Carl Grünberg (10 February 1861 – 2 February 1940) was a German-Austrian Marxist philosopher of law and history.

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Born in Focșani, Romania, into a Jewish-Bessarabia German family, Grünberg studied law in Strasbourg and worked as an advocate. Later he studied and taught political economy in Vienna. Among his academic teachers were Gustav Schmoller in Strasbourg and Lorenz von Stein and Anton Menger in Vienna. In 1894, he became academic reader for political law and economy at the University of Vienna.

Carl Grünberg was the father^[1] of Austromarxism. Among his students were Max Adler, Friedrich Adler, Otto Bauer, Rudolf Hilferding and Karl Renner. In 1912 he received the chair for history of economy at the University of Vienna against strong opposition.

In 1924 he became the first director of the Institute for Social Research, later known as the Frankfurt School.^[2] He established and edited a journal of labour and socialist history, the Zeitschrift für Social- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte (1893) and the Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der sozialen Bewegung (1911), a journal that is known today as the Grünberg-Archiv (Archive for the History of Socialism and the Workers' Movement). Under his leadership the institute worked closely with the Marx–Engels Institute in Moscow. After having suffered from a stroke, he retired in 1929 and left the Institute to Max Horkheimer. In 1931 he became an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.^[3]

• Die Bauernbefreiung: Und die Auflösung des Gutsherrlich-Bäuerlichen Verhältnisses in Böhmen, Mähren und Schlesien (Leipzig 1893)
• Sozialismus, Kommunismus, Anarchismus (Jena 1897)
• Studien zur österreichischen Agrargeschichte (Leipzig 1901)