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Michael Lazarus, "Absolute Ethical Life: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx" (Stanford UP, 2025)
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Dr. Michael Lazarus
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Mortaza Hajizadeh
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Mortaza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory and Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Michael Lazarus about a recent book that he has published with Stanford University Press, a very topical book. The book is called Absolute Ethical Aristotle, Hegel and Marx. And it just came out a couple of months ago, if I'm not mistaken. And Michael Lazarus is a lecturer in political theory at King College in London. Michael, welcome to New Books Network.
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Dr. Michael Lazarus
Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here and talking about the book.
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Mortaza Hajizadeh
Before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself, tell us about your field of expertise and more importantly, why you decided to write this book. What was the story of the inception of the book.
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Dr. Michael Lazarus
Thank you. So I'm a political theorist, very interested in questions of the intersection between political economy, moral philosophy and political thought, broadly construed. So this book tries to fuse those different pursuits in its own one. So it tries to track Marx's critique of political economy and situated within debates in normative moral theory and the history of political thought. In terms of how the book came about, worth giving some sense of the background and how I came to these topics. So I became very interested in the critique of capitalism and Marx's critique of capitalism in particular as a result of the Occupy movement. At this point I was studying at Sussex University, which has a kind of fairly radical background, but I was studying philosophy and I was reading quite a bit of Plato in some way that these kind of interests fed into the background of the book too. Both a kind of sense of how the ancient world might help us understand elements of today, but also a relationship between the ancient political theory and modern present as well. So the world kind of came out of that conjuncture. So it has a background to radical political action. But it also came to be as a frustration with attempts to come to terms with the role of ethics in Marxists thought from both academic and activist circles. So as far as I take it, the existing academic literature often focused on very semantic issues in terms of Marx and ethics. So there's a kind of focus on the Marx was a kind of a moral theorist or whether to what extent he used terms like exploitation, whether they had a moral meaning in particular. And a lot of these accounts don't pay much attention to Marx's critique of political economy in particular his idea of value. And a lot focus on the critique of bourgeois morality that Marx focuses on in the manuscripts, which are typically called the German ideology. It's in the middle 1840s. So I was going to be interested in how reading Marx's work, his later work, but then sort of connecting it to the earlier ideas of alienation could fill out, could make a deeper and more persuasive idea of ethics in Marxist thought. So on that level I wanted to kind of show the influence of Marxist philosophical influences to that concept of value, in particular Marx's Aristotelian and Hegelian background and show that Marx's critique of political economy has normative importance. There's a kind of academic partly and the academic background. But I also saw that there was an issue in sometimes the way that italk activists to be fairly dismissive of talking about Marx and ethics and fairly dismissive of the Idea that they were making explicit normative claims out of political action. So they found activists often make appeals to normative language consistently. It's one of the ways in which activists can organize. But the idea that that could be some kind of ethical project was treated fairly suspiciously. So I took it that the notion of ethics was fairly central in Marx's critique of capitalism, a vital part of his thought, despite there being some hesitancy from both the experience that I was kind of finding in the type of political commitments that I had, but also in some of the academic discussion as well. So that's kind of the background to the book. Thanks.
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Mortaza Hajizadeh
Yeah, that's quite nice. What I really like about the book, and you also mentioned that in your introduction, was that practical, I mean, the activism, political activism, especially these days, and how these Marxist ideas, or let's say ideas about ethical often track with political actors. And we'll get to talk about some of these things. Can you just very briefly talk about the title of the book, Ethical Life. It's an expression that Hegel used. But what do you mean by absolute ethical life? If we could just briefly talk about the titan of why you chose these three thinkers, and then I'll ask you some more questions about the content specifically. Interested again, Absolute ethical life, what do you mean by that? And why did you choose these three thinkers, Aristotle, Hegel and Marx.
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Dr. Michael Lazarus
Thanks. So the title Absolute Ethical Life is from Hegel's work in Hegel's mature political thought, an idea of ethical life in his Philosophy of Variation. But in his earlier work, in one of his texts from almost 20 years before, 15 years before, makes a distinction in that work between relative ethical life and absolute ethical life. And part of the distinction he makes there is to associate one with a kind of individual morality and absolute ethical life to mean a much wider, broader concept that involves different institutional forms. And that distinction is taken up by one philosopher that I'm very influenced by, Gillian Rose, in her 1981 book Hegel Conscious Sociology. And she tries to radicalize that distinction. And she uses the distinction to suggest that it helps articulate a critique of bourgeois property relations that Hegel sets out. So in some ways I'm using that distinction to kind of show the type of radical Hegel that possible. But it's also to suggest that there's something within Hegel's thought that often Marx is very suspicious of the idea of the absolute. Take it to be a kind of metaphysical or idealistic hang up. Whereas the book and my reading, Hegel in general tries to put Pressure on this and show that Hegel's idea of the absolute is very helpful way for Marxists to think about capitalism. And there's no need to try to take the kind of rational kernel of Hegel's thought and then critique the system. But there's ways in which Hegel's or Hegel's thought, in particular the dialectic and the system, the idea of the absolute can be. Can be carried into understanding Marx in a helpful and productive way, which I try to argue throughout the book. So part of the way that the connection that I try to draw between these three thinkers is a way of thinking about ethical life as a shared tradition between Aristotle, Hegel and Marx, that each thinker is committed to an idea of human flourishing and the good of shared collective practices. They have different ways of articulating it, different historical forms and political forms in which they think that kind of rationality and human flourishing is capable of being produced by. But each is committed to it in general. And I take it that with that kind of through line, a way of thinking about human activity, human action, ethics and politics can be teased out. There's a lot shared between the thinkers, that there's a dialogue that continues just to emerge between them. Not just because Marx is so heavily influenced by Hegel and Aristotle, but that it opens up a way to read some of the most difficult passages in a work like Capital, where he first chapter draws an Aristotle's Nicomedian ethics. It's not just an accident. This is very carefully planned out in many versions of the chapter which show that Marx is using Aristotle not just to kind of counterpose a difference between modernity and the ancient world, but to show the value of Aristotle. And at the same time, the kind of Hegelian logic that makes a work like capital seem very difficult is the result of a real commitment to the idea that abstraction and philosophical thinking has normative repercussions, dimensions and importance. So I'm sure we'll be able to build on some of these points as we go along in our discussion. But some preliminary remarks on that connection.
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Mortaza Hajizadeh
It was a good way of bringing these. I mean, defining this, what you mean by absolute and relative, because it's also relevant to the question that I have next, which is about Marx's idea of ethical life. In your introduction, you talk about how his ideas of ethical love kind of challenges the way we view economic system or capitalism. And in your book, you also, a lot of people unfortunately, have this misconception that capitalism is only an economic system. But you argue that no, it is a form of life. It's not really only an economic system. Again, Marx's idea of ethical life helps us understand, better understand capitalism as a form of life or way of life. Can you explain that? How is it ideopetical life makes us rethink capitalism as something more than an economic system.
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Dr. Michael Lazarus
Great, thank you. Yeah. So many commentators accuse Marx of being a deterministic or a communistic thinker and suggest he's just thinking about the economy. Right. So Capital's often seen as this kind of fairly boring, dry book that's just about economic laws of motion or whatever. But what I'm trying to do with this idea of capitalism as a form of life is to show the Marxist critique of capitalism is precisely that the economic comes to dominate political and social life. So the Marx is foremost a critic of economic logic. Right. So the capitalism is not just kind of derarifying the idea of the economic. It's to show that the economic is merely a constellation of different social relations which then come to shape our form of life in general and has particular types of logics, ways that it is produced and reproduced. The Marx is interested in putting pressure on, showing the way that they connect together. So in reconstructing Marx's argument about capital, it pushes beyond simply an idea of capital as an economic term, but shows the way in which capital has effects world side, just the domain of the realm of production. So form of life, or trying to grasp capitalism as a form of life, is a way to grasp social totality. And here I can draw and influenced by other ways of trying to conceive of this, from George Lukas to Rahu Yeghi. But certainly this is the kind of the nub of that idea. Then to think about capitalism as a form of life is an ability to critique economic ways of thinking and the domination of the economic over the political.
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Mortaza Hajizadeh
What I liked about your book is that despite the fact that in the title you only mentioned three thinkers, but you do rely on other thinkers to explore these ideas. And one of them is Hannah Arnett. And you sort of compare her ideas with Marx's idea of praxis, with Arnett's idea of freedom and public life. How do you. I think Arne was more or less a liberal. I don't think she was. I don't think she was a huge, huge fan of Marx anyhow. But how do these two ideas, Marx's idea of practice aligned with Arnett's idea of freedom? Because even Marx was also his ultimate vision was liberation and freedom.
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Dr. Michael Lazarus
Yeah, that's a great question. So I take the reason that I spend the first chapter deals in detail with Arendt's work in particular in the 1950s, where she becomes very interested in Marx's idea of freedom. Her greatest work, the Human Condition originates as the work that's going to be about Marx. And Marx is kind of a central figure throughout the book in ways that sometimes underappreciated but her commentators. So Arendt, as you suggest, has an idea of praxis that rubs in contradiction to Marx. In particular, she wants to separate an idea of praxis or public action, political action from production. She takes this to be kind of one of Marx's key errors. So Arendt's popularity not just in kind of contemporary political theory, but also as a kind of figure for inspiration in political movements today presented or presents a need to kind of challenge some of the ways in which she articulates that division between public action and production. So in this way I think she gets key elements of Marx's thinking wrong. In particular, she sees that there's a she see she can't understand the distinction or doesn't understand the distinction that Marx puts huge amounts of argumentative importance on. And the difference between alienated and unalienated labor. So Arendt takes that the Marx is in some ways committed to an idea very similar to find in bourgeois political economy. That the kind of savior is some form of freedom would look something very similar like a kind of Greek aristocrat. She thinks that Marx ends up just taking the economic as having precedence over the political. And as a result ends up getting ending in a very traditional idea of what freedom could be. Whereas if a distinction between alienated and unalienated labor is mobilized. Marx's idea of free labor becomes much richer, more persuasive. And when a rent in the human condition creates divisions between work, labor and action. Even though those distinctions aren't quite as firm as it might first appear. And Marx has read in a in a richer way we certainly get a sense of that Much of what Arend takes reaction Marx would see as arising from instances of the connection between labor and praxis. And so in some ways I find that interesting Aren's discussion of the council movements in the kind of Paris Commune, but in particular in the Russian Revolution and the German Revolution in the afterwar period. So Arendt's kind of one of the most prominent theorists Council of Democracy in some ways that are standing in direct contrast to some types of liberal political theory. Many of her commentators aren't so interested in the kind of council theory, her council theorization. But it's very important how she takes action to be. So I think that thinking about her idea of action helps animate elements of Marx's own commitment to kinds of democracy that had similar types of forms. In particular his writing on the Paris Commune. So in kind of engaging with Arendt and showing her the problems in her reading of Marx, but holding to an idea of kind of massive political action in the form of the councils, I try to kind of show what I think the importance of thinking about praxis in that way, but also that Marx can kind of answer many of the kind of concerns that Arendt has, that those resources are within his thought. The Marxist is very much interested in a political theory of human action. And part of Oran's concern with that is just how central it is to his way of thinking, despite what she gets wrong.
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Mortaza Hajizadeh
And towards the end of that chapter, that chapter one that you discuss, Arnett, Hannah Arnett, you kind of propose a synthesis of Marx's critique of capitalism and how it can, let's say, enrich Arnett's theory of action as well. Which I was really interested in that section as well. But there's a lot in the book that I really want to discuss. But I want to give our listeners an overview of different parts of the book. So. But I just wanted to highlight that section that I really enjoyed there another part of the book that was. And again that goes back to my previous comment that it's not only about these three thinkers, because when I saw the book, I thought it's a specifically focus on these three thinkers. But you beautifully bring in other thinkers as well. One of them is the late Alistair McIntyre, who passed away a couple of months ago, he found a few months ago. And that chapter, Ethics as Virtue.
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Dr. Michael Lazarus
You.
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Mortaza Hajizadeh
First introduce how MacIntyre critiques modern moral philosophy and how it can help us to better understand the ethical challenges of contemporary life. And then you are also. And MacIntyre has this idea of small scale communities, but I'll come to that one and that you're a big critical of. I'll come to that one later. But very broadly, can you tell US how does MacIntyre's criticism of modern life, what was his criticism of modern moral philosophy? And how can it help us better understand those ethical challenges of contemporary life?
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Dr. Michael Lazarus
Right. So MacIntyre's critique of modern moral philosophy, it kind of takes up themes that kind of present in some contemporary analytic or his kind of contemporary analytic, Elizabeth Escombe, and in some Ways also there's a kind of resonance in Hegel as well, that he thinks that there's a difficulty that modern ways of thinking moral philosophy is caught in a binary between kind of Kantian approaches and utilitarian approaches insofar as there's a kind of either preference or a way of talking about a kind of ought way of rules based approach to morality, or a kind of consequentialist approach to trying to judge happiness and maximizing happiness. So MacIntyre takes it that there's an incoherence of both those positions as meaningful alternatives. And the reason that he draws that view is he suggests that both come from a particular moment in which the rational basis of morality starts to fall away. And that's the kind of the social process that was the Enlightenment and the development of the modern world and capitalism and a bunch of other things as well. So MacIntyre's argument isn't just that those were kind of. The arguments on their own terms are not coherent. It's that their coherence is that they were. Their lack of coherence is that they were embedded in particularly fragmented social processes, which meant that they lost a kind of grip on the type of language that they were using to describe moral terms. So that ideas like good or rational or whatever had been separated, had kind of departed from how they had previously been rooted in social practices in societies before the development of capitalism. So MacIntyre kind of draws this out in reference to Aristotle by saying, well, Aristotle has a way of describing the coherence of moral language as it exists within the ancient polis. Now obviously that breaks down that form of life is one of the past. Then there's a whole account of how that historical of what that means historically. But for MacIntyre, what morality needs to get back to and why we live kind of after virtue. After virtue in his language, which is the title of his most famous book, is that virtue has to be embedded within the practices of political communities. And so we need to kind of regain an idea that ethics is the purposeful activity of human flourishing, of living well, and that the potential of human beings to do this is. Was much more noticeable in the ancient world. MacIntyre doesn't think that's lost, but he thinks that kind of has become almost lost insofar as it's restricted from view that one morality isn't able to kind of give an account of that. So I take it to be convincing in lots of ways, but also limited, not historically rich enough in the. So the purpose of by kind of working out some of those how MacIntyre makes that argument or it's to show that there's certainly a potential to develop this idea of practices and of human flourishing. But MacIntyre needs to grasp a kind of or MacIntyre ends up discounting Marx where he would be most useful for the type of project that MacIntyre's trying to do. So similar to Arendt, insofar as I think that thinking about MacIntyre helps us think about ethics in the role in Marxist thought, similar to Arendt, insofar I was thinking about her work lets us think about politics in Marx's thought. I'm trying to use MacIntyre to show how something continued, something shared in that way of of trying to understand human flourishing that MacIntyre draws in some ways from Marx and especially in his early writings. And I have an engagement with his early, more Marxist writings, even though MacIntyre never loses sight of Marx. There's something I think that I'm trying to kind of show that the type of diagnosis that MacIntyre offers in his most famous work, After Virtue can be sustained and enriched by looking in a deeper way in Marx's Lord. And that's kind of where the book ends up going after that chapter the.
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Mortaza Hajizadeh
I Before we started recording the interview, I told you that I studied English literature. I specifically focused on the my research area was eco environmental humanism, let's say. And I specifically look at romantic literature back then. But anyhow, when I was and I was a fan of so your book has kind of distorted my vision in a positive way. Let's say sort of a fan of McIntyre's argument that. That that small scale community is cultivating virtue. Coming up with the importance of local practices, which I'm still a fan of, but I found your argument also against this argument. Your critique of this argument was also quite potent and strong. Can you tell us why you think this vision, MacIntyre's vision of small scale community? Because these days especially, I guess a lot of people are disappointed with the political structure. So they're maybe only focusing on building. There's a lot of focus on building small communities or building up the communities of people around them and doing local initiatives rather than big global movements. But can you tell us why you find McIntyre's idea of this small scale communities cultivating virtue a bit problematic? And in what ways? In what ways we can use that potential maybe to critique the broader structure of domination.
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Dr. Michael Lazarus
Thanks. I'm glad you brought up novels and English literature and Romantic literature in particular, partly because MacIntyre has a kind of interesting engagement with this throughout his life, but certainly enough to virtue that he points to some 19th century novels, Jane Austen's work in particular, but also Henry James and so on, as kind of ways of trying to read the virtues as they still exist throughout this process of enlightenment fragmentation. So he takes Austin's work to be kind of the prime example of this, really, that some of the characters, like Fanny Price or that's his kind of most notable example, kind of embodiments of this kind of. There's an idea within those, within those novels of what kind of the virtues might be, that they are very defined and set by societal norms and the ways that the characters interact with them, struggle with them, contest them. The kind of, in some ways elements of MacIntyre's idea of how the practices can emerge. So I think there's something very fruitful in this kind of way of reading. The problem is in McIntyre's work there's a type of pessimism that starts to emerge. It's a kind of ambivalent one, certainly not as dramatic as some people might want to put it. It doesn't lead to a type of. It's not a type of conservatism, inherently the big C conservative type of view that some people attribute to him as a kind of later embrace in a brace of the Catholic Church and so on. But he ends up kind of advocating an idea of the politics of the small scale community as the place in which the locus of development of practices and virtues. And this could be small scale, the kind of fishing community, trade unions, a whole lot of different kind of ways of thinking about how practices can be best observed within on a small scale. And he takes this because. He takes this to be the case because modernity has gone so wrong that the small community could provide this kind of refuge, but also a place in which there would be much more understanding within those who occupied about how life is to be lived, the type of flourishing that would be important and how one could kind of live an ethical life within that sense of that type of community. So I think there's something attractive about this in some ways, but it's a very limited one insofar as it can only give us a sense of the particular or the kind of. It can only be a stepping stone to a broader, more universal idea of politics in which if it's just the politics of the small community, it ends up being extremely limited when it comes to combating the kind of the threat of the state, in particular the capitalist state, as it has restrict forms of freedom which McIntyre is kind of aware of these arguments but takes it that any solution against them is wrong footed. And that if the kind of Marxist argument ends up being a kind of leading to a. And leading to a kind of strong, extremely brutal state. So I don't take that to be the type. I don't take Marx's argument to be leading in that direction. And I try to show that the steps that MacIntyre makes to lead to that conclusion. There's some reasons to be more hesitant of the steps that he takes. He gets there very quickly and that we can retain an idea of communities of practice. But insofar as those particular practices of the small community can lead to a wider, richer, universal politics. And those are the politics that contest the nation state. But the practice is certainly insofar As I think MacIntyre is right that practices come from the way in which we relate to communities and often sometimes in small scale, that's important. But it has to kind of link up with it abroad and being riched by broader, more universal forms of politics for it to be really to be as radical as it could be insofar as that there could be a transformation in terms of the potential of human beings to be through our practices to realize ends of flourishing.
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Mortaza Hajizadeh
And. And I'm not a historian, but I. I'm guessing because I've read bits and pieces about civil movements in. In the United States and how women. Women started organizing especially in smaller cities there and to Me there was a good example of how small communities could build more momentum and then build larger and larger communities and. And build solidarities among themselves. But that was a good, good old 1960s and 70s. So things were a bit different back then. But I hope the left can still learn the lessons from those days.
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Dr. Michael Lazarus
Well, I think so, but also that part of what often the left is committed to is trying to show how those histories bear upon us now and what we can learn from earlier points of time, how they might shape traditions in which we think about politics. So I take a lot of MacIntyre's provocations to be important. It's just if we take modernity to be as divided, as fragmentary as MacIntyre suggests, the local community will continue to be attacked and will be more and more fragmented. It won't be able to sustain itself in the face of those types of dangers. So the only form of resistance possible is resistance that goes beyond it, that has a wider and more universalistic approach to politics, which I think MacIntyre can't see that half of that argument despite. So in this sense, I'm trying to kind of read McIntyre with him, but against him, insofar as there can be a broader political outlook that comes from even that agrees with him about many of the motivations for that kind of criticism.
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Mortaza Hajizadeh
In chapter four, you talk about Hegel again and his concept of ethical life. And then you argue how it builds on and transform Aristotle's idea of human flourishing. So ethical law of human flourishing are related concepts. Can you talk about that, please?
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Dr. Michael Lazarus
Sure. So I make an argument that tries to trace out a through line or show the. The depth of Hegel's commitment to an idea of what he calls the living good, or of the rationality of institutions as forms of human flourishing. The institutions which are conducive to human flourishing, which he understands in terms of relations of recognition. So for Hegel, rationality must be seen like Aristotle and our purposeful activity and then defined activity. So Hegel to see ends. This isn't. We're to see that our activities are to be rational is defined by ends. It's not a deterministic view or an idea that history is just leading to one place. But it's the view that activity is defined by specific purposes, by the way in which we try to live a flourishing life. And he wants to his idea of ethical life takes it. That needs to take institutional form. And so I try to show that that type of argument, the archetonic of that argument in Hegel Has Aristotelian characteristics. An existing literature which we're engaging with that makes some of these arguments as well that there's a kind of importance in Hegel's thinking about ethical life which puts pressure on Kantian ideas of morality as a kind of as following one's Judian, the categorical imperative and those types of positions. So trying to show that there's a kind of through line between Aristotle and Hegel and how that helps establish a way of thinking that the Marxists take up. But more briefly, I think that Hegel takes a series of Aristotle commitments but then modernizes them in a really distinctive and interesting way. Insofar as he takes it then that moral subjectivity isn't something to be simply opposed in a Kantian version, but it's one moment of a larger picture of what it would mean for life to be ethical. So he takes the event of subjectivity and modernity to be a very distinctive transformation and one that needs. The type of Aristotelian picture needs to be transformed to give a full account of this. So there's a kind of a synthesis in many ways of elements of the Aristotelian picture. The kind of the thick ethical relations of political community and then the idea of subjectivity, autonomy, moral will that have to come together for Hegel in institutions which recognize both.
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Mortaza Hajizadeh
And what about Marx? You also argue, discuss Marx in the following chapter about how he transformed Aristotle's idea. Aristotle's idea of human flourishing.
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Dr. Michael Lazarus
So I take it the Marx is committed to the same type of picture. The humans are rational beings. That's the strive for freedom, which I take as an Aristotelian argument about forms of flourishing. That his idea of species being in the 1844 writings, in his early writings is very much indebted to this kind of idea that can be derived from Aristotle. That can help give some sense of what Marx means by talking about human essence. This type of language that Marx uses throughout the early 1840s. So in the book I try to defend this kind of idea of species being against some more recent interpretations which take a critical of Marx on this type of point that say that it's kind of trans historical or overly romantic. Whereas what I take it to be is a commitment to the idea that human beings are rational and historical beings. And the problem with alienated labor is that it prevents us from the types of potentials which are characteristic of our form of life based on the what we know about ourselves as things that make history, have account of ourselves historically and so on. So I Take it that Marx's this kind of idea about human flourishing. Which is totally crucial to the idea of alienation. The economic and philosophical manuscripts. Is continued and deepened in his later writing. And in particular, that we can understand the analysis of capital that he gives of capital of human life. And the problems with the way that. How the labor process. Restricts our freedom. As a form of domination and so on. Is that it prevents us from being the kind of flourishing beings that we could be. If we realized our potential. So there's a sense that Marx has obviously got a very historical argument. But that he's trying to make good on this idea that Aristotle sets out. That we need to think about what it means to be a human being. In relation to our actuality and our potentiality. And that keeping both these ideas in view. Allows us to think dialectically about the problem. And suggests that Marx's idea of freedom is one in which we can flourish together. So that Marx is taking up the Aristotelian picture. But that in certain ways agrees with the kind of modifications. The type of Hegelian legacy that is involved in it too. So Marx ends up using this kind of language in his Conrissa. Where he talks about social individuals. There's an idea that we have to be free as individuals that are always social, right? So sometimes in the kind of liberal accounts of Marx. Often the idea is that he doesn't give enough idea to individual freedom. Or he's really concerned with individual freedom first and foremost. Whereas I'm trying to show that the concept of social individuals. Is a way of cashing out an idea of human flourishing. And if we reconstruct the way that he thinks about freedom. From the 1844 writings onwards. We get this idea of human flourishing.
- [43:28]
Mortaza Hajizadeh
And another part of the book that I love mainly, I guess because I also studied literature.
- [43:32]
Dr. Michael Lazarus
Is.
- [43:32]
Mortaza Hajizadeh
And that was the last thing I expected to see in the book. Which was your discussion of Robinson Cruise, a famous novel. When you discuss the account Marx and ethics. In your discussion of Marx critique of capitalism. And how it helps us better understand, let's say, ethical life. And then you have this discussion about this novel. Why did you. What is the significance of this novel, let's say, to your account of Marx and ethics.
- [43:59]
Dr. Michael Lazarus
Thank you, Robertson. Crusoe plays an important role in the book. And it follows on from your last question about When I was talking about this idea of the social individual. That Robinson Crusoe often is understood as a kind of. As the kind of the individual. What the individual's totally abstracted from the world and shipwrecked on the island, attempting to make their life in adverse conditions and so on. And that type of thought experiment has been. There's lots of different versions of it, from kind of pop culture to economic textbooks. But what often there's an appealing element of that, often to liberal political thought because the individual can be understood as a kind of the prime locus of. Of kind of thinking about the world in kind of in a larger way. So I try to show through that novel, its kind of interesting history in political theorizing that Daniel Defoe, the author had been involved in the later parts of the English Civil War, was sort of kind of reader of Locke. And then the novel is talked about by Jacques Rousseau, by Hegel, by kind of a bunch of different theorists that kind of started thinking about this type of problem from reading Marx's many references to Robinson Crusoe as well. Most particularly and most famously in the first chapter of Capital, but elsewhere he mentions Robinson Crusoe in several places as well. So I wanted to kind of show how Marx's. To try to take seriously Marx's kind of comments about Rousseau. He doesn't just use Robinson Crusoe as a kind of batting ram against what he takes liberal political thinking to do and it's individualism, but he tries to show what the kind of the truth of the novel is that why Romes and Crusoe, when he's kind of stuck on this island, how we can think about his labor and his labor, you know, he thinks he's really producing commodities, he thinks he's producing value. But Marx is showing that on his island he can't produce value. He can make things that are useful for himself, that help him survive, but he can't produce value. So it's a way of kind of historicizing Marx's engagement with kind of history of political thought in that chapter, but also to try to think of the role of colonialism in the novel as well. And I put it in conversation with Marx's discussion of so called original opinion in the latter section of Capital, Volume one kind of discussion how Marx thinks capitalism came to be dripping in blood. So there's a discussion of trying to connect these ways of thinking about the kind of individual within liberal political sort with processes of colonialism. And I engage with different figures in kind of in literature. In particular. Edith Said has a famous discussion of the book in Cultural Imperialism. So I try to trace the kind of event of why Marx would use this novel or think this novel would be a useful reference point. For his audience. And that it's not just a lineage tree device. It has a kind of this other kind of purpose as well that helps us think about what labor, how labor is a social practice and how value is could only be a result of commodity production in historically specific form rather than simply people working on objects, which is Locke's view, but it's not Marxist.
- [48:01]
Mortaza Hajizadeh
This chapter had a very important discussion which was that's something that I had also been thinking about myself previously, but not in this systematic realm. That's the idea of ethics. Because a lot of people, their idea ethic is something that set up practices that you perform, might perform ethical moral practices. But I really liked it when you argue that it's important to conceptualize. Understand ethics as something that is socially and historically. As a socially, historically embedded practice, rather than just me doing something ethically. And I think it's quite important to the idea of ethical life and any minority's idea of flourishing, human flourishing. Can you talk about why is it important to think of ethics as something that is as a social and historically embedded practice rather than a personal code of conduct, let's say.
- [49:00]
Dr. Michael Lazarus
Yeah. So the argument, the way I conceive of ethics as the way that fundamentally pertaining to the question of how we should live the broader, more wider compassing kind of question in which my individual beliefs or my individual values are not can't be seen in isolation from their wider normative context. But also that wider normative context, insofar as it's socially and historically formed, means that when I'm thinking about my individual action, I need to also be thinking about the wider setting for those types of what I take in your language, like a moral code today. And often we think of morality in extremely individual terms. Right. Like should I. And often this will be experienced when people study in university or even when people talk about it in their day to day lives. This will be like my morals relate to how I just conduct myself. Whereas I'm trying to show that those types of questions can only be adequately understood within the broader commitment to. Even when we're asking those kind of questions, they must always pertain to the question of how should we live? The questioning of that. But then we need to ask more questions. We need to put it within a kind of broader sense of the social relationships which help motivate those questions. And that the type of challenge that someone like Hegel thinks about in the philosophy of right is to say that ethical life, the way in which as an individual you fit into or any individual fits into social world always has to take institutional form. And that those major institutions that run life and the family at the workplace and in the state, those are the general framing of any individual action will always take a particular. Will always take a particular institutional form. And that if we're rational about what those institutional forms are, our individual or the way that we would take an individual, our individual moral code would be then seen as always social. They were always making social decisions. And that ethics pertains to this is embedded in this kind of pursuit. So in thinking about this kind of way of the kind of the socially and historically embedded context, the forms in which ethics takes it allows. There's the Aristotelian dimension of well, what are the practices? Do they allow us to become better reasoners with others? And how those kind of processes, learning processes, might come to fruition. So that's the kind of. Yeah, the broader kind of framing issue of why ethics has to be seen as a kind of broader idea than morality, to use Hegel's language. But I try to develop the thought.
- [52:13]
Mortaza Hajizadeh
I keep going back to Marx. What about his idea of value form theory, which is again highly. I mean, again, we tend to think of it as an economic theory. But again, you argue that that can also open up other possibilities for. For rethinking cooperation, recognition and ethical life. How does his. First of all, what is his value form theory? If you could just very briefly explain it for the uninitiated and then tell us how it can help us better understand issues topics such as cooperation, recognition and also ethical life.
- [52:50]
Dr. Michael Lazarus
Right. Thanks so much to value form theories. Kind of a way of thinking about the understanding of social form as it plays out in Marxists, generally speaking, Marxist thought more broadly. But like especially there's an attention in some of the scholarship on the way it plays out in capital and the manuscripts around capital. And part of it's sometimes described as a particular tradition. There's different kind of different contexts in which it arises. But what I take to be the most important parts of it is that it's a challenge to traditional or kind of older understandings of Marx's way of thinking about capitalism that understood there to be a trans historical nature of value and a trans historical nature to the categories that Marx is discussing rather than historically specific instances of value of labor and so on. The Marxist critique of capitalism takes seriously that his objective critique is capital and how value is the form of wealth specific to capitalist society. So in particular key to this position is that the labor theory of value of classical political economy found in Adam Smith and Dave Ricardo and so on. Common to that view is that value is a physiological characteristic bestowed by labor onto objects. Whereas Marx has an imminent critique of this way of thinking that he has certainly a value theory, but he wants to show that why labor always takes a specific form. And then under capitalism it takes an abstract form. And in this way it's only abstract labor that produces value and that it must be, that production must be realized. The value must be realized in exchange. So that when we're thinking about capitalism and Marx's idea of value, it's not just the role of production, it's the role of circulation. And these two things that are essential to the metamorphosis of value. How value continues to take different forms in commodities, in money, in capital and so on. And Marx is really trying to argue that value isn't something that we can hold in our hands. It's a social relationship. And the problem precisely with political economy, but its fetishistic element in general is the value appears to be a property bestowed onto objects. We value objects, right? We do. There's a valuation process that occurs through a series of social relationships that are mediated by the market. But those relations in and of themselves are not valuing. It is a standalone thing. He says. Well, famous section of capital. He says, we can twist, you know, we have a promoter we can twist and turn, but we can't hold it to that. Its object, its objecthood, right? And this type of theorization opens up a series of hugely important elements of how we can consider Marx's significance as a social theorist. And the problem that I'm trying to help animate the thought that I'm trying to from that starting point and that engagement with a fine grained reading of Marx's work, but then also other thinkers that trying to use that or trying to develop that kind of thought. I'm showing the possibilities for thinking about that critique of capital as a idea of recognition, to use Hegel's language, those social relationships, the fact that value is made up of human activity, that, that social organization, that those social forms act as systematic barriers to the way in which people could relate to each other in, through the type of activity that, how we organize our lives through family, workplace, political communities, that these are like that these institutions that are in our present society configured by capital and by abstract forms of domination that we find often the family is a place where there's huge amounts of. Where social reproduction occurs, where there's huge amounts of agenda and heavily problematic way in which gender relations and oppression is reproduced through the family. That work is a place of alienation and exploitation. And that the political state is one of nationalism and oppression as well. So I'm trying to show the ways in which those that thinking about capital and at H. Thinking about Marx's idea of value and thinking about the argument he plays in capital is ways of thinking about how all those versions or those institutions of social relations could be otherwise. That they could be. We could have real relations of meaning in or deeper two sided normative meaning within the institutional forms that we make our lives together. And the part of Marx's problem with capitalism is the way in which value comes to rule over us. That capital acts as a form of domination on us because of the way that we produce it. That it's our action that makes it, but that it could be otherwise. And that for it to be otherwise would require the type of cooperation which is, you know, which is imminent within, you know, that we. The way the world is made. And so from Marx's analysis of the way that social relations are composed and reproduced, Marx sees that there's some potential for a form of that the cooperation that's involved in it. That capitalism is the most global and complex way of. Of organizing the way that we live could be. That there could be. We can gain elements of the way of thinking about social relationships within that. But how those social relationships are ones of domination rather than of freedom. And that Marx has an idea of recognition involved in it. That the mark immediates the way that we interact with rather than the actual activity that we do with each other.
- [60:05]
Mortaza Hajizadeh
I always try to relate the topics of discussion to what's happening in real life these days. And this book, I guess is very relevant. I think it's a beautiful mix of theory and also application of that theory and how we can achieve that idea of ethical life. But my question is that your concept of the topics you discuss in the book, the absolute ethical life and given the fact that today's world, especially in the past two or three years, life everywhere in the world has become social life, let's say, is rife with economic inequality, ecological breakdown, democratic erosion, erosion of democratic institutions, you know, we have the rise of populist demagogues around the world or even if the demagogues are not elected, like luckily, what happened in Australia. Fortunately. But again you have the rise of these mass movements of people who have genuine concerns. But I feel that their concerns are misdirected or their anger is misdirected towards minorities maybe, but I'm Keen to know what practical insights reading Marx can offer us to imagine politics of human flourishing that can also reorient us towards the future as well, to be able to better achieve that idea of ethical life and human flourishing.
- [61:31]
Dr. Michael Lazarus
Thanks. That's a great question, one that bears on the purpose of the book. The commitment that I spoke earlier about the way that the book came out of political referring and the idea really to think the possibilities of emancipation and to consider the kind of. Yeah, maybe some of the theoretical influences of Marxist thought can help that it's not necessarily just an academic exercise, but in compiling that and getting some sense of what motivates Marx's thought, that this could help us conceive of our own commitment, why it is that political action is something that we can't just do. We need to think about that there's always relationship between theory and practice and that Marx is committed to that relationship in a very particular and important way. So the aim of the book, in some ways, in terms of some of the issues you mentioned, like inequality and the issues of climate change, the book's committed to the idea that we need systematic solutions to those problems and that individual action in terms of be the change that I might want to see in the world or whatever's not going to cut it. We need to think about the kind of how if we understand capitalism as a series of social relationships and social forms, that we get a richer normative view of social action and that we need to look. That a type of normative ethics needs to look at the critique of political economy. We can't just do normative thinking by itself. That we need to kind of think about it within a critique of the way that of economic logic and derefy the economic. So there's a real sense that these arguments lead to kind of institutional forms of. Of recognition, to relations of recognition and to an idea of political action that really we're the only ones that are capable and able to save ourselves. And that this would be a kind of a philosophy of human flourishing and that in mobilizing the free thinkers that are in the subtitle Aristotle, Hegel and Marx, but also engaging with Arenda MacIntyre, that we have a way to kind of think about both ethics and politics within a modern world and I think, try to think the possibilities of emancipation.
- [64:06]
Mortaza Hajizadeh
Mike, I know that you've recently finished this book. It's extremely difficult to write a book and publish it with a reputable publisher such as Stanford. So I'm wondering if there are still other projects you're working on or you're taking a short break for the time being?
- [64:26]
Dr. Michael Lazarus
No, I'm working on another project, another book project on Hegel and Smith. Kind of thinking about ideas of value in those two thinkers which kind of comes out of this project and kind of other elements in terms of thinking about colonialism and those types of issues as well. So that's the kind of next major project. Yeah. Preliminary. Some of that research is an article that's just about to come out in Cambridge Journal of Economics that tracks the division of labor and the idea of the rivalry in Smith and in Hegel. So yeah, it's kind of a continuation of some of these themes. But the idea of that project is to try to face up to questions of inequality, different ideas about speculation, fictitious capital and other things too by looking at early discussions in the market.
- [65:25]
Mortaza Hajizadeh
Well, hopefully should be able to talk to you sometime soon, I guess in a year or so maybe. You're in the book. It made longer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're really looking forward to hopefully soon be able to speak to you again about your new book as well. Thank you very much, Mike, for taking the time to speak with us. The book we just discussed was Absolutely Ethical Life, Aristotle Regeran Marx, published by Stanford University Press. Thank you very much for your time.
- [65:54]
Dr. Michael Lazarus
Thank you. I would very much enjoy that conversation.