34 The Nation. October 7, 2019
YOSEMITE VALLEY, AFTER A PAINTING BY THOMAS HILL (ALAMY)W
hy should we be in favor of social-
ism? Many thinkers—philosophers,
economists, sociologists, political
theorists—have labored over this
question and advanced arguments
of various kinds. Some appeal to fairness:
Only a fundamental change in the distri-
bution of property and social goods will
arrange society in such a way that capital
and inherited wealth do not award advan-
tages mainly to a privileged few. Others
invoke the idea of human flourishing: Peo-
ple can realize themselves and achieve true
happiness only if they have the freedom to
pursue their individual and collective goals,
and they can do that only if they do not find
their life paths obstructed at every turn by
economic need. Then there is the instability
claim: As an economic system, capitalism is
intrinsically unsound and, quite apart from
any moral considerations, will eventually
collapse under the weight of its dysfunc-
tion, even if we seek to allay its difficulties
through stopgap efforts in social welfare and
massive incursions of foreign debt.
A different and rather novel sort of ar-
gument for socialism is that we must re-
turn to the most rudimentary philosophical
questions concerning what we take human
life to be and why we care about it at all.
We will then come to the conclusion that
socialism is the only political and economicEITHER THIS WORLD OR THE NEXT
Do we need to give up God to embrace socialism?
by PETER E. GORDON
Peter E. Gordon is the Amabel B. James Professor
in History and a faculty affiliate in philosophy at
Harvard. His most recent book, Migrants in the
Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of
Secularization, is out next year.
system that responds to these questions in
a suitable way. This is the approach taken
by Martin Hägglund in his searching new
book, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual
Freedom. A professor of comparative lit-
erature and humanities at Yale, Hägglund
brings to his argument an unusually wide
array of resources—philosophical, literary,
and political—that he braids together into
a passionate case for democratic social-
ism. His claims are not primarily economic,
nor are they grounded in considerations
of fairness or utility. We should endorse
socialism, he insists, because it is the only
arrangement of society that answers to our
fundamental conception of ourselves as be-
ings concerned with our own finitude. We
are, Hägglund observes, fragile creatures
who exist without any “final guarantee” in
the success of our commitments. Our lives
are precarious, but it is our unrestrained
investment in this precious life that leads
us to socialism and the creation of a society
that can afford us genuine fulfillment. “You
cannot shut down your sense of uncertainty
and risk without also shutting down your
capacity to feel joy, connection, and love,”
he writes. And it is this sense of uncertainty
and risk—the possibility that everything
might not hold together—that underwrites
our worldly commitment to one another; if
we were not finite, such commitment would
not be possible at all.
This concern with our own finitude is
what Hägglund calls “secular faith.” In a
series of chapters that address key thinkers
in the canons of philosophy and religion—
Augustine, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Martin
Luther King Jr.—Hägglund attempts to
show how this secular faith has served and
should continue to serve as the necessary
condition for all of our worldly actions and
thus why socialism and secular faith natu-
rally complement each other. Most provoc-
ative are those portions of This Life in which
Hägglund tries to show how traditional
religion fatally misconstrues the value of
human life by locating it in an eternal realm
beyond mortal bounds. We must commit
not to eternity, he argues, but to our own
worldly being. Yet like a belief in eternity,
this commitment to the finite world is every
bit as much a leap of faith.
Hägglund understands, of course, that
talk of secular “faith” sounds paradoxical
and may invite misunderstanding. He is
not interested in secularism in the juridical
or institutional sense, as in the Jeffersonian
“wall of separation” between church and
state. Nor is Hägglund concerned with the
question that might trouble a specialist in