Eden and Cedar Paul are known mainly to historians of this period as translators. However, they also figure in the mediation of certain aspects of the Russian Revolution though their involvement in the Plebs League and their attempt to develop a notion of workers’ education. The Pauls therefore offer an example of the translator as something much more than a medium supposed to convey an otherwise little-known culture. Rather, they are a fascinating example of translation as intervention with the translator as political agent. Although they were committed to workers’ education before 1917, they took inspiration from Proletcult and from the educational reforms of Anatoly Lunacharsky, and combined this interest with the concepts of progressive education, psychoanalysis, Bergsonian vitalism and Charles Badouin's theory of suggestion. As remarkable as this combination of elements may seem for the time, the Pauls were only partly able to work through the implications of their own lines of thought, and the pattern of their thinking has to be construed from some of their decisions as to which texts to translate, as well as from their own writings.

Eden Paul and his wife Cedar (née Gertrude Davenport) were friends of Beatrice Webb, who described Cedar as an associate of Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin, and were committed to the revolutionary Left. Eden was the son of the publisher Kegan Paul, was a qualified medical doctor and long-standing friend of the Webbs, who had suddenly converted to communism. Eden and Cedar's usually joint translations are numerous and include several works of political theory, such as Robert Michels’ Political Parties (1915), Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni Preobrazhensky's ABC of Communism (1922), and Rosa Luxemburg's Letters from Prison (1923), alongside numerous works on psychology and education, including A Young Girl's Diary (1921) with a preface by Sigmund Freud, and Pierre Janet's Psychological Healing (1925). The wide range of their translations also includes works by Romain Rolland, Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Walter Rathenau and René Marchand.

The Pauls were members of the Plebs League, a Marxist breakaway group at Ruskin College in Oxford. Ruskin was independent of Oxford University, mainly to make the point that it was dedicated to the education of working-class men who would otherwise have no access to higher education.