in struggle, that is to say, in suffering.” Being stretches toward joy and toward harmony only through an endless struggle, Jaurès writes. There can be progress of a kind, progress that “raises, transforms, and enlarges the conditions of the struggle,” but the struggle is never superseded. Thus the world “oscillates between conflict and harmony.” Moments of harmony are never more than provisional because “there remains at the base of the world an eternal contradiction” between Being in actuality and Being in potentiality, “a hidden root of suffering.” But Jaurès is quick—too quick?—to add that suffering is never absolute because “the divine activity that pours out the world remains like an inexhaustible spring of joy.” Indeed, the life of the world consists of a continual effort to achieve harmonious organization and shared joy, an effort that is always incomplete and always possible: “The battle is never wholly won; it is never wholly lost” (PTA, 175–77).
The important thing, Jaurès wants to say, is not a transformation that will happen in the future. What matters is the contour of the present. Tellingly, Jaurès writes little in “De la realité du monde sensible” about time and a great deal about space. For Jaurès, the reality of space is a particularly important idea because the expansiveness and three-dimensionality of space guarantees the possibility of movement, and thus of freedom (PTA, 129–35). He distinguishes between the idea of “place” (lieu) as it was studied by Aristotle and other ancient thinkers—the position of objects in relation to one another—and the idea of “space” (espace), properly understood. For space to be conceivable, Jaurès writes, two intellectual “revolutions” were necessary. First, Christian theology—in particular the thought of Augustine, who was “amazed that images of extensiveness can pour out and move through the nonextensive soul”—taught that “the development of interior life, the habit of contemplation” does not distract us from the sensible world, but rather grounds our comprehension of it. Then, at the beginning of the modern era, Copernican thought posited a universe of infinite space, showing us that we are located within a limitless expanse of Being. After these two revolutions, Jaurès writes, it became possible to understand space as the site where the absolute is present in the world. For Jaurès, thinking spatially involves recognizing both the inclusion of particular spaces within the infinite expanse of Being and the presence of infinite Being within particular spaces. Thus Jaurès can say that the absolute—or the infinite, or the potentiality of Being, or divine perfection—is not an unembodied spirit or an event that will reach fullness at a future time; instead, the absolute becomes available to our senses through its spatial character. Because space is real, Jaurès argues, it is in real spaces, in the present, that we are able to sense the world’s aspiration toward an ideal harmony (PTA, 291–93).50
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
