True to Life: An Interview with Martin Hägglund
Martin Hägglund speaks about This Life, his new book about love, grief, wealth, and Karl Marx.
“View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm — The Oxbow” by Thomas Cole, 1836.Metropolitan Museum of Art / Wikimedia
Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom is a book about love, grief, wealth, and socialism. It is both “an accessible and moving statement of an existentialist theory of human commitment” and an entreaty to devote ourselves to the political project of building a socialist world.
Jacobin’s Meagan Day spoke to Hägglund about Karl Marx, C. S. Lewis, St Augustine, Martin Luther King Jr, and how democratic socialism — not liberal capitalism — can fulfill our shared commitment to the values of freedom and democracy.
Meagan Day
First I should say that I loved the book. I was attracted to it because of its political content, but it turned out to be a very reassuring meditation on life and mortality for me, as someone who couldn’t muster faith in the afterlife if I tried.
Martin Hägglund
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