proceeding through antithesis and synthesis, and shows how the contradictions of the preceding moments are resolved in a new and more complete moment of the Absolute and the Idea. In political economy, Marx (and Lassalle) show how history reconciles moments that were at first opposed into a new and better order” (PTA, 430). A more complete moment of the Absolute, a better order: whatever victories socialists should expect—and Jaurès does not object to the German socialists’ confidence that there will be such victories—they will improve the human condition, but they will not bring about perfect justice or an end to social conflict.
Thus Marx’s great contribution, for Jaurès, is his account of what is new and peculiar about the economic and social life of capitalist countries in the second half of the nineteenth century. Up to a point, Jaurès supports Marx’s method of thought. Unlike Hegel, who offers an a priori description of the dialectical process, Marx prudently begins by examining facts, “things themselves,” and builds a picture of reality a posteriori. Marx takes his place within the sensible world and thus is able to specify the social and material constraints on freedom and human community in a way that no other thinker in the German tradition had been able to do. This leads Marx to an image of socialism unlike Fichte’s regimented administrative order: “Through socialism, a new economic order will emerge in which production will be assured as in the Middle Ages and extensive as in modern times, in which man will be master of himself and of things” (PTA, 430). For Marx, socialism (or, as he would have written, “communism”) means freedom from both want and domination.
However, in good dialectical fashion, Jaurès suggests that when Marx rejects Hegel’s “mysticism,” he falls into a one-sided style of thought. “Marx opposes economic materialism to Hegelian idealism: things do not flow out of ideas, but ideas out of things. History and political economy do not grow from philosophy, but rather philosophy from history and political economy. Whatever the changes at work in the mind or in human character, they have been brought about through some modification of economic affairs” (PTA, 431). Jaurès thinks this view of history is half correct: ideas do follow from events. But events also follow from ideas. When Marx abandons Hegel’s notion that the Idea works itself out dialectically, he also abandons any strong sense of human agency. If things in the world are made to change by some fate or force wholly immanent within the world of things, it is not clear that human beings “accomplish anything” or even that human beings “act,” rather than merely reacting to the material events that define their existence. Jaurès asks: “What good is it to call for socialism or to organize an army of socialism’s soldiers if things themselves will march ahead, step by step, and so make socialism a reality?” (PTA, 432).
Jaurès is concerned that Marx has no good answer to this question; he is even more concerned that the Marxists of his own generation also have none. The idea that history marches toward an apocalyptic day of reckoning can inspire courage; it can also justify a principled passivity. Jaurès wants to replace that passive reliance on history with a determined engagement in political life, and this means making an ethical case for socialism. If socialists are to make a public “call” for political engagement, if they are to pull together parties and unions and other groups to advance their principles, Jaurès suggests, they will need to recognize the demands placed on them, now and every day, by the ideal to which they have committed themselves.
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
