Jamie Aroosi’s new book is an original and refreshing contribution to the study of Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Marx. The starting point is their shared interest in Hegelian philosophy, which provides the prism for a comparative study of how both thinkers envision modern subjectivity, especially with regard to freedom and its many obstacles. Aroosi shows how Kierkegaard’s interest in individual self-transformation complements Marx’s analysis of collective class struggle and how this in turn provides a fuller picture of the challenges facing emancipatory politics. The book develops these challenges in terms of what the author calls “the dialectical self,” a term that in and of itself helps pinpoint the ruptures and tensions that continue to haunt the quest for self-government. Rather than aiming for complete reconciliation, the book shows how self-government emerges when the individual’s search for ethical authenticity runs up against the more collective concern for justice and recognition for all. The care with which the book develops this insight makes it a unique contribution to debates in contemporary political theory, especially about left Hegelianism and its usefulness for modern emancipatory politics.
The book’s overall form mirrors the dialectical structure underpinning its argument. Part 1 (chaps. 1 and 2) develops the analysis of “bondage” that we find in Kierkegaard and Marx, respectively. Part 2 (chaps. 3–5) turns to the conditions of “emancipation” that will allow modern subjects to escape their enslavement, highlighting the discourses and legal forms needed to disclose injustices in the present without falling back into nostalgia for the past. Part 3 (chaps. 6–8) uses these insights to develop a new synthesis, which in turn provides a fuller account of how Kierkegaard and Marx envision “freedom” as a combination of individual and collective self-transformation. This account is then followed by a discussion in Part 4 (chaps. 9 and 10) of the actual “praxis” that can make freedom real for those embodying it.
Throughout, Aroosi stages carefully crafted encounters between Kierkegaard and Marx, which enable the reader to appreciate their shared critique of modernity’s penchant for inauthenticity and exploitation. The kernel for this aspect of the book is the relationship between “love” (Kierkegaard) and “revolution” (Marx), which never become the same but nonetheless feed into each other. How this might be the case is the subject of the conclusion, in which Aroosi provides his final statement on the dialectical relationship between Kierkegaard and Marx: “Love is not enough—it also requires thought and action. This is the story of Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Marx” (p. 192).
Although the general reader will find much to appreciate in every chapter, the real strength of the book lies in how it uses Marxist concepts to shed light on Kierkegaard’s significant but strangely understudied contribution to modern political thought. The first interesting move in this regard is the discussion of Kierkegaard’s concept of despair, which Aroosi links to Marx’s concept of alienation. As Aroosi sees it, despair for Kierkegaard is a specific experience in which the individual self turns against her own actions, seeking to “will itself away” (p. 33). Although Kierkegaard was fond of equating this experience with religious sin, Aroosi shows how it in fact is a much more general concept that applies to many more aspects of modern life, including the ones Marx analyzed under the heading of alienation. What despair and alienation have in common is thus the tendency to accept, more or less willingly, a situation or a set of circumstances that are not of one’s own choosing (p. 34). For Kierkegaard, this tendency was particularly present among members of the Danish bourgeoisie during the 1849 transition to constitutional monarchy, but as Aroosi’s Marx reminds us, it is something much more prevalent. Despair (or alienation) is not only experienced by religious believers but also appears within most modern forms of life in which structures of domination and exploitation prevent individuals from taking responsibility for their own lives. For this reason, we might also say that despair is another way of characterizing the basic challenge to modern emancipation.
The main advantage of formulating the issue in this manner is that it places Kierkegaard at the very heart of debates in contemporary political theory. As Aroosi rightly notes, there has been an unfortunate tendency to treat Kierkegaard as a strictly ethical thinker for whom the realm of politics is either uninteresting or a sign of corruption (p. 7). Aroosi counters this tendency by linking Kierkegaard’s discussion of freedom to the analysis of “true democracy” that Marx develops in his Contributions to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (p. 144). What Marx points out—and what Kierkegaard helps us see even clearer—is that democracy is the most fundamental mode of political organization, because it follows directly from the experience of self-determination that both Marx and Kierkegaard posit as fundamental to the human condition (p. 147). For Kierkegaard scholarship, this insight is interesting because it also provides a new perspective on his hesitations about Denmark’s transition to constitutional monarchy in 1849. Following Aroosi’s analysis, we might say that Kierkegaard critiqued this transition not because he preferred a more authoritarian regime, but rather because he thought the alternative was externally imposed rather than actively willed. The transition, in other words, was not radical enough to undo the state of despair that Kierkegaard saw as the main obstacle to true emancipation.
One way to elaborate on this insight, taking the dialectical structure one step further than developed in this book, is to focus more directly on the narratological structure of the transition from inauthentic to authentic (or “true”) modes of democracy. Aroosi suggests that we approach the transition in existential, if not tragic, terms, pointing to literary examples such as Ibsen’s Nora, Job’s Abraham, and Homer’s Agamemnon (pp. 54–60). All of these examples resonate with Kierkegaard’s own thinking, and yet he also experiments with other tropes and genres, including irony and the comic more generally. Kierkegaard does so in an attempt to empower a higher degree of reflexivity about the struggle—and also limits—involved in becoming self-constituting. “Power in the comic,” Kierkegaard says in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), is the highest mode of existence available for finite beings. Aroosi’s book does not consider this possibility, which eventually may limit its ability to trace the emergence out of despair and into something like a true democracy. Kierkegaard’s turn to the comic suggests that this transition not only entails a certain distance from the process itself but also requires an affirmation of the inevitable twists and turns undermining the very idea of a clear goal. How to embody this experience remains a challenge for any account of “true” democracy.
These comments should not distract us from the many achievements of Aroosi’s book. Carefully argued—and skillfully written—it provides a much-needed boost to contemporary scholarship, showing how and why we must read Kierkegaard and Marx as part of the modern quest for democracy and self-determination.
