(PTA, 404–5).57 Jaurès remarks that Kant’s emphasis on liberty is such that one could almost take him for “a French philosophe full of the revolutionary spirit and trusting solely in liberty,” except for the fact that Kant accords a “great majesty to the state,” as no philosophe would do. Bridging Rousseau and Luther, Kant argues that a social pact—that is, a power outside the individual person—makes a society based on free will possible and that civil society must in turn leave individual liberty intact. Kant shows that Rousseau’s idea of a social contract “acquires its maximum force and effective power” in the modern representative republic and in the future prospect of universal peace through a federation of republics (PTA, 404–6). In this way, Kant is able to “reconcile the ideals of French philosophy and Prussian monarchy”—that is, the principles of individual liberty and state power (PTA, 400). Most French republicans would have been too wary of state power to accept that it could further liberty, but, to Jaurès, this is the most interesting element of Kant’s political thought. What Kant has shown, Jaurès writes, is that “individualism and socialism are not opposed to each other as if they were essentially contradictory.” Instead, in Kant’s dialectical argument “they are brought together and reconciled” (PTA, 406–8).
Fichte seems to Jaurès to be an “amplified” Kant. What is only a “germ of socialism” in Kant’s work becomes in Fichte’s the idea of full-blown “collectivism” and the argument that the state should secure citizens’ economic well-being. A social contract must deal with property rights, Fichte argues, but it can make provisions for property rights only if every citizen has a claim on society’s wealth—otherwise, some participants in the contract will have to give up something for nothing, violating the precept that Rousseau finds central to the validity of the contract (PTA, 409–12). Where French Opportunists and Radicals would be content to let great social inequalities coexist with the Third Republic’s democratic institutions, Jaurès wants to take from Fichte the idea that a democracy without substantial social equality is not very democratic after all.
Jaurès admires both Kant and Fichte for making the study of history subordinate to “the demands of justice in the present.” To Marx, this would seem a weakness: “Marx justifies the need for collectivism less by its justice than by the historical destiny of social evolution. He is eager to mock those like Fichte, who ceaselessly invoke human dignity and eternal justice.” But Fichte understands something that has also become important in Jaurès’s own conception of political life. Precisely because Fichte’s method of thinking about politics has turned him toward the present and toward questions of justice, he does not rest his hopes on a drastic political change at some point in the future or accept forms of action that might in themselves be unjust. Rather than pushing for “rash action,” Fichte understands that “slowness and temporizing do not mean inaction and apathy.” For Fichte, Jaurès writes, “one must continue each day to advance toward justice, so that by evening the world is already closer to justice than it was in the morning” (PTA, 417–18).
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
