and socialist utopian ideologies, as well as research into labor science and industrial psychology.

The historian Martin Jay called this work "a classic of cultural studies" that "revealed for the first time the importance of the late-19th-century European obsession with the laboring body and its vicissitudes.

[22] Rabinbach's 2018 follow-up book The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor traced the decline of the utopian idea of "man as machine" after 1945 and explored its afterimages in an economy increasingly determined by knowledge and computers.

In their introduction to the issue, David Bathrick and Andreas Huyssen note Rabinbach's "compelling... staging of texts and debates written by or involving public intellectuals that have arisen in moments of crisis, catastrophe, or apocalypse," including his seminal writings on Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Martin Heidegger, Max Horkheimer, Karl Jaspers, and Raphael Lemkin.

"[27] Rabinbach's late work employed methods of conceptual history inspired by Reinhart Koselleck and applied them to twentieth-century concepts including totalitarianism, antifascism, and genocide.

"[28] In contrast to the open-ended, utopian horizon of expectation theorized by Koselleck in the modern Sattelzeit, these Cold War concepts, shaped by the catastrophic events of the twentieth century, expressed neither futurity nor acceleration but dystopia and deceleration.

Rabinbach was the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation,[29] the National Endowment for the Humanities,[30] the Fulbright Program (as a visiting professor at Smolny College in St. Petersburg, Russia),[31] and the American Academy in Berlin.