Yale professor Martin Hagglund created something of a stir with the publication of his book, ‘This Life’ in 2019. In it, he sets out a framework for a neo-existentialist reading of the contemporary human situation that he believes establishes a platform for a restructuring of Western politics based on a re-reading of Hegel, Marx, and Martin Luther King. To do this, he makes a case for ‘secular faith’ as the pathway to achieving an unalienated, and therefore authentic, ‘spiritual freedom’.
Following a brief outline of Hagglund’s position, my intention is to interrogate the argument in order to see if it offers a viable solution to what might be called ‘the current crisis in post-modernity’, or whether it can be written off as yet another case of armchair-based utopianism.