which means both “to preserve” and “to abolish”: in Jaurès’s dialectic, nothing disappears.
Thus the great achievement of Hegel’s political thought, as far as Jaurès is concerned, is Hegel’s understanding that “civic life” in the context of the law-governed state preserves individuality even while the individual learns devotion to universal ethical principles. Citizens, in this view, are people whose political circumstances prompt them to live for themselves and for others at the same time. Jaurès sees the phrase “Der Staat ist Organismus” as Hegel’s most creative symbol for this reconciliation of individual and community. As in an organism, the individual parts of the state-governed community are lifeless without the whole, but being part of the whole does not mean that they are dominated by the other parts. Rather, they each contribute to something they could not have achieved alone. “In an organism there is no organ that can be said to be the foundation of the other members and organs, as if the stomach, arm, or brain were itself the organism. Instead, all the organs taken together are the basis of the whole organism. Likewise, the fundamental basis of the state is not restricted to one or another organ of the state, to executive power or legislative power; the state is the basis of the state” (PTA, 427). This reconciliation of individual and community marks, for Jaurès, the point at which socialism emerges from Hegel’s philosophy:
From the moment he compared the state to an organism, this gave socialism a powerful argument for adopting the model of a unitary organism for material goods as well as for the state. Accordingly, Hegel has not placed true and complete liberty either in the individuality of the person isolated from other individuals or in supposed free will, but rather in universality and in the state because only within the state can there be perfect liberty. This is close to socialism. Then, when he put the state above civil society and as something higher than the apparent exterior union of citizens, when he declared that only within the state can there be true religion, true philosophy, he pushed men to submit all their life, that is to say all their goods, to unity, to the law, to the divine reason of the state. (PTA, 428–29)
Hegel’s thought points toward socialism because Hegel harmonizes individual freedom and political community, and because he does so through political institutions. Jaurès especially likes the elements of Hegel’s thought that echo Aristotle. Hegel refuses to set the individual above the community, or vice versa: the state is in a sense the outcome of Hegel’s argument, but it is not an outcome that erases or supersedes the preceding steps. As Hegel describes political life, the individual is not lost in the state, but found because membership in the political community orients the individual toward universal concerns and commitments in a way no other membership can. In this view, my rights are secured by the state’s laws and law-enforcing mechanisms, and so I can come to see my membership in the state—that is, my citizenship, with all the obligations to and bonds with fellow citizens that it entails, and with the broader obligations toward all rights-bearing subjects that it implies—as something just as fundamental to my personhood as is my freedom. Jaurès endorses these ideas, just as he does Hegel’s idea that all important principles at some point become institutions: in this sense, Hegel has inherited Luther’s fascination with the Christian doctrine of incarnation, the Word become flesh. In both these ways, Hegel insists on the reconciliation of what others have seen as conflicting: freedom and community, ideas and institutions.
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
