Martin Hägglund

Martin Hägglund is a Swedish philosopher and literary scholar, Birgit Baldwin Professor of Humanities at Yale University. His early books read Derrida and modern novelists through the themes of time and finitude, as in Radical Atheism (2008) and Dying for Time (2012). This Life (2019) argues that caring about anything depends on our lives being finite, so religious hopes of eternity would undercut what we value. He goes on to argue, drawing on Hegel and Marx, that capitalism wastes our limited lifetime and should give way to democratic socialism.

Key ideas

• Secular faith is commitment to fragile, finite lives and projects that can be lost.
• An eternal life would make care pointless, since nothing would be at stake.
• Spiritual freedom is the ability to ask what we ought to do with our limited time.
• Capitalism measures value by labour time and so cannot recognise free time as the true measure of wealth.
• Democratic socialism would let societies decide together how to use their collective time.

Major works

• This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (2019)
• Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (2008)
• Dying for Time (2012)
• Chronophobia (2002)

In the Book corner

• This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom 2019 · Intermediate
  An ambitious two-part argument for a fully secular understanding of what makes life meaningful, with political consequences. Part One, 'Secular Faith', argues…

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