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.
Jaurès successfully defended his two theses and was granted his doctorate in philosophy in February 1892.1 A few months later, coal miners in the Tarn town of Carmaux went on strike. Jean-Baptiste Calvignac, an officer in the miners’ union, had been elected mayor; he asked the mining company for two days’ leave each week to attend to his duties; the company refused and then fired him when he took the time anyway. The miners struck, demanding his reinstatement and insisting on his right to serve in public office. Jaurès pushed for arbitration, and when the company would not concede, he toured France to raise money for the strikers. The strike dragged on for months before the company submitted to the union’s arbitration request.2 In the wake of the strike, the Carmaux socialists asked Jaurès to be their candidate in a January 1893 special election for a seat in the Chamber of Deputies. He accepted, based his campaign on the platform of the Parti ouvrier français, and won the election handily. Returning to the Chamber as one of only a dozen socialist deputies, he arrived on the eve of a change for which most French socialists were not prepared.3