Maurizio Lazzarato (born 1955) is an Italian sociologist and philosopher, residing in Paris, France. In the 1970s, he was an activist in the workers' movement (Autonomia Operaia) in Italy. Lazzarato was a founding member of the editorial board of the journal Multitudes. He is a researcher at Matisse/CNRS, Pantheon-Sorbonne University (University of Paris I), and a member of the Collège international de philosophie in Paris.^{[citation needed]}

Lazzarato studied at the University of Padua in the 1970s, where he was active in the Autonomia Operaia movement. He left Italy in the late 1970s for exile in France to escape political prosecution, although the charges against him were abandoned in the 1990s.

Lazzarato is known for his essay "Immaterial Labor" that appeared in a collection of contemporary Italian political theory edited by Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, called Radical Thought in Italy (1996). His research focuses on immaterial labor, the transformation of wage labor, and work, and cognitive capitalism. He is also interested in the concepts of biopolitics and bioeconomics.

Lazzarato has written two closely related works on the subject of debt, The Making of the Indebted Man and Governing by Debt. Both books were translated into English and published as part of the Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. In both works, Lazzarato uses continental philosophy and economic data to critique debt and neoliberalism from a left-wing perspective.

In The Making of the Indebted Man, Lazzarato examines debt as it is experienced by individuals, specifically the subject; he also presents a case that the debtor-creditor relationship is a central category of economics—more important than money or finance, for example. In the modern economy, it is taken for granted that debts must be repaid, and much of economic activity is driven by lending with the expectation (or: promise) of future repayment. Lazzarato observes that in order for such an economy to function, its actors must first be socialized to accept the premise that debts must be repaid. This entails that they become capable of making promises (to repay a debt) and of feeling guilt (on failing to repay a debt). To illustrate this process, he refers to the second treatise of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality, which deals with the concepts of guilt, debt, and socialization.

What is credit/debt in its most elementary sense? A promise of payment. What is a financial asset, a share, or bond? The promise of future value. "Promise", "value," and "future" are also key words in Nietzsche's Second Essay. For Nietzsche, the "oldest and most personal relationship there is" is that between creditor and debtor, a relationship wherein "person met person for the first time, and measured himself person against person." Consequently, the task of a community or society has first of all been to engender a person capable of promising, someone able to stand guarantor for himself in the creditor-debtor relationship, that is, capable of honoring his debt. Making a person capable of keeping a promise means constructing a memory for him, endowing him with interiority, a conscience, which provide a bulwark against forgetting. It is within the domain of debt obligations that memory, subjectivity, and conscience begin to be produced.

— The Making of the Indebted Man, pp. 39-40.

Lazzarato refers to the socializing process of creating individual subjects as "subjectivation". He also contrasts the Nietzschean view of credit/debt with those given by Marx and by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. The latter part of the book is a criticism of debt as used in European neoliberal governance, introducing ideas which are developed more fully in Governing by Debt.