An enriched view on the extended finitary monad--Lawvere theory correspondence

We give a new account of the correspondence, first established by Nishizawa–Power, between finitary monads and Lawvere theories over an arbitrary locally finitely presentable base. Our account explains this correspondence in terms of enriched category theory: the passage from a finitary monad to the corresponding Lawvere theory is exhibited as an instance of free completion of an enriched category under a class of absolute colimits. This extends work of the first author, who established the result in the special case of finitary monads and Lawvere theories over the category of sets; a novel aspect of the generalisation is its use of enrichment over a bicategory, rather than a monoidal category, in order to capture the monad–theory correspondence over all locally finitely presentable bases simultaneously.