Aristotle, Hegel, Marx: A Philosophical Dialogue

Join us for a dialogue on philosophical themes featuring two authors of forthcoming books from Stanford University Press. Michael Lazarus is the author of Absolute Ethical Life: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx, and Jensen Suther is the author of True Materialism: Hegelian Marxism and the Modernist Struggle for Freedom.  Lazarus situates Marx within a shared tradition of ethical inquiry, placing him in close dialogue with Aristotle and Hegel. His book 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 True Materialism, Suther engages with three titans of literary modernism—Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Samuel Beckett—to pursue not only an account of Hegel’s materialism but also a new critique of capitalist modernity. Breaking with the received view of Marx’s relation to German Idealism, the book argues that the materialist critique of capitalist production is inseparable from Hegel’s idea that the demand for freedom is a demand for mutual recognition.

Michael Lazarus is a postdoctoral research fellow at Deakin University.

Jensen Suther received his PhD from Yale University and is currently a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows.