How to Be a Marxist: An Evening with Martin Hägglund & Lea Ypi

If this life is all there is, what should we do with it? Yale philosopher Martin Hägglund and LSE philosopher Lea Ypi will consider some of the deepest questions of existence, arguing that only by stripping away their subtle illusions can we discover the true value of our earthly freedom.

Blending Kierkegaard with Hegel and Marx, Martin Hägglund’s new book This Life: How Mortality Makes Us Free offers a new generation of socialists a guide to living a life of radical political commitment. Join us for the London launch of This Life!

In developing his vision of an emancipated secular life, Hägglund engages with great philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel and Marx, literary writers from Dante to Proust and Knausgaard, political economists from Mill to Keynes and Hayek, and religious thinkers from Augustine to Kierkegaard and Martin Luther King, Jr. This Life gives us new access to our past – for the sake of a different future.

Through clarifying terms like socialism and capitalism, and by looking back to the core values that underpinned Marx’s philosophy, Hägglund and Ypi will explore why Marx is in fact the strongest defender of key liberal values such as liberty, and equality, and how commitment to such values must inevitably lead us to a form of democratic socialism.

Martin Hägglund is Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale. He has been hailed by Richard Klein as “the most important young philosopher in the United States.” His new book, This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free is published in August by Profile Books.

Lea Ypi is Professor in Political Theory in the Government Department, London School of Economics, and author of Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency.

This event is a collaboration between the London Philosophy Club, Bigg Books, and the Philosophical Society of England (PSE). It is being sponsored by The Philosopher, the UK’s longest-running public philosophy journal.

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