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