The Elusive Social Dimension: Reading Michael Lazarus's "Absolute Ethical Life"

Michael Lazarus's Absolute Ethical Life (2025) reasserts the social as the foundation of ethical existence, challenging bourgeois individualism and capitalist alienation. By synthesizing Aristotle's eudaimonia, Hegel's Sittlichkeit, and Marx's critique of commodity fetishism and surplus value, Lazarus argues that true ethical life arises only through collective, socially embedded praxis. The book addresses misreadings of Marx by 20th-century critics such as Arendt and MacIntyre, demonstrating the enduring moral core of Marx's analysis of labor and alienation. In an era of political fragmentation and commodified existence, Lazarus calls for the reinstitution of sociality as the path to human redemption and freedom.