Absolute Ethical Life comes smothered in praise from the world’s leading experts on Hegel, Marx, and Critical Theory. Karen Ng, Martin Hägglund, Michael Heinrich, Tony Smith, J. M. Bernstein, and Terry Pinkard, announce it as a crucial intervention: “essential reading,” “exemplary,” “enormously important,” “immense contribution,” “a reading of Marx for our times.” In normal circumstances, the genre of the blurb is marked by hyperbole, and no one really expects to find what the endorsements portend. But in this case, circumstances are not normal. Whether or not we agree with it completely, Absolute Ethical Life deserves the accolades. It is a major work by a young scholar who is on his way to adding his name to the list of experts mentioned above.

Lazarus’s book forms part of an ongoing revival of Marxism. Its basic claim concerns the normative dimension of Marx’s work, early and late. Lazarus rejects the Althusserian trope of Marx “breaking” with the humanism of his youth to develop a mature science of society. Instead, he argues that Marx belongs to a tradition that runs from Aristotle to Hegel and that has at its core a conception of ethics as human flourishing, or the realization of human potential through collective action and rational deliberation. Of course, this claim is hardly new. It has been central to various humanist Marxisms since the publication of Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. But Lazarus reinforces it substantially by arguing that the key to Marx’s later normative theory is found in his discussion of “the value form.”

For Lazarus, Marx’s treatment of value cannot be reduced to the labor theory of value. The value form is instead what Lazarus calls a “form of life.” It is the way that all human relationships are structured in capitalist society. As Lazarus puts it, “the value-form is Marx’s most significant contribution to critical social theory.” And Marx’s later work is not merely a social science but provides “an account of capital as a form of life which is constituted by social relations of domination that restrict in fundamental ways the ability of human beings to recognise each other as free and rational beings in a social world of our own creation” (3). Overcoming this restriction would involve more than a redistribution of wealth. It would require “the ethical organisation of free institutions,” “the creation of institutions of self-rule,” or what, borrowing Hegel’s idiom, Lazarus dubs “absolute ethical life” (26).

Following an Introduction, Absolute Ethical Life is broken down into three parts. The first focuses on the political and ethical thought of Arendt and MacIntyre. Essentially, Lazarus wants to show that Arendt’s and MacIntyre’s well-known criticisms of Marx were misplaced, and that, had they understood Marx better, they would have seen that his work complemented their projects. In the case of Arendt, Marx offers a theory of action that does not rely on Arendt’s rigid distinction between social and political. In the case of MacIntyre, Marx offers an account of virtue that does not need to be limited to particular communities but has a robust connection to politics and the universal.

Lazarus’s second part deepens his understanding of the Aristotelian-Hegelian tradition and develops a concept of ethics that goes beyond individual preferences or conformity to a moral law to include collective relations of mutual recognition. It explores how Hegel adapted Aristotle’s ancient theory of eudaimonia to accord with modern institutions of freedom and argues that Marx further contributed to this tradition by exposing how capitalist social relations thwart the realization of ethical freedom. As Lazarus writes:

This line of thought is then reinforced by way of a digression on Robinson Crusoe and the myth of ethical individualism.

The third part of Lazarus’s book develops the theory of absolute ethical life through a close study of Marx’s writings, especially the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and Capital. The details of the argument are too sophisticated to rehearse here. Briefly, Lazarus insists on continuity between Marx’s early treatment of alienation and his later discussions of the fetishism of the commodity, abstract labor, and the value form. “Marx’s understanding of capital,” Lazarus claims, “furnishes not only an analysis of ‘the economic,’ but a comprehension of the forms of social life specific to the modern world.” Here “Marx goes beyond utopian opponents of capitalism by formulating both a normative objection to its symptoms and a systematic view of the dynamics of its constitutive forms.” As a result, “with Marx it becomes possible to conceive mutual reciprocal association as the concrete universality of social life in which the purpose of human activity and the constitution of society are inseparable conditions of free deliberation” (264).

I admire Absolute Ethical Life deeply. But I would not fulfill my commission as a reviewer if I simply summarized it in approval. Thus, I will conclude with two challenges, one concerning Lazarus’s concept of “tradition” and another his references to “institutions.” First, Marx’s work is notoriously fragmented and unfinished. As recent contextualizing studies have shown (Carver, Roberts, Leipold, Heinrich), it is best approached, not as a systematic social theory, but as contingent interventions into historically discrete debates. One way of giving Marx’s writings coherent shape is to follow Lazarus and place them in a tradition, thus allowing others to flesh out what Marx never could. But here the concept of tradition does quite a bit of heavy lifting. It suggests a continuous history of ideas that I doubt Marx would have accepted. Perhaps, then, the effort to put Marx in a tradition should be supplemented with an effort to locate him in contexts.

Second, while it is difficult to fault the idea that Marx’s work implies “the creation of institutions of self-rule,” what those institutions would look like and what political processes might hasten their arrival remains unexplored in Absolute Ethical Life. Lazarus provides a handful of references to class and revolution. But there is really no discussion of how practical political actions might lead to the formation of free institutions. Developing an abstract normative theory of human freedom is laudable. But for Marx (and Althusser) ideas are weapons. Their semantic content cannot be divorced from their performative effect. And just as there is no politics of the individual so too is there no politics of humanity as such. Or, at least, if there is ever going to be a world of mutual recognition in which all humans actualize their potential, it is going to require considerably more struggle and antagonism than humanist readings of Marx typically admit.