“Gives fresh philosophical and political vitality to a longstanding question... Much in the book will resonate with a democratic left that has gained strength in the seven-plus years since Occupy - in Black Lives Matter and the Sanders campaign, in the vision of the Green New Deal, in the Fight for $15 and in North Carolina’s Moral Mondays. This Life attempts to deepen the philosophical dimension of this left and to anchor its commitments in a larger inquiry: What kind of political and economic order can do justice to our mortality, to the fact that our lives are all we have?... This Life presents a vital alternative.” (Jedediah Britton-Purdy, The New Republic)

"An important new book.... Always lucid.... Beautifully liberating...I admire his boldness, perhaps even his recklessness. And his fundamental secular cry seems right: since time is all we have, we must measure its preciousness in units of freedom. Nothing else will do. Once this glorious idea has taken hold, it is very hard to dislodge...I finished This Life in a state of enlightened despair, with clearer vision and cloudier purpose - I was convinced, step by step, of the moral rectitude of Hägglund’s argument even as I struggled to imagine the political system that might institute his desired revaluation of value." (James Wood, The New Yorker)

“This is a rare piece of work, the product of great intellectual strength and moral fortitude. The writing shows extraordinary range and possesses an honesty and fervor which is entirely without cynicism. Beneath Hägglund’s affirmation of secular faith and a life-defining commitment is a compelling reworking of the early Heidegger’s existential analytic, especially his understanding of finitude and ecstatic temporality. With the great difference that this is a distinctly leftist project, where secular faith leads to spiritual freedom which is understood as a Hegelian-Marxist affirmation of democratic socialism. Hägglund is a genuine moralist for our times, possessed of an undaunted resoluteness and a fierce commitment to intellectual probity. Maybe he’s the philosophical analogue to Karl Ove Knausgaard.” (Simon Critchley, curator for The New York Times' The Stone and author of Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us)