In the first English-language monograph on French socialist Jean Jaurès in over a generation, political theorist Geoffrey Kurtz offers a nuanced analysis of the attempt by the leading French socialist at the turn of the twentieth century to synthesize the liberal, republican, and Marxist traditions. Kurtz pays careful attention to the historical context of the entire written Jaurès corpus, and reads Jaurès in a manner that contributes political insight to contemporary social democracy, a project that faces stiff challenges from dominant neoliberal conceptions of democratic capitalism. This book merits attention not only from historians of political thought but also from contemporary theorists and activists interested in an immanent critique of the contradiction between liberal conceptions of equality of opportunity and the social inequality endemic to capitalism.

Jaurès is best known for his pacifist opposition to the nationalist drumbeat for war and his tragic assassination on the eve of World War I. But Kurtz recovers the theoretical contributions of one of the most philosophically trained of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century socialist leaders. Jaurès wrote his doctorat ès lettres on Kant and Hegel; he drew from Kant his conception of socialist justice as a regulatory ideal for everyday practice and from Hegel a belief that the dialectical tension between particular and universal forms of identity could never be totally overcome. This training enabled him to grapple with the Marxist orthodoxy of German social democracy through the lens of French radical democratic republicanism. Jaurès, unlike most of his contemporaries schooled in Marxism, valued political participation as a good-in-itself rather than predominantly as an instrument to achieve socialism.

Kurtz reads Jaurès to be a pioneer of “ethical socialism,” a vision that did not depend upon classical Marxism’s faith in the unbounded and linear progress of the Enlightenment. Kurtz shows how Jaurès developed the values of liberty, equality, and solidarity into regulatory norms by which he could judge the struggle for incremental reforms. Thus, Jaurès went beyond Eduard Bernstein’s endorsement of the immediate aims of the workers’ movement by arguing that reforms were only truly socialist in nature if they enhanced the democratic voice of workers and citizens. Thus, while he initially judged the Dreyfus affair to be a conflict among two bourgeois parties, he soon came to see it as an issue of civil rights that would remain central to any future socialist society.

Jaurès emerges in Kurtz’s analysis as one of the few major socialist figures writing before the birth of authoritarian communism who openly embraced a liberal form of socialism. Jaurès rejected any impulse to trade political and civil rights for greater social equality. He did not counterpose, as Isaiah Berlin later would, “negative” freedom (freedom from dominance by an overbearing government) and “positive” freedom (the possession of those basic necessities, such as quality education and health care necessary for meaningful self-development). Rather, drawing upon the French radical republican tradition, he understood that greater social equality enhanced the value of political and civil rights.

Kurtz shows how Jaurès grappled with the halting and uneven progress of European socialism by transcending the rigid socialist divisions between “reform” and “revolution” and between “means” and “ends.” Such rigid dichotomies long bedeviled the socialist tradition, particularly in its more authoritarian forms. This ability to avoid either/or thinking enabled Jaurès to hold together a bitterly divided French socialist movement, a movement that contained both the first socialists to enter “bourgeois” government (the “Millerandistes”) and radical syndicalists who rejected any participation in the “bourgeois state” (Eduard Vaillant and his followers). Kurtz locates the ability of Jaurès to bridge these seemingly irreconcilable tendencies in his faith in socialism as the extension of democracy into all institutional forms of social life. According to that analysis, if reforms increased the power of working people, that marked a gain for the socialist movement, even if public ownership of the means of production had yet to be fully achieved. In this way, Jaurès anticipated those who argue that radical democracy is the primary aim of democratic socialism, rather than any one particular form of organization of a socialist economy.

Jaurès believed that French socialists should root the movement in the communitarian traditions of republican liberty, a tradition that conceived of involvement in public life as a responsibility of free citizens. He envisioned the socialist movement to be a multi-class movement fighting for greater democracy. But he did not deny the reality of class conflict and saw the trade union movement as an integral part of a broader socialist movement. In his view, if reforms won by the labor movement—such as greater economic security and increased leisure time—spoke to the needs of individuals across class, then these gains demonstrated the working-class movement’s ability to promote universal interests.

Kurtz further contends that Jaurès understood that the countervailing class power of an organized labor movement would fight both for redistribution of income through an expanded welfare state and for greater democratic control over capital. The works of such important “class power” theorists as Walter Korpi, John Stephens, and Nicos Poulantzas illustrate that the possibility of workers gaining democratic control over investment peaked when social democratic parties and unions had gained sufficient power to squeeze corporate profits through progressive taxation, high union density, and expanded public provision. But when capital in the 1980s onward mobilized against these constraints, particularly in the form of neoliberal attacks on collective bargaining rights and government regulation of corporate behavior, the more radical project of socializing control over capital receded. Thus, Jaurès correctly intuited that if the political power necessary to achieve redistributive reforms within the context of democratic capitalism decreased, so too would the possibility of more radical social transformation.

Jaurès also was one of the first socialists to grapple with the reality that political conflict often revolves around competing conceptions of the national project. Thus, he spoke to issues of national identity and community largely ignored by his more “internationalist” peers. He argued that socialists needed to develop a democratic conception of patriotism and to fight for a democratic, civilian draft army. He did not reject internationalism, but believed that the socialist movement could only build international solidarity by developing a tolerant, pluralist, and pacific conception of national identity. In contrast to the idealist affirmation that the working class had no country, Jaurès held that only through the achievement of egalitarian national solidarity would the socialist movement promote a feasible path toward cosmopolitan, universal human rights. Given that the Left, particularly in the United States, has often been marginalized politically by the charge of being antipatriotic, His interest in constructing a radical democratic vision of a nonchauvinistic patriotism remains relevant today.

Kurtz draws upon the belief of Jaurès in the liberal value of toleration and pluralism to reject the radical distinction too often made in contemporary theory between “republican” or “communitarian” conceptions of tightly bound communities and cosmopolitan liberalism. Kurtz, mirroring Jaurès, values the republican tradition’s critique of liberalism for failing to interrogate the role of domination within nondemocratic institutions. But Kurtz also takes to task such contemporary republican theorists as Philip Petit for failing to see that democratizing institutional life can only come through the work of grassroots, democratic, social movements that challenge social inequality. Radical social inequality poses a severe barrier to equal political participation for those who do not possess the adequate leisure time or sufficient educational capital to be fully informed participants. While Jaurès understood that unions and socialist parties could construct a consciousness based on shared class interests, his intuition that workers could also be divided by skill, gender, and cultural and ideological beliefs led him to think that citizenship would ultimately constitute a more communal form of political identity than class. But he understood that shared identities of both class and citizenship had to be constructed by democratic subjects themselves; and, thus, socialists must defend the civil and political liberties that protect the individual and group differences that would persist in a democratic socialist society.

Kurtz’s mining of the rich work of Jaurès as a political intellectual makes a significant contribution to both academics and activists working to renew the democratic socialist tradition after several decades of bipartisan neoliberal hegemony. A major challenge for left renewal remains the question of agency: Who will fight for democracy and why? Jaurès believed that ordinary citizens would organize to secure liberalism’s promise of substantive equality of opportunity; today this is a daunting task when the right of workers to organize is more contested by capital than anytime since the 1920s. Yet absent collective action, how can low-wage workers, immigrants, indebted recent college graduates, and the academic precariat achieve decent life opportunities for themselves and their dependents? Jaurès had faith that in the long run, “bourgeois democracy” would prove too democratic to be purely bourgeois. Whether that faith can be realized in the twenty-first century will determine whether or not formal democratic institutions serve largely to legitimate oligarchic forms of rule.