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Michael Lazarus' 'Absolute Ethical Life: Aristotle, Hegel

When: Thursday, April 30, 2026, 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Where: Room 313, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road London E1 4NS

Absolute ethical life cover. An oil painting of a woman working in a factory.Join us for a discussion of Michael Lazarus' new book 'Absolute Ethical Life: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx' published by Stanford University Press in 2025. Karl Marx gave us not just a critique of the political economy of capital but a way of confronting the impoverished ethical quality of life we face under capitalism. 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, with consequences for philosophy today. Michael Lazarus situates Marx within a shared tradition of ethical inquiry, placing him in close 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. He challenges contemporary political and economic theory to insist that any conception of modern life needs to account for capitalism. 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.

Speaker: Michael Lazarus is Lecturer in Political Theory in the Department of Political Economy at King's College London, having previously held positions as Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University and Deakin University Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute.

Commentator: Fernando Quintana is a PhD Student at Queen Mary University of London. His research deals with the withering away of law thesis as formulated by the Soviet Jurist Evgeny Pashukanis and the subsequent debate within Marxist Legal Theory.

This event is organised by the Centre for the Critique of Law and Society (CCLAS).

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