Overview

Winner of the René Wellek Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by The Guardian, The Millions, and The Sydney Morning Herald This Life offers a profoundly inspiring basis for transforming our lives, demonstrating that our commitment to freedom and democracy should lead us beyond both religion and capitalism. Philosopher Martin Hägglund argues that we need to cultivate not a religious faith in eternity but a secular faith devoted to our finite life together. He shows that all spiritual questions of freedom are inseparable from economic and material conditions: what matters is how we treat one another in this life and what we do with our time. Engaging with great philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel and Marx, literary writers from Dante to Proust and Knausgaard, political economists from Mill to Keynes and Hayek, and religious thinkers from Augustine to Kierkegaard and Martin Luther King, Jr., Hägglund points the way to an emancipated life.

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9781101873731

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Reviews

An important new book. . . . Beautifully liberating. --The New Yorker A splendid primer on the importance of authentic freedom. --Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek Minister of Finance and bestselling author of Adults in the Room A sweepingly ambitious synthesis of philosophy, spirituality and politics, which starts with the case for confronting mortality, and ends with the case for democratic socialism. . . . Everything depends on what we do with our time together. This Life makes a forceful case for keeping that truth in mind. --The Guardian A distinct and important contribution to contemporary philosophy, This Life is a rare accomplishment. A book that is a rigorous as it is approachable, as incisive as it is patient. A veritable trove of ideas. . . . A rewarding book that deserves exactly what it demands: close, engaged reading by a wide readership. --Critical Inquiry Gives fresh philosophical and political vitality to a longstanding question. . . . What kind of political and economic order can do justice to our mortality, to the fact that our lives are all we have? . . . This Life presents a vital alternative. --The New Republic Powerful. . . . Lucidly written, and at times beautifully so. . . . Deeply radical in its aims. [Hagglund] wants to effect a revolutionary change in our understanding of value, in our economies and in our lives. --New Statesman A monumental achievement. . . . Hagglund is exactly right to focus our long-term vision on a fundamental transformation of society. . . . Hagglund's revaluation of value is itself a powerful Polaris to help navigate the political projects that we set ourselves to embracing. --Jacobin Hagglund hopes to help people seize this moment of discontent with capitalism and ask some fundamental questions: How should we live and work together? What are the optimal ways we can organize society to enhance freedom and well-being--and avoid scorching the planet? That's a good conversation to have. --USA Today

A sweepingly ambitious synthesis of philosophy, spirituality and politics, which starts with the case for confronting mortality, and ends with the case for democratic socialism. . . . Everything depends on what we do with our time together. This Life makes a forceful case for keeping that truth in mind. --The Guardian A distinct and important contribution to contemporary philosophy, This Life is a rare accomplishment. A book that is a rigorous as it is approachable, as incisive as it is patient. A veritable trove of ideas. . . . A rewarding book that deserves exactly what it demands: close, engaged reading by a wide readership. --Critical Inquiry Gives fresh philosophical and political vitality to a longstanding question. . . . What kind of political and economic order can do justice to our mortality, to the fact that our lives are all we have? . . . This Life presents a vital alternative. --The New Republic Powerful. . . . Lucidly written, and at times beautifully so. . . . Deeply radical in its aims. [Hagglund] wants to effect a revolutionary change in our understanding of value, in our economies and in our lives. --New Statesman Always lucid. . . . I admire his boldness, perhaps even his recklessness. And his fundamental secular cry seems right: since time is all we have, we must measure its preciousness in units of freedom. Nothing else will do. Once this glorious idea has taken hold, it is very hard to dislodge. --James Wood, The New Yorker A monumental achievement. . . . Hagglund is exactly right to focus our long-term vision on a fundamental transformation of society. . . . Hagglund's revaluation of value is itself a powerful Polaris to help navigate the political projects that we set ourselves to embracing. --Jacobin Hagglund hopes to help people seize this moment of discontent with capitalism and ask some fundamental questions: How should we live and work together? What are the optimal ways we can organize society to enhance freedom and well-being--and avoid scorching the planet? That's a good conversation to have. --USA Today

An important new book. . .Always lucid. . .Beautifully liberating. . .I admire his boldness, perhaps even his recklessness. And his fundamental secular cry seems right since time is all we have, we must measure its preciousness in units of freedom. Nothing else will do. Once this glorious idea has taken hold, it is very hard to dislodge. . .I finished This Life in a state of enlightened despair, with clearer vision and cloudier purpose--I was convinced, step by step, of the moral rectitude of Hagglund's argument even as I struggled to imagine the political system that might institute his desired revaluation of value. --James Wood, The New Yorker Brilliant. . .An excellent place to start for those who want to energize the theory of socialism... Hagglund insists on grounding his Marxism in a broader tradition, and his version of it is so exciting. . .One of Hagglund's most impressive achievements is to bring to a new public agitating for an embrace of freedom in our lives a bold project of exhuming from the grave an identifiably Marxist intellectual enterprise. At stake are the beliefs we all must share that humanity is one, the social life it has created for itself an affront to its destiny, and -- theoretically as well as practically -- it has a world to win. --Samuel Moyn, Jacobin Gives fresh philosophical and political vitality to a longstanding question... Much in the book will resonate with a democratic left that has gained strength in the seven-plus years since Occupy--in Black Lives Matter and the Sanders campaign, in the vision of the Green New Deal, in the Fight for $15 and in North Carolina's Moral Mondays. This Life attempts to deepen the philosophical dimension of this left and to anchor its commitments in a larger inquiry: What kind of political and economic order can do justice to our mortality, to the fact that our lives are all we have?. . .This Life presents a vital alternative. --Jedediah Britton-Purdy, The New Republic Martin Hagglund's This Life is a splendid primer on the importance of authentic freedom. --Yanis Varoufakis, Former Greek Minister of Finance and bestselling author of Adults in the Room Arriving at a moment of widespread intellectual and political disorientation, This Life is a timely, profoundly ambitious attempt to fashion a new foundation for personal and collective existence. Hagglund argues that a return to Marx's radical materialism does not have to signal a loss of spirituality or contempt for democracy, but something like the opposite: a truly secular faith in a redemptive realm of freedom. --Stephen Greenblatt, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern An audacious, ambitious, and often maddening tour de force. . .This Life is to be applauded. Its iconoclasm and sweep provide an example of what intellectual activity can and should look like in an era of emergency. . .The answers certainly are not banal: starting from first principles, Hagglund seeks to reconstruct what a worthwhile human life might look like, and what institutional arrangement might make it possible. The most interesting feature of his analysis is the great attention he gives to temporality. . .The great virtue of the book: it provides a regulative ideal, and a reminder of what kind of world we are actually fighting for. . .We need a vision of justice that is plausible and compelling enough to organize our efforts. Hagglund's book provides one. After a half century of anti-utopian suspicion, This Life calls us back to a nearly forgotten style of thinking and imagining. . .Hagglund is right that time is our most precious resource. --James Chappel, The Boston Review Deep, critical, and lively. . .Lucidly written, and at times beautifully so, it is unmistakably a work of philosophy. . .Though his style is more careful and deliberate, Hagglund's book is also more deeply radical in its aims. He wants to effect a revolutionary change in our understanding of value, in our economies and in our lives. . .The book's central contention is powerful. --Mark O'Connell, The New Statesman This is a rare piece of work, the product of great intellectual strength and moral fortitude. The writing shows extraordinary range and possesses an honesty and fervor which is entirely without cynicism. Beneath Hagglund's affirmation of secular faith and a life-defining commitment is a compelling reworking of the early Heidegger's existential analytic, especially his understanding of finitude and ecstatic temporality. With the great difference that this is a distinctly leftist project, where secular faith leads to spiritual freedom which is understood as a Hegelian-Marxist affirmation of democratic socialism. Hagglund is a genuine moralist for our times, possessed of an undaunted resoluteness and a fierce commitment to intellectual probity. Maybe he's the philosophical analogue to Karl Ove Knausgaard. --Simon Critchley, curator for The New York Times' The Stone and author of Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us Hagglund shows with real originality why the moral concern that underlies religious faith has always been a hope for the perpetuation of life on earth. Stringent, lucid, and urgent in its appeal for a politics equal to the prospect of climate disaster, This Life is both an argument and a summons. --David Bromwich, Sterling Professor at Yale University and author of Moral Imagination Martin Hagglund is the most important young philosopher in America, whose work on time has already made an immense impression in academic circles. Now he has chosen to address a broad audience, in a work of immaculate clarity. When this powerful and moving book reaches a wide readership, it will, I think, have profound practical as well as theoretical consequences for the discussions that are raging on every side around questions of religious belief and the future of democracy. --Richard Klein, Professor Emeritus at Cornell and bestselling author of Cigarettes Are Sublime A book filled with insight. . .Hagglund has written an important work that pushes forward a secular, rational, and fulfilling view of humankind's place in the world. If the reader is up to the challenge of engaging deeply and historically about their life philosophy, this is a book that rewards that effort. --David Chivers, The Humanist By far the most profound, thoughtful, compelling, and insightful book I have ever read on the topic of immortality, and the problematic implications of the religious fixation on eternal life. For a secular person--or anyone who wants to understand the secular worldview--this book is essential reading. . .Hagglund plumbs its depths like no one has ever before. He does so artfully, theoretically, and with tremendous wisdom. This Life is a truly welcome addition to the secularist humanist canon. --Phil Zuckerman, Psychology Today As timely as a work of philosophy could be these days. --Booklist, starred review A densely argued critique of religion and capitalism . . . An impassioned and erudite proposal for vast systemic changes. --Kirkus Reviews A bold contemporary take on existentialism. . .Earnest and precise. . .huge intellectual range. . . beautifully clear. This Life requires no philosophical training or lexicon to follow it, only an interest in the meaning of this life. . .I found Hagglund's cherishing of mortal life a cheering corrective to the sometimes joyless scientificity of the new atheism. . .Hagglund is surely right that it is our mortality, our miraculous existence as carbon-based matter turned all too briefly into conscious beings who can love and be loved, that makes us priceless to ourselves and to each other. --Times Higher Education Electrifying... Hagglund's work stands as one of the most morally and politically compelling intellectual projects of our time. --Conall Cash, boundary2

Author Information

MARTIN HÄGGLUND is a professor of comparative literature and humanities at Yale University. A member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, he is the author of three highly acclaimed books, and his work has been translated into eight languages. In his native Sweden, he published his first book, Chronophobia, at the age of twenty-five. His first book in English, Radical Atheism, was the subject of a conference at Cornell University and a colloquium at Oxford University. His most recent book, Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov, was hailed by the Los Angeles Review of Books as a “revolutionary” achievement. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018. He lives in New York City. martinhagglund.se

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