About this item
A profound, original, and accessible book that offers a new secular vision of how we can lead our lives. Ranging from fundamental existential questions to the most pressing social issues of our time, This Life shows why our commitment to freedom and democracy should lead us beyond both religion and capitalism.In this groundbreaking book, the philosopher Martin Hgglund challenges our received notions of faith and freedom. The faith we need to cultivate, he argues, is not a religious faith in eternity but a secular faith devoted to our finite life together. He shows in turn that all spiritual questions of freedom are inseparable from economic and material conditions. What ultimately matters is how we treat one another in this life and what we do with our time together. Hgglund develops new existential and political principles, while transforming our understanding of spiritual life. His critique of religion takes us to the heart of what it means to mourn our loved ones, be committed, and care about a sustainable world. His critique of capitalism demonstrates that we fail to sustain our democratic values because our lives depend on wage labor. In clear and path-breaking terms, Hgglund explains why capitalism is inimical to our freedom and why we should instead pursue a novel form of democratic socialism. In pursuing his vision of an emancipated secular life, Hgglund engages 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; religious thinkers from Augustine to Kierkegaard and Martin Luther King, Jr. This Life gives us new access to our past - for the sake of a different future.
About the Author
Martin Hägglund is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (Pantheon Books, 2019) , Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (Harvard UP, 2012) and Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford UP, 2008) . His work has been the subject of a special issue of CR: The New Centennial Review, Living On: Of Martin Hägglund.
