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