“What’s missing in the work of Richard Dawkins is social justice”

Martin Hagglund, philosopher and literary theorist, photographed in Hyde Park London, October 2019. Photograph credit: Hanna-Katrina Jedrosz. No syndication.

Jovial, clean-cut and impeccably tailored, Martin Hägglund has been hailed as “the most important young philosopher in America”. Born in Sweden in 1976, he is now professor of comparative literature and humanities at Yale. When I meet him for coffee at the British Library in London, he arrives exuding all the cool serenity of someone enjoying great success.

The previous evening, he had spoken before a sell-out crowd at the London School of Economics about his book, This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, a philosophical tour de force. The premise of the book is simple, if unnerving: “life can matter only in light of death”, and that an eternal life is not only unattainable, it is undesirable. “Far from making my life meaningful,” Hägglund writes, “eternity would make it meaningless, since my actions would have no purpose.”