This Life

Reviews / Votes

Beautifully liberating ... Haegglund's 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 * New Yorker * Erudite and provocative, Haegglund's philosophy aims to plug the God-shaped hole gap in the lives of atheists, and has become more relevant as death once more stalks the developed western world. -- The World's Top 50 Thinkers for the Covid-19 Age * Prospect * Like the existentialist works of the mid-20th century, This Life is a stirring reminder about philosophy's power to move and disturb as well as illuminate. -- Gavin Jacobson * New Statesman * What I found very attractive about Hagglund's book is his reinterpretation of Marxism for a secular age and secularised audience, without losing Marx's vision of a broader spiritual liberation from modern forms of coercion. I also liked its emphasis on social interdependence, something that connects the Buddhist to the Marxist tradition -- Pankaj Mishra * The Nation * Really moving and actually soothing. It gave me some kind of inner peace to contemplate Martin Hagglund's arguments, partly because the arguments really are about how beautiful and precious and singular it is to have this life, to be alive as a human on this planet. -- Chris Hayes * Why Is This Happening? podcast * Lucidly written, and at times beautifully so, it is unmistakably a work of philosophy... [Haegglund] wants to effect a revolutionary change in our understanding of value, in our economies and in our lives. -- Mark O'Connell * New Statesman * A breathtaking reconstruction of Marx as a thinker of freedom... An intervention in intellectual history of the first order. -- Nathan Brown * Radical Philosophy * A splendid primer in the importance of authentic freedom. * Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek minister of finance and author of Adults in the Room * Martin Haegglund 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 * 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... Haegglund 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 * 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 Haegglund's cherishing of mortal life a cheering corrective to the sometimes joyless scientificity of the new atheism....Haegglund 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. -- Joe Moran * Times Higher Education * Haegglund's This Life is a highly readable, accessible - yet profound - examination of what kind of society might enable life at its most fulfilling. Whilst realising our interdependence, we have to be responsible for our own fragile lives. The theses may be heavy, but the discussions and analyses, however complex, are written with a light touch and beguiling clarity which is both wholly absorbing and deeply relevant. The reader is complicit, a partner. It is a book to read slowly, and this reviewer is about to start reading it all over again. -- Marina Vaizey * The Arts Desk * Erudite and provocative, This Life elaborates a philosophy to fill the spiritual lacunae in the lives of committed atheists pondering what our mortal existences are for ... It bears witness to that great and very human thirst. -- Tanjil Rashid * Prospect *