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