understand yourself as being exploited or alienated, you have to believe that you have a finite, precious time to live and that your own life is being taken away from you when that time is taken away from you. Accordingly, the cultivation of secular faith is indispensable for progressive politics.

Eternal salvation is not a goal worthy of our aspirations and it cannot even in principle redeem any forms of social injustice, since it would eliminate our freedom and any sense of who we are.

the key to democratic socialism is to have institutions in which we participate because we recognize ourselves and our freedom in their form.

For example, a husband who is making the movement of infinite resignation should be able to stay with his wife and children, apparently as devoted as ever to them, even though at every moment he is renouncing his care for them and is ready to give them up.

Rather than being seen as the meaningful conclusion of a life and as the ascent to eternity, death comes to be regarded as the meaningless interruption of a life. This leads Weber to the conclusion that the commitment to earthly progress makes our lives meaningless rather than meaningful: “Because death is meaningless, civilized life as such is mea

Hence, the third principle of democratic socialism is the one formulated by Marx: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”57 Marx does not develop the meaning of the principle, but in light of the first two principles of democratic socialism we can elaborate the implications. The aim of democratic socialism is to allow

While we can have private property in a concrete sense, however, we cannot have private property in the abstract sense that transforms property into a commodity that can be bought and sold for profit. The recognition of your property as your property is not based on your right to its abstract value as a commodity (or as a means for producing commod

What I call religious faith, then, is characterized by the attempt to convert us from our secular faith, since this faith makes us vulnerable to irrevocable loss. To have religious faith is to disown our secular faith in a fragile form of life. Religious faith holds that our ultimate aim should be to transcend the finitude we share.

To grasp the relation between the realm of freedom and the realm of necessity, the distinction between practical identities and mere social roles is crucial. The realm of freedom is defined by our practical identities—and their internal relations of priority in the form of our respective existential identities—which are expressed by the activities