Absolute Ethical Life will be launched in both Sydney (on August 12) and in Melbourne (August 19). For more details or to RSVP follow the links above.

Michael Lazarus, Absolute Ethical Life: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx, Stanford University Press, 2025

Interpreting Marx anew as an ethical thinker, Absolute Ethical Life provides crucial resources for understanding how freedom and rational agency are impacted by a social world formed by value under capitalism.

Lazarus situates Marx within a shared tradition of ethical inquiry, placing him in dialogue with Aristotle and Hegel. Lazarus traces the ethical and political dimensions of Marx’s work missed by Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre, two of the most profound critics of modern politics and ethics. Ultimately, the book claims that Marx’s value-form theory is both a continuation of Aristotelian and Hegelian themes and at the same time his most distinctive theoretical achievement.

In this normative interpretation of Marx, Lazarus integrates recent moral philosophy with a historically specific analysis of capitalism as a social form of life. With a robust critique of capitalism derived from the determinations of what Marx calls the “form of value,” Lazarus argues for an ethical life beyond capital.

Michael Lazarus is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute. Until recently, he was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at Yale University. He works across political theory, moral philosophy and political theory. His writing has appeared in Constellations, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Thesis Eleven, Historical Materialism and critical theory publications. He has an article on Smith and Hegel on poverty forthcoming in the Cambridge Journal of Economics. His popular writing has been published in places including The Saturday Paper, Jacobin and The Conversation. His next book project focuses on the idea of value in Smith and Hegel.