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Jean Jaurès is remembered as a speechmaker and a polemicist, as a tribune of the labor movement and the helmsman of a political party. I propose, however, that the best way to understand his political thought, the relationship of his thought to his own times, and the meaning of his thought for us today is to begin by considering his two doctoral theses, especially—as strange as this may sound—his first thesis, “De la realité du monde sensible” (On the reality of the sensible world). Jaurès’s early scholarship on metaphysics might seem far removed from politics, but in it he developed ideas about conflict and conciliation, the limited and the absolute, space and spirit that would set the pattern for his account of social democracy and its inner life. By the time he completed his theses in 1892, Jaurès had confronted the contrasts between country and city, classical and modern, philosophy and politics, republic and socialism. It is not surprising that he seems to have been preoccupied with reconciling what common sense would say cannot be reconciled. The quest for harmony that began in Jaurès’s early years would come to define his mature political thought.

Although Jaurès would live in Paris for most of his life, he was born 350 miles to the south, in the small commercial town of Castres, which sits on the river Agout in the department of the Tarn, a region of hills and river gorges. By the time of his birth in 1859, some mining, metallurgy, glassmaking, and textile manufacturing had come to the Tarn, but it was for the most part a place of grain fields, vineyards, and orchards.¹ The Jaurès family—Jules, an unsuccessful businessman, Marie-Adélaïde, a devout Roman Catholic from a family of textile merchants, and their sons, Jean and Louis (a daughter, Louise, died in infancy)—spent part of each year in a townhouse but lived the rest of the time on their farm, La Fédial Haute, about 3 miles outside Castres. Jean and Louis began their education at a small school run by a Castres clergyman and continued it a few years later at the Collège de Castres. The boys walked about an hour each day from La Fédial to reach their schools; when not in class, they spent much of their time out of doors.²

Jaurès excelled in his Greek and Latin studies, which most likely included readings in Homer, Thucydides, the classical Greek playwrights, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, and Cicero.³ In 1875, he was recruited to attend one of the best Parisian lycées, Sainte-Barbe, where he would prepare for the entrance exams to the École normale supérieure, the elite institution of higher learning for future academics, teachers, and civil servants. In the fall of 1876, Jaurès left the Tarn for Paris.⁴

Absorbed in the Greek and Latin classics during his two years at Sainte-Barbe, Jaurès spent most of his time in classes or studying in a small room at the student pension where he lived.⁵ In one of his student writings, Jaurès argued that the classics “have, after their long sleep, a youthful freshness and vivacity.” They are important not so much for their doctrines as for their sensibility: they “refresh and revive” modern minds. In particular, Jaurès commended Plutarch’s Lives to a modern world too ready to surrender to the debilitating idea that history is a continuous sequence of causes and effects. Plutarch’s writings, he declared, refute the proposition that “everything is enchained, and necessity directs even the heroes,” and they show modern people that one can “ally valor with prudence, liberality with respect for law, freedom with rule, and that good things do not lose their worth by avoiding extremes.”⁶

Jaurès entered the École normale supérieure in 1878 and soon decided to focus his studies on philosophy.⁷Although some French philosophers of that time had become interested in the work of Immanuel Kant, the core texts of the École’s philosophy curriculum remained the works of Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and Epictetus, with only secondary attention paid to Kant and other modern thinkers.⁸ The École sequestered its students in poorly lit and stuffy buildings, allowing them only two afternoons a week to explore the city. Although Jaurès apparently found time to read works by the French utopian socialists Claude Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, his course work took most of his attention. The normaliens did discuss politics, and most were supporters of France’s new republican regime—among them, one of Jaurès’s friends, the future sociologist Émile Durkheim, was known to attend republican rallies⁹—but Jaurès would remark years later on the lack of connection between his studies at the École and the political life of the city around him. “In minds nurtured in that fashion,” Jaurès wrote, “the most subtle and profound knowledge is found side by side with the most extraordinary ignorance. It is like a vast secluded room where the light penetrates only dimly.” Studying the ancients’ ideas about justice and friendship and the utopians’ visions of cooperative societies, he “did not know that there were socialist groups in France and a whole agitation of propaganda and fervor of sectarian rivalry.”¹⁰ The idea that classical republican thought might be relevant to political life in the French Republic was at least one of the reasons that the École retained a classical curriculum. However, as Jaurès would later write, although “the idea of freedom in Cicero and Tacitus was honored” there, “popular protest was scornfully treated as intemperate brawling.”¹¹

What did it mean to speak of a republic in France in the 1880s? For the ancient Romans, “res publica” (literally, “public thing”) had meant a political order in which the Senate and the popular assemblies each had some power, much like the blend of oligarchy and democracy that the Greeks before them had called a “politeia” (meaning something like “the political way of doing politics”). A “res publica” meant not only a system for making and enforcing law, but also an aspiration toward a certain moral order, toward a devotion to the common good. A classical republic was a regime of mixing and balancing, and of shared life in public spaces.

What use these ideas might have under modern conditions has never been self-evident. Classical republicanism assumed independent cities with a stability of culture and economy, not to mention a scale of social life that has long since become unavailable. By the end of the nineteenth century, the French word “république” had its own complex relationship to modern upheaval. When the First French Republic was declared in 1792, “république” meant, above all, a regime in which the sovereignty of the monarch had been overthrown and had been replaced by the sovereignty of “la nation,” the people as a whole. The close association between “république” and “révolution” continued through the series of uprisings and regimes—empires, monarchies, and the Second Republic of 1848 to 1852—that followed. “République” came to mean not only the people ruling, but also the people rebelling; it meant violent and disruptive acts by the people en masse, as well as the state of affairs those acts were intended to create.

The Third Republic was something different. When Emperor Napoléon III was captured by the Prussians in the summer of 1870, France’s previously weak National Assembly became the country’s only available government. The Assembly called for elections, after which a new National Assembly was to decide what sort of regime would govern France. In the meantime, the National Assembly would serve as a provisional parliament in what amounted to a provisional republic. But when the monarchist majority in the new National Assembly found itself unable to unite around a single royal house, the provisional republic remained in place. Patiently, the republican minority managed the country’s affairs, outlasted the internecine fights among the monarchist factions, and negotiated a peace with Prussia. In 1875, a new election gave the republicans enough seats in the National Assembly to establish, by a one-vote margin, a new set of governing institutions: a Chamber of Deputies and a Senate, a cabinet, a prime minister, and a president of the Republic. The provisional government had become a permanent government, not through a dramatic uprising but through an unheroic combination of political gambits, competent governance, and good luck.¹²

“République” now meant a regime that was anything but revolutionary. In fact, the militants of the Paris Commune, who briefly created a radical urban democracy in the spring of 1871, had been among the first foes of the nascent republic. Adolph Thiers, one of the Third Republic’s early leaders, spoke frankly: “The Republic will be conservative, or it will not be.”¹³

This was the “Republic” that Jaurès and his friends at the École normale supérieure knew and supported, the Republic that the student Jaurès endorsed when he became, according to the reminiscences of a friend, “a republican in the style of Ferry and the Opportunists of 1880.”¹⁴ Jules Ferry, along with Léon Gambetta, led a faction of republicans who wanted to consolidate the institutions of the new republic while putting off unwinnable or controversial social reforms until more opportune times. Their opponents thus named them the “Opportunists.” Ferry and the Opportunists were men of the Enlightenment tradition; they saw free thought and public debate as weapons against outmoded dogmas and as tools for building a modern republic. At the same time, they were in at least one sense republicans in the classical style: they thought of civic education—that is, the moral formation of a citizenry capable of self-government—as an essential element in the constitution of a republic. Thus, once the structure of the parliament, cabinet, and presidency had been settled, the Opportunists turned their attention to local government, to public education, and to citizens’ freedom of association.¹⁵

In 1881, just before he completed his studies, Jaurès began his involvement in political life. He joined a committee of Paris republicans, mainly Opportunists, that met to nominate a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies.¹⁶ Jaurès would not be long in the city, however. After finishing third in that year’s aggregation—the competitive exam for École graduates seeking teaching positions—he requested a position as professeur at a lycée near Albi, where he would be only 25 miles from his parents. He left Paris that summer to take up his teaching duties.¹⁷

Jaurès’s lectures at Albi take up themes that he would later develop. Because mind and matter act on each other “in constant rapport,” Jaurès taught his students, “we cannot understand the essence of matter without the essence of mind, and the reverse as well.”¹⁸ Made of mind and matter, human beings are obligated to uphold the dignity of the individual person, as Immanuel Kant had demonstrated: “In the individual we see one man, one example of human life in its ceaseless flux, one form and incarnation of the human person from which we must displace suffering and degradation” (PTA, 102).

Along with Kant, Jaurès worried that human beings rarely obey the moral law for its own sake: “It commands, and we do not listen to it.” Because of the rapport of mind and matter, Jaurès proposed, if we are to obey the moral law, we need not only the rational conviction regarding morality that Kant had described, but also a “feeling of duty,” a deep sensation of moral obligation that is to the human personality “as the core of the trunk is to the tree” (PTA, 90).

Asking how someone might acquire this moral feeling, Jaurès found himself turning toward public life. In 1882, only months after he arrived at Albi, Jaurès wrote his École classmate Charles Salomon that he might run for the Chamber of Deputies in 1885 if a seat was open: “When I shall have fathomed the depths of the universe, I will have to come back to the surface. . . . I tell you, my dear friend, that instead of taking me away from politics, my studies push me into it.” Jaurès began to attend meetings of the local republican club. After his father died in the spring of 1882, Jaurès no longer felt bound to remain in Albi. He found a position teaching philosophy at the University of Toulouse and moved there, bringing his mother with him, in the fall of 1883. He began to write articles for the local republican journal, La Dépêche de Toulouse, and won notice as a public speaker eager to defend the Republic against its critics. In 1885, he asked the Toulouse republicans to include him on their list of candidates for the Chamber. They agreed. Jaurès’s political career had begun.¹⁹

Republicans and socialists won 383 seats in the Chamber of Deputies in the 1885 elections, against 201 for the monarchists and Bonapartists of the Right. This meant a continued left majority in the Chamber, to be sure, but a narrowed majority: the Right had almost doubled the number of its seats since 1881, and its partisans remained unreconciled to the Republic. Although the basic institutions of the Republic had been in place for nearly a decade now, the regime’s stability was still in question. One reason why the Left’s candidates did not win as many seats as they had in 1881 was that the republicans were now divided into two loosely organized parties. Once republicans had to govern, they faced decisions about how to use their power, and such decisions are hardly ever simple. Ferry’s Opportunists were now met with bitter criticism from republicans who called themselves “Radicals” (or, in some cases, “Radical-Socialists”). The Radicals, led by Georges Clemenceau, deputy from and former mayor of the commune of Montmartre, differed from the Opportunists in both style and program. Enamored of the French Revolution, the Radicals saw themselves as latter-day Jacobins fighting for the purity of the Republic, and they disdained those who did not share their sense of urgency. They objected to the Opportunists’ policy of imperial expansion, and they insisted on immediate social reforms such as a progressive income tax, the introduction of pensions, the nationalization of the railroads, and limits on the length of the working day and on child labor. “Everything all at once,” sneered the Opportunists.²⁰

There were only about half a dozen deputies in the Chamber of 1885 who could properly be called “socialists.” French socialism was eclectic, and the socialists were even more fractious than their republican colleagues. Different from one another in mood and in strategy, these groups were nevertheless recognizable as members of the same political family. For socialists of that generation, “socialism” (or “communism” or “social democracy”—at this point, the terms were more or less interchangeable) meant a commitment to replacing the existing society with an utterly different social order based on mutuality, community, and cooperation. In the short term, most socialists sought to strengthen the labor movement, win social welfare legislation, expand voting rights, and eliminate oligarchic institutions like upper legislative chambers and standing armies. They wanted what the revolutionaries of 1848 had called “la république démocratique et sociale.”²¹ But most nineteenth-century socialists also made a qualitative distinction between their proximate and their ultimate goals. Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto—a document with a modest but increasing number of enthusiasts—promised that in time “the public power will lose its political character.”²² Or, in the words of Eugène Pottier’s “L’Internationale,” the movement’s anthem:

The world shall rise on new foundations;

We are naught, let us be all.

This is the final struggle.²³

These were aspirations that pushed beyond the bounds of politics. Democratic in practice, the nineteenth-century socialists drew previously voiceless members of the working class into political action. For many socialists, however, their democratic practices seemed no more than means to the end of a society in which political action and political movements would no longer be needed.

The first French socialist party had been organized in 1879, as the exiled revolutionaries of the Paris Commune returned; by 1885, there were at least five socialist groups. Although Marxism was an increasingly prominent tendency among socialists in some parts of Europe—most notably in Germany—Marx’s ideas were but one current among several within French socialism. The series of revolutions in France from 1789 to 1830 to 1848, the memory of the Paris Commune, and the utopians of the early nineteenth century—especially Proudhon, with his vision of a federation of local democracies—all informed and inspired French socialists.²⁴

That is not to say that Marxism was unimportant in France. The Parti ouvrier français (POF), led by Jules Guesde, was the largest and most organizationally coherent of the French socialist groups. Anomalous within the freewheeling French Left, the POF fiercely defended its rigid catechism of Marxist doctrines. Its style was marked by disdain for compromise, skepticism toward the institutions of the Republic, and unshakable confidence in the prospect of revolution. For Guesde and the POF, Marxism meant class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and the promise of a dramatic break between capitalism and the socialist system that would succeed it.

Quite different from the Parti ouvrier français in outlook was the small group of “independent socialists” influenced by the writings of Benoît Malon, a veteran of Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association and of the Paris Commune (where he was a Proudhonian dissenter against the Jacobin majority). Malon wanted to turn the moral impulse of French utopian socialism toward what he called the “reformist” and “experimental” process of change that was now possible within the Third Republic.²⁵ Aside from Malon’s circle of followers, the Marxists’ main rival among the socialist factions was a group led by Paul Brousse, labeled by Guesde the “Possibilists” for their interest in advancing the class struggle bit by bit and by any means possible. Indeed, it may have been Brousse who invented the term “Marxist” as an unfriendly label for his opponents in the POF.

To both Malon and Brousse, the Guesdists of the Parti ouvrier français seemed slavish followers of an authoritarian—and, worse, a foreign—thinker. As one associate of Malon wrote, Marxism was “essentially un-French,” mired in German “local prejudices,” and utterly lacking the “flexibility” and “passion” of French political thought.²⁶ Moreover, the Guesdists’ insistence that socialism was the inevitable result of historical processes left socialists without an intellectual guide to the complicated work of achieving reforms that might be immediately possible. Other smaller groups of French socialists—followers of Auguste Blanqui, who dreamed of a revolutionary conspiracy led by a small band of devotees, or of Jean Allemane, who wanted a revolutionary movement composed solely of real workers with “calloused hands”—added their own criticisms of the POF’s Marxism, but the common refrain was that Marxism, in addition to being a German import, seemed to lead its followers into a closed world of military-style party discipline and deterministic thinking, in which the lessons of France’s revolutionary past and the benefits of life in a republic were forgotten.²⁷

The newly elected Jaurès had little interest in any of these socialist groups. He found them self-marginalizing and simplistic, and he thought that none of them understood the importance of consolidating recent republican achievements before pressing for further reforms. Even Brousse’s Possibilists seemed narrow in their perspective and sectarian in their style, despite their interest in gradual change, and the Radicals’ impatient condescension toward the Opportunists dismayed him. Unwilling to join any of these groups, he declared himself an unaffiliated “republican at large” with an interest in the reconciliation of, or at least mutual respect among, all republican groups. The youngest member of the Chamber, he was slow to draw attention to himself. He sat quietly with the Opportunists and voted with them more often than not.²⁸ The question for Jaurès was, how to build and keep a republican majority? The best approach, it seemed to him, was to begin with the largest republican group and make it more inclusive. Aligning with the Opportunists required patience. It meant working for a distinctly nonrevolutionary republic and making majority building a higher priority than any policy question. To Jaurès, this was acceptable.

Jaurès had only an informal connection with the Opportunists; sitting with them in the Chamber did not make him a member of an organization. He would not remain unorganized for long, however. In 1886—which was also the year of his marriage to Louise Bois, the daughter of a wholesale merchant from Albi—Jaurès helped to found a labor caucus within the Chamber. Since his department included coal-mining towns like Carmaux, he had some acquaintance with the miners’ union, one of France’s first significant industrial unions. Composed of socialists, Radicals, and a few independent deputies like Jaurès, the labor caucus was formed in the wake of a bloody miners’ strike in Decazeville, some 100 miles northeast of Toulouse. Caucus members traveled to Decazeville, conducted an investigation there, and returned to the Chamber to call for policies that would benefit workers.²⁹

The caucus’s open and organized support for strikers was a scandal according to the dominant interpretation of the French republican tradition. With few dissenters, Radicals and Opportunists alike shared the horror that the Jacobins of the First Republic had felt toward any organization that set itself apart from the general will of the nation. A trade union, in this view, was no better than an aristocratic house or a monastic order. Although an Opportunist-led government had legalized unions in 1884, partly as a response to an unprecedented wave of strikes, for most French republicans, this law represented an unhappy accommodation with a new and disturbingly significant force in French society, a foreign object too firmly lodged within the body politic to be safely excised. The labor caucus represented a dissident variety of republicanism in France, in some ways closer to the classical model of making latent conflicts public, of openly balancing different classes and interests.³⁰

After joining the labor caucus, Jaurès drew closer to the miners’ union. In 1886, not long after the Decazeville strike, he was invited to the congress of the miners’ federation at Saint-Étienne to speak about union rights and the prospect of pension legislation. In 1887, he led a parliamentary fight to require that miners’ delegates be included in mine safety inspections, and he worked, although with little success, to introduce pensions, accident and sickness insurance, and other social welfare measures that would benefit his working-class constituents.³¹

In the Chamber and in the Dépêche, Jaurès defended the place of unions in the Republic. René Waldeck-Rousseau, the interior minister who had ushered in the labor law of 1884, had argued that “the association of individuals in accordance with their professional affinities is not so much a weapon of combat as an instrument of material, moral, and intellectual progress.”³² Jaurès, however, insisted that unions were instruments of moral progress in part because they engaged in political combat. The strike might be a “terrible weapon,” he wrote in 1887, but it was necessary if civic life were to be possible under modern conditions, since “there [was] no other way to reconcile humans than to render them truly equal,” and equality was not achieved without the development of organizations that could guarantee some measure of power to those previously powerless. At the same time, unions showed the republic what it was like for citizens to be not only neighbors but fellows as well. “The greatest good that the Revolution has given to men is surely liberty,” Jaurès wrote, but “liberty without solidarity is only a word, and solidarity itself is nothing if it remains a mere sentiment, if it does not take institutional form.” When unions engaged in peaceful strikes and orderly collective bargaining on progressively larger scales, they enlarged their circles of solidarity. With this organizational expansion would come a new consciousness for union members, more political and less strictly economic, more appreciative of negotiation and less enamored of revolution—but, for all that, the daily activities of unions would be no less an attack on social inequality and on the privileges of the upper class. An expansion of “association” among workers, Jaurès concluded, would provide workers with “both wisdom and power.”³³

As the elections of 1889 approached, Jaurès began to express a new confidence in his own political purposes. Campaigning in his hometown of Castres that August, he said: “I hold in my heart a dream of fraternity and justice. I want to work for it until it has been realized.”³⁴

Jaurès lost his bid for reelection, however.³⁵ Returning to Toulouse with Louise and their newborn daughter, Madeleine, he took up teaching once more and wrote frequently for the Dépêche. At times, Jaurès now used the word “socialism” as a name for his political position.³⁶ Socialism seemed a “luminous ideal that shines before the working class, guiding them,” he wrote in an October 1889 essay. None of the existing socialist groups, however, had figured out how to follow the socialist pillar of fire without getting lost in the wilderness. Even the Possibilists stumbled at the same point that other socialists did: their sole political task, as they saw it, was to engage in class struggle. The Possibilists understood the need for that struggle to yield gradual reforms, but, to an extent they had not yet thought through, their acceptance of republican methods was at odds with their commitment to class struggle. The republic operated by majority rule, but the industrial working class was still a minority. “If the socialist party is right to demand a broad representation for the workers, it cannot long maintain the principle of class struggle,” Jaurès wrote. “Either it must start a violent revolution or, contrary to its principles, it must seek an alliance of classes in common defense of liberty, in common pursuit of justice.”³⁷

The contradiction between the politics of class and the politics of the common good was not unresolvable, Jaurès wrote. The intellectual solution lay in the republican tradition, he proposed, and the organizational solution lay in the republican majority among French citizens. “There is in France an immense socialist party that calls itself simply ‘the republican party,’” Jaurès wrote in October 1890. “The French republican party, basing itself on the French Revolution, is a socialist party, whether it says so or not, because the Revolution contains all of socialism.” The French political tradition already contained socialism because the ideas of that tradition, if pursued conscientiously and thoroughly, required a confrontation with the new problems of a capitalist society. So far that confrontation had been the business of small and marginal socialist groups, Jaurès wrote, but he thought this need not always be the case: “Our goal must be not to found socialist sects outside the republican majority, but to bring the party of the Revolution to boldly and explicitly recognize what it is: a socialist party.”³⁸ Existing socialist groups erred when they aimed to build a movement committed exclusively to class struggle. This might have made sense when socialism was a new movement of protest against the conditions of workers in the emerging capitalist economy. Now, Jaurès proposed, a better way to win the “broad representation for the workers” of which he had written the year before would be to build a party, or a coalition of parties, that could assemble an electoral majority in favor of social reform. Significantly, this majority would be a republican majority. Its members would speak the common language of republican politics: rejection of monarchy and aristocracy; commitment to liberty, equality, and fraternity; a concern with both institutions and civic virtue; an affection for the complexity of life in public spaces.

Jaurès had close at hand a model of what this republican socialist majority might look like. He had been elected to the Toulouse city council in a July 1890 special election and served as a member of the governing coalition of socialists and Radical republicans. There were tensions between republicans and socialists—and between socialists, to be sure—but the liveliness and durability of coalitions like that in Toulouse heralded a new kind of politics, as different from older kinds of socialism as socialism was from the liberal republicanism of previous generations.³⁹

Jaurès’s “dream of fraternity” was taking shape. By the end of 1890, he had a rough idea of the political path he wanted to follow: republican-socialist coalitions, a legislative and electoral strategy coupled with support for striking workers, the expansion of collective bargaining, and the introduction of social welfare measures. He was developing a social theory as well. Under the influence of Lucien Herr, who had become librarian at the École normale supérieure in 1888 and with whom he had struck up a friendship while conducting research for his Chamber speeches, Jaurès began to read the writings of Karl Marx. Aside from the Communist Manifesto, a full translation of which had been published only in 1885, few of Marx’s works had been translated into French—Jaurès would read most of them in the original German—and Herr was among the few French socialists who knew them well. Jaurès filled the margins of his copy of Marx’s Capital with notes. He was impressed by Marx’s exposition of the intimate relationships between value and capital, capital and labor: here was a precise and sophisticated account of the mechanics of injustice in industrial societies.⁴⁰

As much as Jaurès thought he had to learn from Capital’s analysis of society, he was not moved by the Manifesto’s apocalyptic prophecies. Neither Marx’s certainty about the inevitable fall of capitalism nor his vision of a future in which humanity has outgrown political life altogether won Jaurès over to Marx’s theory of history. But the members of a political movement need to be confident that their efforts are not futile. If he was not to join Marx in awaiting a revolution, how would Jaurès explain why his republican socialism was worth pursuing? Jaurès wanted a way of thinking about politics that could account for strikes and electoral coalitions, a program of radical reform and a politics of mixing and balancing, the facts of the Third Republic and the dream of fraternity. Most fundamentally, he wanted to confront the problem of hope—but not in Marx’s way. All this, Jaurès seems to have decided, would require intellectual work at some remove from politics itself.

In the 1890s, candidates for the doctorat ès lettres were required to complete two theses, a primary thesis in French and a secondary thesis in Latin. Jaurès had begun work on a thesis in philosophy as early as 1883 or 1884, soon after he arrived in Toulouse. Setting the project aside when he became a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies, he did not return to it until 1890. There followed two years of intense intellectual activity, alongside his service on the Toulouse city council, his journalism for the Dépêche, and his continued advocacy for the miners’ and glassmakers’ unions of the Tarn. By 1892, Jaurès had completed his two doctoral theses.⁴¹

Jaurès begins his French thesis, “De la realité du monde sensible,” with a deceptively simple question: “The sensible world—what we see, what we touch, where we live: is it real?” (PTA, 113). Jaurès has absorbed part of Kant’s critical philosophy; he affirms that the senses collect “fragmentary impressions” of the world while the mind acts as an “architect” to structure them (PTA, 113, 115). Our experiences of the sensible world take the form they do because human consciousness organizes human perceptions through categories such as time, space, and causality. For Kant, the role of consciousness in organizing perceptions means that human knowledge of the world is radically limited. We cannot know how closely things as they appear to us match things as they are in themselves: the phenomena we experience through our senses and the noumena conceived within our minds are separate from one another. Here Jaurès breaks with Kant. Whereas, for Kant, rational consciousness marks human beings as peculiar and betrays their alienation from things-in-themselves, in Jaurès’s eyes, the work of human consciousness marks human beings as full citizens of the cosmos.

What Kant and French neo-Kantians failed to understand, Jaurès argues, is the importance of what we see when we look at the world around us.⁴² In the sensible world, we encounter not merely a series of objects and events; a world like that would be an incomprehensible “ghost in motion.” Instead, we perceive a drive toward form and toward orderly relationships. Jaurès does not mean that our perception of order in the world proves that the world is orderly. He has absorbed too much Kant to make such an argument; like Kant, he thinks that we see order because our consciousness arranges our sense perceptions into ordered systems. But human consciousness is itself part of the world, Jaurès argues, and so if we have a predisposition to perceive order it must be because human consciousness shares with the world as a whole certain structures and impulses. We perceive order because human consciousness, like the rest of the world, tends toward order. That pull toward order, he writes, is the world’s most fundamental trait.

That is why there is organization in the world; or, rather, that is why each part of the world is organized: thus we have the vast ensembles of intertwined movements that we call the systems of stars, we have the systems of forces united by secret affinities that make up chemical compounds, we have living organisms, we even have higher consciousnesses that try to draw the entire universe into their own smaller unities. These organized systems do not exist in relation to a purpose outside themselves. Each only serves itself, or at any rate it is never the essence of any of these systems to serve anything but itself. . . . Each becomes real only through an interior aspiration, through an obscure and conscious effort of its own toward beauty and independence of form. (PTA, 120)

All the pieces of the world—galaxies, living things, cells, molecules—are by nature both individuated and relational. Every “organized system” aspires toward autonomy, toward self-rule; at the same time, these autonomous systems are each members of larger and more encompassing systems with their own orderly patterns and internal rules. Jaurès’s account of the universe sounds so much like what Aristotle claimed about human beings—that we are most ourselves when we are members of communities in which members take turns ruling and being ruled, and in which the community aspires to a shared good life—that at times Jaurès seems to be writing not so much a metaphysical argument with political implications as an account of political life projected onto a cosmic screen.

Jaurès depicts this endless making of organized systems as both a physical phenomenon and a moral drive.

It is not that these organized systems are isolated from one another and that the world finds its being only by losing its unity, for, first, no phenomenon is part of these systems without also being part of the causal and mechanical series that link it to the totality of phenomena, and, moreover, all these organizations, to various degrees and in various ways, aspire to the same end: unity, beauty, freedom, joy. They are thus all linked together outwardly and inwardly, by the exterior and indefinite bonds of the causal series, and by the inner community of the superior and divine purpose that they share. (PTA, 120)

Precisely because we recognize in it something ideal, we can be confident about the reality of the world as we experience it, the reality of what Kant called “the phenomenal realm” and of what Jaurès variously calls “the sensible,” “the visible,” “the solid,” or “the palpable.” We might say that, in recognizing ourselves as parts of a whole, we recognize the sensible world as real and as aspiring to order. Jaurès insists equally on the inverse claim: recognizing the sensible world as real, we recognize ourselves as parts of a whole, as participants in the universal order and dynamics of Being (l’être).⁴³

Thus Jaurès cannot accept the “famous comparison” between Kant’s critical philosophy and Copernicus’s theory that the sun, rather than the earth, is the point around which the planets of our system revolve. Quite the opposite: because it treats human consciousness as an anomaly, Kant’s philosophy is better compared to the medieval, earth-centered view of the cosmos. A true Copernican revolution in philosophy, Jaurès writes, would displace human consciousness from the center, treating it as simply one component of the world, not particularly different from any other; it would “place the self within the living system of infinite consciousness” (PTA, 356). Jaurès, in this respect, turns Kant inside out.

“Consciousness,” as Jaurès uses the term, is not a distinctively human quality of rational self-awareness, but something more like purposeful existence. Jaurès rejects “the opposition, or even the radical distinction, between Being and consciousness” (PTA, 235). Every fragment or aspect of the world contains aspirations that are, in this sense, conscious—although those aspirations might be more obscure here and more overt there. The rational consciousness with which Kantian philosophy is concerned is not to be thought of as something separate from the body and therefore separate from the physical world. Indeed, Jaurès writes nearly as often about the brain (le cerveau) as about consciousness (la conscience) or mind (l’esprit). After all, Jaurès argues, consciousness is located in the brain, an organ of the body. Thus, building on his lectures at Albi, Jaurès proposes that what philosophers study is not consciousness in and of itself, as Kant had argued, but rather “consciousness in its rapport with the reality of the world.”⁴⁴ This rapport, this “continuity of the Being of the world and the being of the brain,” means that human perceptions give us access to the world as it really is (PTA, 370, 351). Our experiences of the sensible world are experiences of reality, of Being itself, and we ought to take with full seriousness the physical and sensual world as we find it.

But something other than the nature and limits of knowledge is at stake here. Jaurès has introduced the idea that Being is characterized not only by unity, but also by diversity and individuation—and by unity not only through “the causal series,” but also through aspiration toward a “divine end.” Jaurès’s universe is neither random nor uniform, neither static nor deterministic. It—and thus the human communities possible within it—can change, in an uneven but orderly fashion, in ways not so much dictated by causal laws as motivated by moral aims.

When Jaurès writes about Being’s ideal unity, he echoes the Platonic and Neoplatonic notion of Ideas or Forms more real than their tangible approximations.⁴⁵ But Jaurès wants to account for Being’s diversity and complexity without repeating Platonic philosophy’s denigration of the sensible world; he wants to be able to say both that Being is a perfect whole and that it is composed of imperfect parts, but he does not want to treat those parts as illusions or distractions, as shadows on the wall of a cave. To account for these apparently incongruous ideas, Jaurès borrows the categories developed in Aristotle’s Metaphysics.⁴⁶ There Aristotle distinguished between actuality (entelecheia, conventionally translated into French as “acte”) and potency or potentiality (dynamis, conventionally translated into French as “puissance”). Jaurès proposes that Being be understood as having two faces: Being in actuality (l’être en acte) and Being in potentiality (l’être en puissance). Insofar as the world is intelligible, and therefore real, Jaurès writes, it must be because “the world participates in the continuity of time and space, as in the absolute continuity of indeterminate, homogenous, and continuous Being.” Being’s actuality, in other words, depends on or is grounded in Being’s potentiality.

Determinedness is thus not enough to constitute the reality of the world: there must also be the absolute continuity of Being considered as undetermined potentiality. To be real, the world must participate not only in the actuality of Being, but in the potentiality of Being. . . . The permanence of a form is possible only because the potentiality of Being is always mixed in all its activities. . . . It must be that every element of Being lives its own life and at the same time aspires to harmony of form and unity of type. Thus, within each element, aside from its own activity there must be a ground of Being and, if I can put it this way, there must be stored-up aspirations toward form. (PTA, 123–24)

Neither “permanence of form” nor “activity”—neither the world’s stability nor the evident possibility of new and surprising things in the world—can be accounted for by deterministic theories, whether of cosmology or of human history. Every phenomenon trembles with unrealized possibilities; particular facts, Jaurès writes, are comprehensible only in relation to “an ideal end,” which must be “the immense harmony of all.” Jaurès’s occasional use of the word “unity” may be confusing since he also writes about “harmony” (PTA, 125). This is not a contradiction, however. The essential point is that the unity toward which Being aspires, in Jaurès’s account, is not unity of identity or erasure of distinctions. Rather, it is unity of purpose, common participation in an ordered whole. Being, in Jaurès’s understanding, wants to arrange itself like a musical composition whose distinct notes all harmonize with one another.

That ideal end of “immense harmony” is what Jaurès calls “Being in potentiality.” Because Being in potentiality makes possible—and thus in a sense is the origin of—all particular facts, it is logically prior to them. At the same time, Being in potentiality is in another sense the goal or the end of all particular things. Being in actuality, then, is the aspect of Being that remains particular, incomplete, unharmonized. Though infinite in its potentiality, Being is finite in its actuality. Being in actuality aspires to (and is grounded in) Being in potentiality, but a gap always remains: Being’s actuality never fully achieves or exhausts Being’s potentiality. Given the ideal end Jaurès claims for Being—a kind of joyful sociability among its fragments—this seems to be necessarily so. Only if Being aimed at a perfect unity of identity could the actual and the potential merge. Unity can be perpetual, but harmony among moving voices gives rise to new harmonies and new dissonant overtones.

Although he takes the actuality-potentiality distinction from Aristotle, Jaurès uses it in his own way. Aristotle wrote about the actuality and potentiality of particular beings; he wanted to understand the processes of development that beings undergo as they move through actuality toward potentiality—from acorn to oak, for instance, or from a set of people in one place to a political community. For Aristotle, actuality becomes (or can become) potentiality. For Jaurès, however, actuality and potentiality are aspects of Being as such. The relationship between the two is not one of change over time, but of permanent co-presence. “Infinite Being is not on the way to realization; it is already the fullness of Being. Infinity does not become; it is,” Jaurès writes. “The infinity of Being is present really, actually, in all fragments of reality” (PTA, 152). A pair of concepts that Aristotle used to account for growth and development becomes, for Jaurès, a way to give an account of the perpetual tension that constitutes Being. When Jaurès writes that the world’s parts all aspire to the common end of unity, beauty, freedom, and joy, he is not making a prediction about the degree to which those ends will be realized in the future; he is proposing that we can sense the presence of those ends now, in the world as we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel it. Thus the facts of conflict, ugliness, oppression, and sadness are not the last word on reality. Writing about the concept of movement, Jaurès proposes that trajectory is more significant than extent: “Every movement—whatever it is, whatever its form, its speed, its direction—is infinite since it gives form to a part of Being; Being is homogenous and singular, and so every one of its parts shares in its infiniteness. Every movement is thus infinite from the point of view of Being and of Being’s potentiality; it is so also from the point of view of Being’s form and Being’s actuality. . . . Each form of movement expresses in its own way the universal system” (PTA, 173–74). Thus, if we want to look for infinity—that is, for the potentiality of Being—we need not look elsewhere than the finite and particular organized systems and instances of movement that we meet in the sensible world. Every form, every organization, every movement intimates the unity, beauty, freedom, and joy that are the purpose of Being. The potentiality of Being is not to be waited for, but to be recognized here and now, in real spaces and at the present time. If we enter into the limited movements and not quite harmonious relationships of the world that surrounds us, we will not be distancing ourselves from the “ideal end” or “divine end” of Being. To pursue the ideal is not to depart from the sensible world, but to comprehend it. To take seriously the sensible world is not to neglect the ideal, but to find it.

Turning from the vocabulary of classical Greek philosophy to the vocabulary of biblical religion, Jaurès at times uses “Dieu” as a synonym for “l’être.” Twice, he quotes Paul’s “in God we live, and move, and have our being” (PTA, 154, 347).⁴⁷ and he writes: “God, or Being, is at the same time, and in an indestructible unity, both actuality and potentiality” (PTA, 129). Jaurès’s God is not a self-contemplating “idol of perfection” like the god of Plato and Aristotle, but is active and “present in our struggles and in our sadness, in all struggles and all sadness.”

Because God is infinite, he has an infinite need to give himself, to pour himself out in all beings and to rediscover himself by that effort. . . . Because God is the supreme reality and the supreme perfection, he does not want to exist in a state of unperturbed and imperturbable perfection. He puts himself in question; he finds a way to give himself up to the uncertain work of the world; he becomes poor and suffering with the universe in order to complete his essential perfection through the holiness of voluntary suffering. The world is in a sense the eternal and universal Christ. (PTA, 154)

Always on the Cross, always rising from the tomb: that, for Jaurès, is the dynamic that constitutes Being. It is important to note here that Jaurès sees “Christ” as an appropriate symbol for the world, not for a particular event in the world. Every facet of the world’s yearning for harmonious order, not only one specific instance of that yearning, shows humanity what it is to live for the sake of something outside the self. Jaurès wants to say here that there will be no one moment at which potentiality overcomes actuality once and for all, no one day when a qualitative transformation takes place. Whatever new birth or resurrection—or revolution—the world experiences will be instead a perpetual, and thus perpetually incomplete, reordering of the world into a harmonious whole.

This is not to say that Jaurès was returning to the Roman Catholic Church of his youth.⁴⁸ It is doubtful, to say the least, that his theology could have passed as orthodox. But the fondness for biblical language and sympathy for religious feeling that he shows here is more than a rhetorical decoration.⁴⁹ Certainly the words “God” and “Christ” are likely to have a different effect for readers, especially readers schooled in the Christian tradition, than the words “Being,” “actuality,” and “potentiality.” To say that God is present not just in all struggles but in our struggles is to invite a response that is not detached or objective, and not merely cognitive. The danger, as Jaurès sees it, is that philosophical argument involves contemplation but not commitment. “This is an era of refined powerlessness and pretentious debility,” Jaurès writes. These features of the modern condition can be overcome, however, because “human consciousness needs God, and will know how to reach him,” just as “human society needs fraternal justice, and will know how to achieve it,” despite the “sophists and skeptics” who obscure these truths (PTA, 135). Philosophical language offers precision and transparency, but Jaurès suggests that theological language has its virtue, too: “The very essence of religious life is to leave behind the mean and egoistic self” (PTA, 347). Jaurès wants words that have effects beyond the conveyance of concepts, words that have the capacity to pull his readers or listeners out of moral isolation, or at least to instigate within them a protest against that isolation. Jaurès claims in his French thesis to be dealing in philosophical knowledge, but he lets slip now and then that he is at least as concerned with what he can express, or elicit, as with what he can prove. “De la realité du monde sensible” is—perhaps among other things, but perhaps nothing other than—an exposition of how the world looks to someone who has adopted a certain orientation toward it: active, critical, appreciative, engaged.

Every theology needs a theodicy; hope needs to be plausible. Since, by definition, Being in actuality cannot fully realize Being in potentiality, Jaurès reminds his readers, the “infinite joy” of Being in potentiality is present within and around the “infinite sadness” of Being in actuality. Joy is the ever present aspiration of all existence, but “the perfect, because of its very perfection, and to earn its perfection, unfolds the world in effort, in contradiction, in struggle, that is to say, in suffering.” Being stretches toward joy and toward harmony only through an endless struggle, Jaurès writes. There can be progress of a kind, progress that “raises, transforms, and enlarges the conditions of the struggle,” but the struggle is never superseded. Thus the world “oscillates between conflict and harmony.” Moments of harmony are never more than provisional because “there remains at the base of the world an eternal contradiction” between Being in actuality and Being in potentiality, “a hidden root of suffering.” But Jaurès is quick—too quick?—to add that suffering is never absolute because “the divine activity that pours out the world remains like an inexhaustible spring of joy.” Indeed, the life of the world consists of a continual effort to achieve harmonious organization and shared joy, an effort that is always incomplete and always possible: “The battle is never wholly won; it is never wholly lost” (PTA, 175–77).

The important thing, Jaurès wants to say, is not a transformation that will happen in the future. What matters is the contour of the present. Tellingly, Jaurès writes little in “De la realité du monde sensible” about time and a great deal about space. For Jaurès, the reality of space is a particularly important idea because the expansiveness and three-dimensionality of space guarantees the possibility of movement, and thus of freedom (PTA, 129–35). He distinguishes between the idea of “place” (lieu) as it was studied by Aristotle and other ancient thinkers—the position of objects in relation to one another—and the idea of “space” (espace), properly understood. For space to be conceivable, Jaurès writes, two intellectual “revolutions” were necessary. First, Christian theology—in particular the thought of Augustine, who was “amazed that images of extensiveness can pour out and move through the nonextensive soul”—taught that “the development of interior life, the habit of contemplation” does not distract us from the sensible world, but rather grounds our comprehension of it. Then, at the beginning of the modern era, Copernican thought posited a universe of infinite space, showing us that we are located within a limitless expanse of Being. After these two revolutions, Jaurès writes, it became possible to understand space as the site where the absolute is present in the world. For Jaurès, thinking spatially involves recognizing both the inclusion of particular spaces within the infinite expanse of Being and the presence of infinite Being within particular spaces. Thus Jaurès can say that the absolute—or the infinite, or the potentiality of Being, or divine perfection—is not an unembodied spirit or an event that will reach fullness at a future time; instead, the absolute becomes available to our senses through its spatial character. Because space is real, Jaurès argues, it is in real spaces, in the present, that we are able to sense the world’s aspiration toward an ideal harmony (PTA, 291–93).⁵⁰

Precisely because absolute consciousness creates the reality of the world, all the individuals and all the forces of the world keep the reality they already have and the duties that are already familiar to them. By blending into the world, God pours out not only life and joy but also modesty and common sense. Precisely because he is present in all, God does not invalidate, does not destroy, the simple and quiet relationships among objects and beings. The lofty sky and stars find their full reality and their justification in the absolute and divine consciousness, but so also does the modest home where, between the family table and the hearth, the man with his humble tools wins for himself and his own their daily bread. (PTA, 374)

Instead of asking his readers to expect that the world will someday arrive at a state of perfect harmony and full joy, Jaurès asks them to consider the simple, the quiet, the contained, the humble, the quotidian. It is in these, if anywhere, that we can find the proper object of our deepest commitments and the proper sphere of our most fundamental moral and political responsibilities. If we want to see the entry of the ideal into reality, Jaurès suggests, we should look not to things distant but to things immediate, not to a time in the future but to the space in which we are already present.

To most socialists of the early 1890s, eagerly awaiting the total realization of their ideal, the moral stance revealed in “De la realité du monde sensible” would have seemed wrong, or at least unfamiliar. Nevertheless, Jaurès saw socialism as the political counterpart to his metaphysical argument. If “the deeper meaning of life” is “that the universe itself is but a boundless and muddled yearning toward order, beauty, freedom, and kindness,” as he wrote around the time he began working in earnest on his French thesis, then one might claim that “the universe is, in its own way, socialist.”⁵¹ The question is what kind of socialist politics might bring that deeper meaning to the surface.

In his Latin thesis, “De primis socialismi germanici lineamentis” (The first outlines of German socialism), Jaurès transposes the “pure and contemplative philosophy” of his French thesis into a political key and begins to work out the differences between the socialism he rejects and the socialism he wants. He does this by writing about a philosophical tradition that is not only the carrier of a “doctrine,” he tells his readers, but also “a party within the state,” which “fights to smash the foundations of the existing society” (PTA, 383). For Jaurès, German socialism showed (sometimes despite itself) how the ideal of justice and harmony about which he had written in his French thesis might take shape within the world—that is, within the conflict, disharmony, and finite spaces of political life.

German socialism was naturally a subject of great interest for any socialist at this time. The German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD) was the largest socialist party in Europe. Even in 1890, when it was just emerging from more than a decade of repression under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Laws, the SPD was able to win almost one and a half million votes for its Reichstag candidates. Alone among the socialist movements of the European countries, German socialists offered a model that could be, and was, imitated elsewhere. Unlike their French and English counterparts, the Germans had a single nationwide party with a mass membership, an established party press, cultural organizations, a relatively well developed party bureaucracy, and defined roles for local branches, central leaders, and party congresses.⁵²

Along with the German style of organization, new socialist parties were also adopting German ideas. German socialists had for a long time been divided between followers of Ferdinand Lassalle, who emphasized peaceful change and the role of the national state in establishing socialism, and those of Karl Marx, for whom socialism meant relentless class struggle and, as certain as sunrise, a smashing revolutionary victory in the relatively near future. But during the dark days of the Anti-Socialist Laws, Marxism’s promise of an inevitable revolution won over many former Lassalleans, and, by 1890, Marx’s ideas were ascendant; in 1891, as Jaurès completed his Latin thesis, the SPD’s Erfurt congress would officially adopt Marxism as the party’s doctrine.⁵³

Jaurès sees the peculiarly German spirit of German socialism as both a fault and a virtue. Because the SPD’s strategy and style respond to its own circumstances, Jaurès suggests, socialists in other countries would be unwise to imitate it uncritically. But they would also be unwise to ignore it because German socialism is the culmination of an intellectual tradition that offered to the rest of the world a distinctive and useful way of thinking. The political visions of Marx and Lassalle are rooted in the thinking of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Immanuel Kant, and Martin Luther, who together compose a tradition that “claims that there is in history and in political economy a certain dialectic that changes the forms of things and of human relations” (PTA, 383).⁵⁴ What Jaurès means by “dialectic” is simply this: “The Germans deliberately bring together and reconcile things that seem to be embattled opposites” (PTA, 398). According to the German tradition, whatever moral or political progress is to be achieved will proceed through the reconciliation of certain pairs of principles that are seen as being, but do not have to be, in conflict with each other.

This way of thinking is quite unlike the French, Jaurès writes. The Germans reconcile, whereas “the French passionately embrace one side of the contradiction, so they can more thoroughly despise and crush the other. The French oppose reason to faith, individual freedom to collective power. The Germans interpret the Christian religion rationally, and they assert that the freedom of each can only be established and secured through the legitimate power of the state” (PTA, 398–99). This habit of nondialectical thinking drives the French to conceive of freedom only as “the abstract faculty of choosing between contrary options, as the hypothetical independence of each citizen taken individually” (PTA, 383). The French “tend to treat each will abstractly, as if an individual could be separated and isolated from broader patterns of events, as if each were sufficient to himself, power for power, so that we then claim that all men are equally free. From this comes the economic maxim ‘Each for himself.’”⁵⁵ This idea of freedom, Jaurès writes, is ghostly, otherworldly, immaterial, cut off from life. It is not a picture of substantive justice (PTA, 389). The French, as much as any nation, needed to learn something from the German tradition.

Jaurès proposes that everything really distinctive in German socialism, including its dialectic method of thought, comes from Luther. No political radical, Luther wanted “not to change society but to reform the realm of conscience and faith,” and he distanced himself from the peasant rebellions he helped to inspire. Despite Luther’s own intentions, however, his insistence on “the liberty to interpret and to comment” on Scripture, his doctrine of the priesthood of all Christians, and his conviction that “the sacraments only have merit when Christians have perfect equality and communion” helped to open a new era in which political life would be shaped by recurring waves of protest and reform. Luther never “wholly embraced the social question” even when he did find something to say about economic matters, as in his pamphlet on usury (PTA, 385–87, 397). But what interests Jaurès most is the idea at the heart of Luther’s theology: the doctrine of salvation by grace. Here Jaurès finds a paradigm for understanding matters far removed from Luther’s principal concerns.

In Luther’s theology, human beings are weak, fallen, distorted by humanity’s original sin. Under our own power, through our own merit, we are unable to fulfill God’s commandments. Our judgment is flawed, and we cannot reliably carry out our own intentions. We cannot simply decide to do what we should. We can only do good “with the grace and help of God.” Thus the source of freedom—of our capacity to make our actions follow our own wills—is not found within the individual self. The doctrine of free will, for Luther, is dangerous not only because it is incorrect, but because it “isolates man from God.” Jaurès worries that there is something punishingly lonely in the idea that freedom is rooted in some quality of the individual person, and he thinks that Luther has captured something about free will, something of interest to socialists. If the individual person were already fully free, as advocates of a simplistic notion of free will would claim, then there would be no need for any change in the human condition. But we do not find ourselves, on our own, to be free, and so we know that the freedom of the human being to judge and to decide requires the establishment of a new context outside the individual. For Luther, whose concern is spiritual freedom, that context is God’s grace, revealed in God’s Word. For Jaurès, the political analogy to Luther’s doctrine is the idea that the political freedom of the individual is possible only on a foundation of social justice. Freedom for the individual citizen, Jaurès wants to say, is possible when justice has been established in and by the society that stands outside the individual, and when the individual is not isolated from that society. Thus Jaurès argues that Luther’s theology prepared thinkers in the German tradition to understand that “man is free only when truth illumines him and justice shapes him” (PTA, 387–88).

In Luther’s soteriology, God’s grace appears as the mediation between human weakness and divine perfection—an opposed pair not unrelated to the Being in actuality and Being in potentiality of Jaurès’s French thesis. What Jaurès finds most interesting in Luther’s doctrine of grace, in other words, is its dialectical quality. Glossing Luther, Jaurès writes:

We must distinguish between the revealed God and the hidden God, that is to say between the Word of God and God himself. God by his Word calls all men to salvation; but God, by his will, pushes some toward salvation, some toward death. And this is not injustice, because it is not ours to judge God or to truly account for the rules of his justice. There are three levels of truth, like three kinds of light: the light of nature, the light of grace, and the light of divine glory. In the light of nature, we are offended to see how often liars and impious men succeed in this worldly life. But in the light of grace, we see that life on earth is only a part of human life, and that beyond this a reward has been reserved for the just, a punishment for the impious. Why has God predestined some to what is good and others to what is bad? In the light of grace, we still cannot comprehend clearly, and we can only stammer unthinkingly that justice has been violated. But when we are allowed to enter into the heart of the radiant glory of the invisible God, then the divine will appear fully just and good to us. (PTA, 388)

For Luther, the world of suffering, of injustice, of sin and alienation that is immediately present before us is not utterly disconnected from the complete joy, perfect justice, and absolute unity of divine glory that is hidden from us. But the brokenness of the world is not the only truth about the world: human beings can experience grace. For Luther, grace—the content of the revealed Word of God—is something we experience here, within the world, although we can only comprehend that grace if we understand it as the mediation of that which remains beyond our sight and grasp. Grace is an intimation of the divine. It shapes and illuminates life in this world, even while the world remains broken and sinful. This is not so different from saying that Being’s potentiality grounds Being’s actuality. What Luther contributes here is the emphatically dialectical notion of a mediation between two poles, whatever names we might give them. Luther’s doctrine of grace suggests to Jaurès that, in politics as in religion, the ideal for which we long can be continually present with us despite its perpetual absence from us.

This dialectic—or, better, this paradox—of the presence of the absent is what fascinates Jaurès about Luther’s moments of biblical literalism. Luther insists that the Garden of Eden was a real place in the Middle East containing an actual Tree of Life because he wants to hold on to the idea that “it is not in unknown or fictional places but in the world itself” that the “struggle for good or evil” happens. Thus the centrality for Luther of the doctrine of incarnation: “What is Christ if not God himself present within the nature of things and of the visible world?” Luther believes that “human life renewed in Christ is impelled toward immortality, permeated with immortality, as if with a divine infection,” writes Jaurès (PTA, 391). This means that

just as Luther does not want to abstract and isolate the human will from divinity, so he refuses to separate and isolate justice from the nature of things and from the nature of the visible world. Justice will not be accomplished outside nature or outside the things of the visible world, but in the world itself, corrected and amended. Justice will not shine forth in the cold regions of death, but in life itself; it will blend into the light of the visible sun. Justice is wrapped up in and interwoven with the things of the world. . . . Heaven will be made anew, earth will be formed anew—not a theological heaven, not a phantasmagoric image of the earth, but a real heaven, a true earth. We need not say: Justice is in the other world and outside this world. Justice will shine one day under the sun of the living, and under the visible sky. Truly, can we not recognize here the spirit of socialism, which works to bring justice into life itself? (PTA, 390–91)

Jaurès has introduced a curious ambiguity here. It is not clear whether the shining justice that he anticipates will be perfect justice. Will the establishment of socialism be like the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, or is socialism the mediation of an ideal that remains as distant as Luther’s hidden God? Jaurès’s reading of Luther up to this point would suggest the latter. But when he turns to the political implications of Luther’s theology, Jaurès chooses not to remind his readers of what he has elsewhere written: that the battle is never wholly won.

Jaurès writes considerably more about Luther than about Fichte, Kant, Hegel, Lassalle, or Marx.⁵⁶ The essential ideas of his Latin thesis have already been developed in the section on Luther; he has now to show the way those ideas were worked out through the tradition as a whole.

Kant’s contribution to the development of German socialism, Jaurès writes, lies in his dialectical restatement of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract theory (PTA, 404–5).⁵⁷ Jaurès remarks that Kant’s emphasis on liberty is such that one could almost take him for “a French philosophe full of the revolutionary spirit and trusting solely in liberty,” except for the fact that Kant accords a “great majesty to the state,” as no philosophe would do. Bridging Rousseau and Luther, Kant argues that a social pact—that is, a power outside the individual person—makes a society based on free will possible and that civil society must in turn leave individual liberty intact. Kant shows that Rousseau’s idea of a social contract “acquires its maximum force and effective power” in the modern representative republic and in the future prospect of universal peace through a federation of republics (PTA, 404–6). In this way, Kant is able to “reconcile the ideals of French philosophy and Prussian monarchy”—that is, the principles of individual liberty and state power (PTA, 400). Most French republicans would have been too wary of state power to accept that it could further liberty, but, to Jaurès, this is the most interesting element of Kant’s political thought. What Kant has shown, Jaurès writes, is that “individualism and socialism are not opposed to each other as if they were essentially contradictory.” Instead, in Kant’s dialectical argument “they are brought together and reconciled” (PTA, 406–8).

Fichte seems to Jaurès to be an “amplified” Kant. What is only a “germ of socialism” in Kant’s work becomes in Fichte’s the idea of full-blown “collectivism” and the argument that the state should secure citizens’ economic well-being. A social contract must deal with property rights, Fichte argues, but it can make provisions for property rights only if every citizen has a claim on society’s wealth—otherwise, some participants in the contract will have to give up something for nothing, violating the precept that Rousseau finds central to the validity of the contract (PTA, 409–12). Where French Opportunists and Radicals would be content to let great social inequalities coexist with the Third Republic’s democratic institutions, Jaurès wants to take from Fichte the idea that a democracy without substantial social equality is not very democratic after all.

Jaurès admires both Kant and Fichte for making the study of history subordinate to “the demands of justice in the present.” To Marx, this would seem a weakness: “Marx justifies the need for collectivism less by its justice than by the historical destiny of social evolution. He is eager to mock those like Fichte, who ceaselessly invoke human dignity and eternal justice.” But Fichte understands something that has also become important in Jaurès’s own conception of political life. Precisely because Fichte’s method of thinking about politics has turned him toward the present and toward questions of justice, he does not rest his hopes on a drastic political change at some point in the future or accept forms of action that might in themselves be unjust. Rather than pushing for “rash action,” Fichte understands that “slowness and temporizing do not mean inaction and apathy.” For Fichte, Jaurès writes, “one must continue each day to advance toward justice, so that by evening the world is already closer to justice than it was in the morning” (PTA, 417–18).

At the same time, Jaurès is careful to point out that Fichte’s vision is different from his own. Fichte calls for an all-powerful state, shut off as much as possible from the rest of the world, administering the lives of passive individuals and suppressing any group that tries to assert its particular existence. Fichte’s collectivist state is “an enclosed sphere, a world unto itself,” in which a cosmopolitan public life is impossible. This is not a vision Jaurès wants to endorse. But even the claustrophobic nationalism of Fichte’s collectivist plan seems to Jaurès to yield a dialectical insight.

Socialists of the 1890s wanted to unite all nations into “one economic society,” a federation of all nations. Fichte had argued that only a “closed state” could achieve “a measure of justice” because injustice outside the state would threaten justice inside it. But socialists of Jaurès own generation had realized that internationalism could achieve social justice more securely than Fichte’s nationalism ever could: the only self-enclosed society possible in the capitalist era, Jaurès suggested, was one open to all, one that encompassed the globe (PTA, 416).

Jaurès finds Hegel’s philosophy to be the most creative development in German dialectical thinking since Luther. In Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Jaurès writes, “the foundation of right”—that is, the basis of political justice and of legitimate state power—“is freedom.” Rather than defining freedom abstractly, Hegel “shows the progression by which freedom gradually takes its full and perfect form.” Neither the absolute freedom of the will (“Freiheit des Willens” for Hegel; “liberté de volonté” for Jaurès) nor the individual person’s ability to decide freely in a particular context (“Willkür” for Hegel, “libre arbitre” for Jaurès) is a true and comprehensive freedom. The absolute freedom of the will seeks to detach the individual from political bonds with others or even, in some forms of religious contemplation, from what Jaurès had previously called “the sensible world”; the individual freedom to decide in a particular context fails to recognize any standard of morality or justice. Unless freedom is reconciled with “the universal rule” of reason, Jaurès writes, it means nothing but servitude to one’s whims. As Luther and Kant argued, this abstract freedom is not so free as it seems (PTA, 420–22).

Jaurès sees in Hegel a reconciliation of individual and community, immediacy and universality. Hegel’s great idea, Jaurès writes, is that to move beyond an individualistic morality limited to mutual regard for contracts, “it is necessary that each will be enveloped within a certain concrete and natural order, thanks to which it can stretch toward universality—not in an abstract way, but in reality. This is where the family, civil society, and the even the state come from. Only when we begin from a concrete and life-giving moral world do we move from Moralität to true Sittlichkeit” (PTA, 423). Jaurès patiently recounts Hegel’s elaborate description of the three spheres within Sittlichkeit or ethical life, but what he finds interesting there is simply the idea that life in these overlapping spheres provides a moral education in which the “character of humanity and universality” within each citizen is amplified. The institutional arrangement of ethical life as a whole is what interests Jaurès, to the point that he often seems, in his pages on Hegel, to use the term “state” to indicate not authoritative political institutions alone, but those institutions taken in the context of civil society and the family: “It is in the state . . . that the will of each citizen finds its full freedom in the universality of the law and of civic life. It is the state that gives to man the fullness of life and freedom” (PTA, 423).

Many readers of Hegel have noted the way his concepts often come in threes. Within the Philosophy of Right, for instance, Hegel moves from his initial conception of abstract freedom to the strictures of morality and from there to the complexity of institutionalized ethical life; ethical life itself, in turn, contains the triad of family, civil society, and state. For Hegel, dialectical thinking means seeing how a two-sided conflict or antinomy can be superseded by a third term or a new stage. Although Jaurès sees something similar in Luther’s theology, in the way that grace mediates between God and humanity, Jaurès’s definition of dialectical thinking at the beginning of his Latin thesis emphasizes something else: that dialectical thought allows the reconciliation of pairs of elements that are, or seem to be, in conflict. For Jaurès, dialectical thinking usually means seeing how a two-sided conflict can become a two-part harmony, or at least a two-sided dialogue. When a third term enters Jaurès’s dialectical patterns, it is most often simply the fact of the reconciliation or harmonization of the first two terms. Hegel is interested in the way an old conflict is obviated by something new; Jaurès is interested in the way a pair of terms can remain distinct while being reconciled. Thus he writes: “What is the Hegelian state? The state is the solid and perfect union of ‘individuality and universality.’ The state must never impose on citizens anything that can hurt any individuality; on the other hand, the citizens may never demand or expect from the state anything that might be likely to put them outside the universal norm of human nature. In the state the will of each man reaches toward universality, that is to say toward infinity; in the state and by the state, freedom is in the end truly absolute” (PTA, 426). This is a reading of Hegel with a distinctive emphasis. Absent here is the often-noted ambiguity of Hegel’s key verb “aufheben,” which means both “to preserve” and “to abolish”: in Jaurès’s dialectic, nothing disappears.

Thus the great achievement of Hegel’s political thought, as far as Jaurès is concerned, is Hegel’s understanding that “civic life” in the context of the law-governed state preserves individuality even while the individual learns devotion to universal ethical principles. Citizens, in this view, are people whose political circumstances prompt them to live for themselves and for others at the same time. Jaurès sees the phrase “Der Staat ist Organismus” as Hegel’s most creative symbol for this reconciliation of individual and community. As in an organism, the individual parts of the state-governed community are lifeless without the whole, but being part of the whole does not mean that they are dominated by the other parts. Rather, they each contribute to something they could not have achieved alone. “In an organism there is no organ that can be said to be the foundation of the other members and organs, as if the stomach, arm, or brain were itself the organism. Instead, all the organs taken together are the basis of the whole organism. Likewise, the fundamental basis of the state is not restricted to one or another organ of the state, to executive power or legislative power; the state is the basis of the state” (PTA, 427). This reconciliation of individual and community marks, for Jaurès, the point at which socialism emerges from Hegel’s philosophy:

From the moment he compared the state to an organism, this gave socialism a powerful argument for adopting the model of a unitary organism for material goods as well as for the state. Accordingly, Hegel has not placed true and complete liberty either in the individuality of the person isolated from other individuals or in supposed free will, but rather in universality and in the state because only within the state can there be perfect liberty. This is close to socialism. Then, when he put the state above civil society and as something higher than the apparent exterior union of citizens, when he declared that only within the state can there be true religion, true philosophy, he pushed men to submit all their life, that is to say all their goods, to unity, to the law, to the divine reason of the state. (PTA, 428–29)

Hegel’s thought points toward socialism because Hegel harmonizes individual freedom and political community, and because he does so through political institutions. Jaurès especially likes the elements of Hegel’s thought that echo Aristotle. Hegel refuses to set the individual above the community, or vice versa: the state is in a sense the outcome of Hegel’s argument, but it is not an outcome that erases or supersedes the preceding steps. As Hegel describes political life, the individual is not lost in the state, but found because membership in the political community orients the individual toward universal concerns and commitments in a way no other membership can. In this view, my rights are secured by the state’s laws and law-enforcing mechanisms, and so I can come to see my membership in the state—that is, my citizenship, with all the obligations to and bonds with fellow citizens that it entails, and with the broader obligations toward all rights-bearing subjects that it implies—as something just as fundamental to my personhood as is my freedom. Jaurès endorses these ideas, just as he does Hegel’s idea that all important principles at some point become institutions: in this sense, Hegel has inherited Luther’s fascination with the Christian doctrine of incarnation, the Word become flesh. In both these ways, Hegel insists on the reconciliation of what others have seen as conflicting: freedom and community, ideas and institutions.

To say that Hegel’s reconciliation of these conflicting terms points toward socialism is to say something not only about Hegel but, more important, about socialism, which seems here to mean an exceptionally strong and distinctly modern expression of the ethical principle of freedom reconciled with community—the principle Jaurès has in mind when he uses the term “justice.” Expressed in milder ways or in earlier eras, this principle would still be recognizable. Socialism is not the exclusive concern of the labor movement. It is not primarily an economic idea. It is also evidently not a state of affairs to be found only in the future: it has been present in political thought and political life, whether clearly or obscurely, for centuries. If this is so, it must also be present—not just as an idea or an ideal, but as a reality—in Jaurès’s own time.

There are moments in Jaurès’s discussion of Hegel when he seems to be saying that the principle at stake in socialist politics can be fully realized in some political form, as when he writes of the perfect form of freedom or of the fullness of life. This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that Jaurès allows himself to hint at an overweening optimism. More often, however, Jaurès remembers his earlier argument that actuality cannot catch up with potentiality, as when he writes that the experience of citizenship directs the citizen toward what is universal. Consider his summary of what he wants his readers to learn from Hegel: “From the Hegelian description of the different aspects and moments that make up the progressive march of the Idea and of the Absolute, we can conclude with satisfaction that in the world no form of the Idea, no moment of the Absolute, is self-sufficient or has eternal value” (PTA, 429). In this dialectic, nothing is perfect; the absolute is never realized in fact, and the totality is never grasped in thought. Instead, Jaurès’s dialectical thinking typically involves a sense of perpetual development, perpetual incompleteness, perpetual tension between principles that may be reconciled but that remain distinct.

Jaurès illustrates this kind of dialectical thinking when he explains Hegel’s notorious description of the state as “divine.” Hegel does not mean that there are no unjust states, or that we ought to worship the state, but, rather, that the meaning of the state stretches beyond the facts of particular states. Every state, by the encompassing and public nature of its laws and activities, shows that freedom can become something more than abstract individualism, that the detached individual can achieve “his full reality and his whole perfection” by becoming a “substantial person” with a “complete life” in community with others, even while remaining a “private person” with a personal and inward life (PTA, 426–27). All this will remain true even if no state fully plays out this potential. The state, as it exists in real political life, is not perfect. Its incomplete justice must be challenged through political agitation, and its thin solidarities must be supplemented by the richer life of smaller groupings with more intense bonds. Moreover, the state is not the answer to the fundamental human questions. Nevertheless, it shows us what the answer looks like; it points toward the perfect reconciliation of public and private, outward and inward, flesh and spirit, even without achieving that perfection. Jaurès says of an often quoted passage in the Philosophy of Right: “When Hegel wrote, ‘All that is rational is real, and all that is real is rational,’ he did not want to justify things themselves simply because they are. Hegel only meant that each event in history, each institution, is one moment of the Idea; each contains truth, however distorted and corrupted. . . . Although the state in and of itself has a divine essence, there may still be many bad states because, in them, the essence of the idea of the state is distorted. The way of history is not the way of the dialectic” (PTA, 434). Dialectical thought, Jaurès writes, is not a replacement for the study of history. It does not answer historical questions or allow us to understand history before it happens, except in that it attunes us to the inexhaustible possibility of reconciliation, of freedom-and-community. Instead, the dialectic reveals something about events and institutions that is never fully evident in history.

The most interesting moments in Marx’s thought, Jaurès suggests, occur when Marx recalls Hegel’s (and Luther’s) awareness of impermanence and imperfection. Where “official economists” have treated the key concepts of modern economics—Jaurès lists the examples of capital, labor, and wage work—as if they were “eternal economic categories,” Marx demonstrates that “nothing is eternal except the law of dialectics itself. Contemporary society, far from being a solid and immutable crystal, is an organism susceptible to all sorts of transformations and always eager to take on new forms” (PTA, 429). This was not Marx as the French Marxists of the Parti ouvrier français knew him. If there were no eternal economic categories, then the collective property heralded by socialists of Jaurès’s generation could not be the permanent solution to human troubles. Marx was supposed to show the transience not of every economic order, but of every economic order prior to communism; his theories were supposed to guarantee the end to human conflict. But Jaurès writes: “Hegel shows the dialectic proceeding through antithesis and synthesis, and shows how the contradictions of the preceding moments are resolved in a new and more complete moment of the Absolute and the Idea. In political economy, Marx (and Lassalle) show how history reconciles moments that were at first opposed into a new and better order” (PTA, 430). A more complete moment of the Absolute, a better order: whatever victories socialists should expect—and Jaurès does not object to the German socialists’ confidence that there will be such victories—they will improve the human condition, but they will not bring about perfect justice or an end to social conflict.

Thus Marx’s great contribution, for Jaurès, is his account of what is new and peculiar about the economic and social life of capitalist countries in the second half of the nineteenth century. Up to a point, Jaurès supports Marx’s method of thought. Unlike Hegel, who offers an a priori description of the dialectical process, Marx prudently begins by examining facts, “things themselves,” and builds a picture of reality a posteriori. Marx takes his place within the sensible world and thus is able to specify the social and material constraints on freedom and human community in a way that no other thinker in the German tradition had been able to do. This leads Marx to an image of socialism unlike Fichte’s regimented administrative order: “Through socialism, a new economic order will emerge in which production will be assured as in the Middle Ages and extensive as in modern times, in which man will be master of himself and of things” (PTA, 430). For Marx, socialism (or, as he would have written, “communism”) means freedom from both want and domination.

However, in good dialectical fashion, Jaurès suggests that when Marx rejects Hegel’s “mysticism,” he falls into a one-sided style of thought. “Marx opposes economic materialism to Hegelian idealism: things do not flow out of ideas, but ideas out of things. History and political economy do not grow from philosophy, but rather philosophy from history and political economy. Whatever the changes at work in the mind or in human character, they have been brought about through some modification of economic affairs” (PTA, 431). Jaurès thinks this view of history is half correct: ideas do follow from events. But events also follow from ideas. When Marx abandons Hegel’s notion that the Idea works itself out dialectically, he also abandons any strong sense of human agency. If things in the world are made to change by some fate or force wholly immanent within the world of things, it is not clear that human beings “accomplish anything” or even that human beings “act,” rather than merely reacting to the material events that define their existence. Jaurès asks: “What good is it to call for socialism or to organize an army of socialism’s soldiers if things themselves will march ahead, step by step, and so make socialism a reality?” (PTA, 432).

Jaurès is concerned that Marx has no good answer to this question; he is even more concerned that the Marxists of his own generation also have none. The idea that history marches toward an apocalyptic day of reckoning can inspire courage; it can also justify a principled passivity. Jaurès wants to replace that passive reliance on history with a determined engagement in political life, and this means making an ethical case for socialism. If socialists are to make a public “call” for political engagement, if they are to pull together parties and unions and other groups to advance their principles, Jaurès suggests, they will need to recognize the demands placed on them, now and every day, by the ideal to which they have committed themselves.

Even if socialism could be realized without the motivating power of an ideal of justice, it would not be a socialism worth the name because, without an animating ideal, it would be only a lifeless scheme for administering economic events. Marx opposed Hegel’s “mystical dialectic” for good reasons, Jaurès writes, but Marx’s own “materialist dialectic,” taken by itself, creates even greater problems.

If everything comes from the movement of things themselves and if humanity cannot be governed by the will and the consciousness of man, then, even when the new society blooms, it will still not be supreme and perfect. It will be new, but still amendable and transitory. If this is so, then socialism will not reflect an eternal value after all! To put it better, where is the evidence that a new form of society produced by a nearly blind necessity will be better and more equitable? In the end, the only thing that gives value to socialism is if it appears to the people as a religion of justice worthy of adoration, not as the adoration, the cult, of a fact. (PTA, 433–34)

That which has eternal value—call it “the potentiality of Being,” call it “the ideal of freedom and community”—can only take political form when and to the extent that human beings consciously shape the world according to the ideal. Socialism is not socialism if it does not aspire to the ultimate reconciliation: that of the sensible world and the mind, the flesh and the spirit.

The German philosophical tradition had begun on the border between theology and philosophy. Somehow, Jaurès lamented, the tradition had since lost track of the idea of ideals, of the need for a conscious commitment to something beyond human experience and human history. Hegel’s shift toward a wholly immanent account of the Absolute and Marx’s materialist turn had in some ways enriched German dialectical thought. However, Jaurès argued, Kant and Fichte, devoted to the idea of justice, had maintained a vital element that had begun to go underground with Hegel and that had disappeared altogether with Marx. Oddly, that devotion to justice had been better preserved—although in a distorted and one-sided way—in French political thought.⁵⁸ “Fichte, both by his burning love of pure justice and by the generous instincts of his soul, comes much closer to the French—who in 1789 and in 1848 proclaimed, so to speak, a new gospel of justice—than to those Germans who have accepted the severe historical dialectic of Karl Marx. More important, socialism in Germany will not be able to enter the people’s hearts, to leave the schools, to fill the public square, unless it makes equal appeal to the passions and invokes not only the necessities of history, but also ‘eternal justice’” (PTA, 418).

As much as the German philosophical tradition had to offer the French, the French had something to offer the Germans: their experience of life in the public square. German socialists had never known any political life except that of the self-enclosed school or sect. The members of such a group, kept at the margins of society whether by their own zealotry or by government repression, might well find themselves comforted by the notion that their marginality would inevitably transform itself into triumph. A movement whose members aimed to organize a majority of their fellow citizens, however, would learn the value of appealing to widely shared passions and to the language of justice and injustice.

The politics of the public square, Jaurès suggests, depends on the passions and on the power of the idea of justice in a way other politics do not. Even before the Third Republic, the French had learned how to fill the public square, whether with arguments or with barricades. Was it not the idea of justice that had inspired the republican revolutions of 1789 and 1848? Socialists in a republic, or in a country with a long experience of republican uprisings, ought not to take on wholesale the doctrines of comrades who lived under repressive monarchies. Marx’s one-sided materialism, his disdain for “mystical” accounts of history and for the idea of ideals, his notion of historical necessity, and the expectation of absolute transformation that follows from all this are for Jaurès the peculiar products of Germany’s exceptionally backward political life.

What German socialism needed, Jaurès proposed, was a deepening of its own dialectical character. Dialectical methods could be applied to the tradition of dialectical philosophy itself. There was no reason why a rigorous analysis of economic history and a fervent devotion to the ideal of justice needed to be sundered from each other. The working-class victory for which socialists labored would be a victory not for a particular part of humanity, but for humanity as a whole; not for self-interest, but for justice. Jaurès ends his Latin thesis with a passage more oratorical than scholarly:

Dialectic socialism thus accords with moral socialism, German socialism with French socialism, and the hour is near when we will see all spirits, all forces and faculties of consciousness—and also the fraternal Christian communion, the dignity and the true freedom of the human person, and even the immanent dialectic of things, of history, of the world—converge and join together in one true socialism.

In short, to comprehend the German socialism of our day, it is not enough to find it in the particular and transitory form that Bebel and the others give it. We must search out its origins, which is to say, all its sources of intelligence and consciousness. Thus I have examined Christian socialism with Luther, moral socialism with Fichte, dialectic socialism with Hegel and Marx. And I was not displeased to treat these contemporary questions in Latin because this is the language in which the human right of ancient moral philosophy was formulated and in which Christian fraternity was yearned for and sung. Moreover, the Latin language is even today the only universal language common to all peoples; it fits well with universal socialism. Latin fits well with the “integral socialism” sketched by Benoît Malon, where socialism appears not as a narrow faction, but as humanity itself, where socialism seems to be the image of humanity, of eternity. (PTA, 435–36)

Jaurès’s reference to Malon is telling. For Malon, “integral socialism” meant the simultaneous pursuit of “material” and “moral” reforms. He proposed policies—worker control of workplaces, municipal ownership of enterprises, a system of social insurance—but he also thought that the experience of citizenship in a republic could foster citizens’ solidarity with one another. “There are always more socialists under a republic than under a monarchy,” he argued.⁵⁹ For Jaurès, socialism has come to mean all that and evidently something more: it appears here as a modern name for the grand reconciliation—or, to use Malon’s word, “integration”—of humanity’s perennial aspirations for freedom and for fraternity. From the point of view of this kind of socialism, history was a continuous struggle for justice in which the decisive factor had been and would continue to be not an impersonal evolution of social forces but the conscious, collective, daily activity of citizens in the public square. Socialism, for Jaurès, would be the expression within modern political life of humanity’s obscure and conscious effort toward a just and beautiful order—an effort that had begun in the ancient world and had never ceased, that could always be carried forward but could never be completed.

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