PositiveThe Boston ReviewThe great virtue of Samuel Moyn’s important new book, Gerontocracy in America, is that it takes these issues seriously, grounding the debate in data and offering concrete prescriptions ... Strangely for a book so concerned with wealth and power, Gerontocracy in America doesn’t have much to say about class ... Though I am not persuaded by many of the arguments in this book, it still has much to teach us.
Martin Hägglund
RaveBoston Review...an audacious, ambitious, and often maddening tour de force ... This Life asks secular readers to take their own secularism seriously, reminding them that their worldview can and ought to influence their politics as fully as it might for religious believers ... his project is to be applauded. Its iconoclasm and sweep provide an example of what intellectual activity can and should look like in an era of emergency ... The answers certainly are not banal: starting from first principles, Hägglund seeks to reconstruct what a worthwhile human life might look like, and what institutional arrangement might make it possible. The most interesting feature of his analysis is the great attention he gives to temporality ... the great virtue of the book: it provides a regulative ideal, and a reminder of what kind of world we are actually fighting for. However secular he might be, Hägglund’s is ultimately a project of restoring faith ... The problem is that, for a book so concerned with theology, Hägglund does not really have a theory of religion. He does not, in other words, have a theory to explain why so many people, today and historically, have devoted themselves ... After a half century of anti-utopian suspicion, This Life calls us back to a nearly forgotten style of thinking and imagining.
