The Normativity of Marx’s Aristotelian-Hegelianism: An Interview with Michael Lazarus – JHI blog

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.