by Jackson Herndon

Michael Lazarus is a Lecturer in Political Theory in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. He previously served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University and as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute. He completed his PhD in Politics at Monash University. Jackson Herndon interviewed him about his new book, Absolute Ethical Life: Aristotle, Hegel, and Marx (Stanford University Press, 2025), in which he argues that Marx premised his critique of political economy upon a resolutely ethical critique of capitalist social relations shaped deeply by Marx’s Aristotelian and Hegelian inheritances. Lazarus weaves an account of this influence together with a critical exegesis of Hannah Arendt’s and Alasdair MacIntyre’s earlier efforts to grapple with the ethical dimension of Marx’s thought. In the process, Lazarus traces this problematic’s significance to the present, foregrounding its salience to tendencies in Marxist thought as well as the conditions of radical politics. The JHI Blog presents an edited transcript of his discussion with Jackson Herndon.

Jackson Herndon: You understand Marx’s account of the value-form as not only a strictly economic description of capital’s self-expansion via the productive process but also as a totalizing, distinct social relation. So, following from the contributions of the Neue Marx-Lektüre tradition’s emphasis on understanding the value relation, you argue that Marx, too, is best understood as a thinker of the social, concerned with the totality of operative concepts through which capitalism constitutes its particular form of human relationality. Yet you do more than extend the critique of political economy to a critique of social forms, arguing that Marx’s critique transcends the purely negative and in fact contains an adumbrated normative vision of sociality and freedom. Can you elaborate on how this expanded understanding of value as a social relation opens up a positive mode of critique?

Michael Lazarus: What gives Marx’s version of immanent critique purchase is an idea of what human life and social life could be. For the negative critique of capitalist society to get off the ground, Marx understands that there must be a sense of what is wrong with the form of sociality value produces and reproduces—that is, how real abstractions and economic processes rule over and form social life. For this critique to have any purchase, there needs to be some sense that it could be otherwise. But Marx’s political writings are also positive. His conception of revolutionary politics is not separate from but deeply embedded in Capital, the project of the critique of political economy. While I think there are deep normative resources in Marx’s work, he often gestures towards them rather than fully sketching them out, even though he makes these gestures in very important places. For instance, Capital’s first chapter, an intricately layered criticism of efforts to theorize commodity society at its most abstract level, leads Marx to discuss the possibility of rational production: a society of associated producers. Here, there’s a sense of a positive vision that exists within and emerges from criticism. Marx can only make these types of pronouncements if he possesses a positive conception of what social life could be if developed from the potentials inherent in the way people live, socially cooperate, and so on—the negative must come with the positive.

JH: If Marx’s normative vision of human sociality is not necessarily an account of how, specifically, a society ought to be politically and economically organized, you argue that he nevertheless makes a claim on what it means to be free and to live a good life. What does it mean for this normative vision of communist sociality to be ethical, and not merely moral? How does that distinguish your reading of Marx from a more strictly economic interpretation of Capital?

ML: I approach the question of human freedom by taking Marx’s critique of economic categories seriously. Throughout Capital, Marx often appears to critique purely economic categories, but he aims to illustrate that in capitalist society, economic life dominates political and social life as a whole. Furthermore, a conception of politics drives Marx’s understanding of this domination; his critique must lead in a political direction, such that alternative modes of organizing economic life also necessarily function as modes of organizing human social relations.

Marx’s descriptions of a positive, alternative vision of cooperation frequently employ Aristotelian modes of expression. Existing theories of the value-form adeptly articulate how Marx critiques economic categories, but I additionally consider Marx’s Aristotelian background to be a central element of Marx’s critique of capitalism—one that relies upon, builds upon, and strengthens a view of why human beings are social beings. By understanding the Aristotelian character of Marx’s social ontology, it becomes possible to critique labor under capitalism in terms of its historical specificity. Marx’s Aristotelianism does not tie him to a transhistorical or romantic account of labor, but rather allows him to provide an account of what makes human labor different from, say, the bee or the beaver.

I argue that this critique is “ethical” and not merely “moral” for two reasons, both informed by my reading of Hegel. First, Hegel makes a crucial distinction between morality and ethics. He criticizes the “moral point of view” (Philosophy of Right, §135) as individualistic and abstract—removed from the concrete connection to social life that the justification of normative action requires. Hegel forms his argument in opposition to Kant’s attempt to justify morality through the categorical imperative. Hegel does not, of course, deny individual subjectivity’s importance altogether, but he sees it as only one moment within normative action. For Hegel, individual subjectivity must connect to social life in a way that Kant rules out. This distinction leads to the second way I follow Hegel. He locates normativity in the institutions of social life: the family, work and political community. Ethical life, for Hegel, is bound up with the rationality of institutions, that is, whether they allow the good life to be lived. Using Hegel’s terms enables us to consider communism as a theory of ethical life. For Marx, the good life requires rational institutions.

JH: You demonstrate the impact of Marx’s sustained engagement with Aristotle’s understanding of ethics as flourishing (eudaimonia) and Hegel’s understanding of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) as the freedom enabled by mutual recognition, but you argue that Marx transcends both. To focus on Aristotle, how does Marx’s vision of ethical life transcend the limits of the classical polis and Aristotle’s emphasis on the division between production (poiesis, a sort of means) and action (praxis, a higher end in and of itself)?

ML: There is clearly an Aristotelian element in the earlier example we discussed from Capital’s first chapter. There, Marx thinks about social cooperation as a form of reasoning that depends on the social character of human beings. This understanding also appears in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and, of course, throughout his political writings. When he talks about workers gathering together and organizing, he clearly believes that the kinds of practices involved in these activities—both overtly political tasks and life’s normative practices, like making and sharing food—allow for particular types of reasoning. These are claims that we can understand in Aristotelian terms.

I take it that Marx critically adopts an Aristotelian idea of praxis so as to argue that unalienated labor is an end in itself, since it entails the rational practices and creativity of free human activity. However, Marx rejects Aristotle’s distinction between praxis and production. Marx thinks that this distinction reflects Aristotle’s own prejudices as a product of a particular type of slaveholding class society. Aristotle’s conceptual division of production and action reflected their practical separation in the division of labor, whereas Marx understands labor as the unity of production and practice. One of the goals of Marx’s political writings is to show how this dualism falls apart.    

Like Hegel, Marx clearly appreciates the thickness of ethical life in the classical polis but considers any attempt to return to it childish, as he says in the Grundrisse. A politics cannot be based on romantic reflections of the past, despite what we can appreciate about ancient, now unavailable, forms of freedom. It is precisely their distance from us that Marx finds instructive. By considering the close relationship between politics and ethics for the Athenians, Marx thinks that we can imagine a form of freedom beyond the formal equality of capitalism. Marx uses Aristotle to illuminate the historical specificity of value in the modern world.

JH: You emphasize Hegel’s insistence that the struggle for mutual recognition unfolds in distinctly historical, political terms, contrasting it with Aristotle’s abstract ideal of the human “natural being” by which various modes of slavery and lordship have been historically articulated. Freedom thus appears through the real categories through which contemporary modes of sociality are enacted. If Marx’s vision of ethical life inherits this simultaneously normative yet historical character, what precisely distinguishes Marx from Hegel and, in turn, both from Aristotle?

ML: In many ways Hegel is a very good Aristotelian, but he notes the huge impact of slavery on Aristotle’s thought. As a result, Hegel thinks that Aristotle was unable not only to see what freedom would consist of, but also to come to a truly historical vision of what it would mean to be a free human being. Though Aristotle establishes rich resources for suggesting how and why a human being could be free, an emancipatory critique is needed, for example, to overcome his understanding of the rational being as an exclusively male figure. Hegel deeply appreciates Aristotle’s idea of rationality and the collective rationality of a polity despite pointing out that the forms of social organization he conceived were rooted within historically specific forms of unfreedom, the historicization of which takes the form of contradiction and overcoming.      Hegel reflects upon the way in which different philosophers have attempted to think this freedom as it expanded from the freedom of one authority, to the freedom of an elite few, and eventually to the freedom of all: the modern idea of universal freedom.

In terms of the relationship between Hegel and Marx, I want to step away from the reductive insistence on a great philosophical battle between “idealism and materialism.” Often these accounts, especially by Marxists, categorize these terms crudely. As it usually goes, proper materialism concerns the “real world,” while idealism imagines that ideas form the world. The dualism that underlies this account does great damage to understanding either Hegel or Marx in isolation, let alone their relationship and the problematic emerging from it. Regardless, there’s something much more interesting about Hegel’s project. The challenge of the Philosophy of Right is to think the world in thought—to be both “idealist” and “materialist” and neither. The journey of the shapes of consciousness that Hegel sets out in the Phenomenology of Spirit and throughout his work attempts to think not just the logic of the world we live in, but its material practices as well.

As I see it, Marx shares this motivation. I think Hegel’s view of the state’s role in world history and his idea of the market’s rationality are wrong-footed and internally contradictory, but what is relevant here is that the justifications that Hegel outlines for these institutions fail to satisfy his own standard of rationality. One can appreciate both Hegel’s dialectical argument and his argument for the rationality of institutions without resorting to the typical Marxist division, starting from Engels, between the two, which attempts to preserve the dialectic but make it “materialist,” removing the “bad Hegelian” residue. For this reason, I provide a highly synthetic account of the relationship between Marx and Hegel but make explicit that Marx is very critical of where he sees The Philosophy of Right’s account of institutions going.

To summarize, it’s essential to emphasize that Hegel always understood his project to be a normative one. He considered it impossible to present a logical argument separately from a normative one. Marx is a good German Idealist in this sense as well. He takes this to be the case, too, even though Hegel’s language and mode of argumentation undergo changes in Marx’s hands. My project in Absolute Ethical Life is to show how the earliest stage of Marx’s argument, the first chapter of Capital, sets up his argument by including these parameters. The presence of Aristotle and Hegel there is not accidental; they are vital to the kind of normative exposition Marx is offering.

JH: In Part I, you take up Hannah Arendt’s and Alasdair MacIntyre’s respective critiques of Marx in The Human Condition and After Virtue in a simultaneously generous yet critical manner, amplifying their insights and shortcomings to draw out the distinctiveness of Marx’s vision of ethical life. You argue that both mistakenly identify a form of fatally modernist productivism in Marx. For Arendt, this stems from an excessive debt to the Aristotelian-Hegelian tradition, while for MacIntyre a surfeit of Aristotle precipitates an affirmation of Enlightenment individualism. As you put it, “For Arendt, with the loss of our political lives, ethics means nothing. For MacIntyre, with the loss of our ethical lives, politics means nothing” (120). Let’s begin with Arendt. You argue that she misunderstands Marx’s concept of freedom as circumscribed to the realm of liberation from biological necessity. Yet if Arendt errs here, her critique nevertheless prompts us to reconsider the relationship between the organization of economic activity and the “extra-economic” political sphere. How do you understand Marx’s efforts to transcend this binary? What form of political life does Marx posit instead?

ML: The things that annoy Arendt are aspects that I think are important to grasp Marx’s argument. She puts the question of Marx as a thinker of freedom front and center and tries to come to terms with what this claim means for political action. But once she identifies what she takes as Marx’s prioritization for production (poiesis) over action (praxis), it becomes very difficult for her to see the movement in Marx’s thinking about these two categories. Arendt focuses on the passage from the so-called “German Ideology” manuscripts in which Marx and Engels speak of the hunter, fisher, herder, and critical critic. She takes this to mean that communism is less utopian and more aristocratic, resembling the Greek polis, where the slaves worked so that citizens could idle. Her worry is not that work is excluded from public life, but she thinks Marx excludes politics from his vision of communism. Arendt argues that Marx glorifies labor, which reduces politics to biological necessity. Arendt’s response is to affirm the division between production and action in Aristotle in the other direction; she suggests that this is what has been lost in modern politics. Marx remains traditionalist to her since he reduces life to labor and can not think human freedom apart from it.

However, for Arendt, “labor,” “work,” and “action” need to be distinguished. Labor cannot enable human action as Marx sees it because it is tied to necessity. This really weakens her ability to conceive of political action. When she applies what she takes to be the lost promise of politics inspired by the Greek polis and applies it to events of her time—the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the German council movement, and the 1956 Hungarian revolution—she takes them to be examples of the division between production and action rather than as spaces where that binary is contested. Marx, as I read him, contests that division, instead showing how alienation prevents the worker (and capitalist, for that matter) from being able to engage in a type of collective, political life that emerges through meaningful social practices.

JH: In turning to Alasdair MacIntyre, you begin by excavating his complex yet deeply indebted relationship to Marx and Marxism, arguing that Marx remains a pivotal influence animating After Virtue’s critique of the Enlightenment dualism of “is” and “ought”—between knowing and acting in the world. However, you conclude that MacIntyre himself fails to chart a concept of the virtues suitable to contemporary political life. The critical absence here seems to be a claim on the universal: the possibility of transforming local modes of ethical practices and institutions into scalar struggles aimed at a more just life for all. Could you elaborate more on your understanding of why absolute ethical life must be distinctly modern, shirking neither the distinctive universality nor individualism of our epoch?

ML: MacIntyre’s critique of modern morality is that it has lost coherence as the result of a process of fragmentation that started with the Enlightenment and the capitalist transformation of the modern world. He founds this critique in the limitations of individualistic notions of morality, whether Kantian or utilitarian. The central promise of After Virtue is a critique of these dualistic modes of thinking about ethics which, according to MacIntyre, become a sort of emotivism: morality as a virtue of personal choice rather than as something lived through the practices of collective life.

I agree with him that the practices of collective life he identifies are crucial to what ethics means. I also share his skepticism towards the modern state. However, following the sort of universalism that Hegel and Marx offer, I put pressure on MacIntyre’s idea of the political, which collapses into a critique of any form of universal action. To use Hegel’s language, Macintyre’s position maintains the particular as the crucial moment to resist the dangers of the universal and individual, but his critique would be much more persuasive if he were able to show the mediation between all three categories.

For instance, the local community certainly has a role in a Hegelian-Marxist idea of what kinds of practices a political community would need—the kind of solidarity required for social struggle and connection. But the political community has to go beyond the local community; it cannot simply act as a refuge against the bad universal but must enable the universal to be properly ethical, to be made meaningful through the participation of the particular in the concrete whole. Without an account of universal politics akin to Hegel’s and a much stronger account of capital as a social form, like that of Marx, the account fails.

What would a fuller picture look like, then? Well, I think that Hegel sets up a convincing infrastructure of the mediations of ethical life in terms of relationships of recognition, from the family, to labor, and to the institutions of the political community. I’m not interested in the status quo view of these institutions but in the fact that an account of these three aspects of social life is necessary for conceiving meaningful social roles in a post-capitalist society. As I see it, freedom must be articulated within institutional forms. There is no way to be free without social life, and this requires an account of practices and institutions. Hegel insists that social roles and institutions are always in the same frame when thinking about freedom. I argue that we should understand Marx’s idea of ethics as a continuation of this thought.

JL: In your critique of Arendt’s Darwinian-Hegelian reading of Marx (as well as in Chapter 5), you center the concept of species-being, insisting upon its continued significance to Marx’s mature body of work. Critically, you argue that it is through species-being that the economic and organizational dimension of the communist critique is united with its political dimension. If human social needs are historically constituted, the species-being concept in and of itself poses a normative critique: all forms of organized economic activity are ends that posit normative, historically specific social ontologies. What do you see as the political significance of reframing the species-being concept as an ethico-political question in our contemporary conjecture?

ML: This aspect of Marx’s thinking has not featured strongly in the most interesting, recent work on Capital and its philosophical elements. The hesitancy has been that any idea of social ontology must imply some sort of dubious, transhistorical argument that any form-specific discussion of value would have to abandon. I see this binary as a destructive one, not just because it becomes hard to read the passages in which Marx directly invokes ideas of species-being, which remains consistent in his work, but because it eschews attempts to provide an account of what Marx takes a human life to be and why he finds the specific form of life under capital to be deficient. There is a normative rejection of the way in which human life is dominated by the logic of capital, which prevents us from cultivating the potential for a rational form of life. Marx forms this view from a critique of the alienation of labor, which he considers to be life-activity, because in rationally making and remaking our lives together, we can be free.

Species-being is not a romantic concept calling for a return to some earlier essence, but rather the idea of what human life could be based on whatit is to be a rational being. Marx articulates his idea of life through the ways we are both rational and historical beings. Through all his work, Marx takes labor to be a social form of practice that shows our historical nature. But, crucially, we’re also rational beings in ways that make us distinct from other forms of animal life. On the basis of this capacity, we can critique this form of life and analyze alienation, taking the potentialities of human life as our standpoint. Furthermore, that our practices are normative has implications not just on the ways we live our lives, implicitly, but on the types of explicit questions we ask ourselves: whether it’s about how we decide to reproduce family life, who does the care work, but also, say, the workplace, questions of industrial matters, whether you will go on strike, and so on.

JH: In the book’s introduction, you describe yourself as attempting to follow MacIntyre’s vision of “tradition-constituted inquiry,” arguing that our understanding of influence and intertextuality ought to be concerned with how the contributions of a certain thinker become both obstacles to and constitutive elements of another, as with Marx’s relationship to Aristotle and Hegel. In the latter half of the book, you offer us another example of this relationship in the form of Marx’s use of Robinson Crusoe. Can you talk a bit more about how you came to this approach to thinking about influence and intertextuality, as well as the significance of Robinson Crusoe for Marx?

ML: I wanted to consider the many references Marx makes in his writings to Robinson Crusoe as suggesting something more complicated than a simple, illustrative example of the myth of the bourgeois individual. Tracing the figure of Crusoe through Rousseau and Hegel, as well as his ‘prehistory’ in Hobbes and Locke, proved a helpful hermeneutic for thinking about Marx’s relationship to the history of political thought more broadly. It is a reminder that Marx’s critique of political economy should be understood as a contribution to the history of political thought. But his interpretation of the novel is strategic. He knows many of his readers would be familiar with Crusoe and that the story can help show the real history of capitalist social relations.

Crusoe claims the island on which he is shipwrecked as his own and captures a slave, “Man Friday.” He is a colonialist and slaveowner. In lectures, Hegel used the novel to explain the dialectic of mastery and servitude. Thinking through this novel helps frame how, in the latter half of Capital, Marx is engaged in a denaturalizing move, recounting how capital came into being dripping in blood. Robinson Crusoe helps illuminate these problems. Our capacity to understand the myth of the isolated producer suddenly stranded on an island relies on the reader’s implicit assumptions about the social form of capitalism. Based on the same assumptions, Crusoe imagines that they are making valuable commodities rather than simply objects for use while on the island. This helps clarify the distinction between concrete and abstract labor. Abstract labor is the kind that produces value through commodity exchange. Crusoe’s labor is concrete, but, despite his intentions, he cannot produce value. He might measure his labor using modern methods and hoard money, but he cannot make commodities. Despite Crusoe’s European heritage, he cannot exchange commodity values or produce value. Looking at the novel’s previous uses and its readership provides a broader sense of the purpose and theoretical significance of Marx’s frequent references to it.

JH: We’ve just spoken a bit about influence and intertextuality. In the same spirit, I’d like to conclude by asking about your hopes for the reception of your own book. How would you like to see your work become a contribution (or obstacle) in the thought of others?

ML: One explicit aim is to open up lines of dialogue between rigorous accounts of the value-form and studies of Marx’s social and political theory, especially as these concern the question of ethics, political freedom, and so on (which I find a very promising direction in recent Marx studies). One of the most important arguments in the book, of which I’m very curious to see the reception, is the claim that Marx’s ethical and political thought has to be understood through the prism of value and that this is Marx’s distinctive contribution to social theory. Furthermore, the concept of value is not just how Marx understands surplus extraction; it is crucial to his whole understanding of sociality. Otherwise, I hope this book might be a contribution towards political projects, too. The work comes from a commitment to political action and is an attempt to theorize it in explicitly normative terms. This theoretical project is part and parcel of a politics of human action and emancipation. Absolute ethical life demands a communist politics.

Jackson Herndon is a PhD student in History at New York University. He researches the intellectual history of Modern China through the Republican and Socialist eras.

Edited by Zac Endter

Featured image: [left to right] Line engraving of Aristotle by P. Fidanza after Raphael Sanzio; line engraving of G.W.F. Hegel by Lazarus Sichling after a lithograph by Julius L. Sebbers; and line engraving of Karl Marx by J. Robertson after a photograph by M. Wunder, 1871.