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