We all know that it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism. One of the most compelling and ambitious philosophical attempts to snap us out of the solidifying inertia of “capitalist realism” is Martin Hägglund's 2019 book This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free. In this conversation between Hägglund and Lea Ypi (the only in-person event transcript in this volume), Hägglund builds his argument from an analysis of our most basics needs as humans, and contends that Marx is in fact the strongest defender of key liberal/Enlightenment values such as liberty and equality, and that commitment to such values must inevitably lead us to a world beyond capitalism.

MARTIN HÄGGLUND is Birgit Baldwin Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities at Yale University. A member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, he is the author of four highly acclaimed books, and his work has been translated into eight languages.

LEA YPI is Professor in Political Theory in the Government Department at the London School of Economics. Her research interests include normative political theory, Enlightenment political thought and critical theory.

Lea Ypi (LY): I thought I would start by situating Marx, and Martin's reading of Marx, within a particular tradition and within the traditional way in which we think about that tradition. The tradition I have in mind is the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment conception of reason and free agency as something that unfolds in history, through which we reappropriate the world we inhabit, through which we are able to criticize foreign, alien instances like religion or natural circumstances. These are all familiar thoughts in the Enlightenment, carried forward in the Hegelian appropriation of the Enlightenment thinkers. The caricature understanding of Marx is that he was someone who had read the Enlightenment thinkers, who had read Hegel, who was very inspired by the German idealist tradition to which Hegel belonged, but that he was also a rebel, someone who was exposed to different traditions of thought, such as the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and the British empiricists, and became more concerned with day-to-day questions like what we eat, how we reproduce ourselves, how we live in communities – the kinds of day-to-day questions that the German poet Bertolt Brecht captured nicely in his phrase, “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral” (“First comes eating food, and then morality follows after”).