Jean Jaurès and the Social Preconditions of Democracy

• In Event: Frustrations of Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Resisting Elite Domination

Abstract

The French theorist and politician Jean Jaurès is well known for his defense of a moral conception of socialism, which held that the socialist movement introduced a new morality into democratic capitalist society. Dismayed by capitalist and parliamentary elites’ oligarchic rule in the French Third Republic, Jaurès took up the socialist cause in the late 1880s and 1890s because he thought working-class organization and action cultivated a morality of solidarity among democratic citizens. This paper examines Jaurès’ conception of solidarity and how it influenced his vision of the leading role of trade unions in the socialist movement. It argues that, for Jaurès, unionists acquired a sense of solidarity through deliberation with their comrades and, over time, disseminated this moral feeling to capitalists through participation in arbitration institutions. It also maintains that Jaurès thought a culture of solidarity and compromise within industry would have positive consequences for democracy at the level of the state.

In Jaurès’ early writings in the 1890s, he emphasized that internal union democracy developed members’ feelings of solidarity because it heightened their awareness of their interdependence in production: deliberation with comrades before an intra-union election or between delegates at union congresses revealed the ways in which different labor processes in workers’ specific industry complemented each other. For Jaurès, as workers gained an understanding of their interdependence within industry, they would also come to recognize the interdependence between industries across the economy. Influenced by the sociologist and left-liberal thinker Émile Durkheim, he claimed this meant unionists would possess a sense of solidarity with society—i.e., solidarity with their fellow citizens in other industries.

Highly democratic and deliberative unions, in Jaurès’ mind, would ultimately lead to the rise of a new type of union leader, who exhibited this solidarity with society. These new union leaders would conduct responsible bargaining with capitalists in arbitration institutions established by the first French socialist-progressive coalition in 1899. Since bargaining with unionists developed capitalists’ understanding of their profession’s social function and hence the interdependence of the modern division of labor, some of the latter would gradually acquire a moral feeling of solidarity with society. These capitalists would thus embrace cooperation and compromise with unionists as necessary to ensure different professions properly complemented each other.

After French unionism’s expansion at the turn of the century, Jaurès argued the unions’ development of a more solidaristic culture within industry would help foster democratic practices within the French parliament. This was because citizens, who developed a sense of solidarity with society through industrial negotiation, possessed important democratic dispositions such as a willingness for dialogue and compromise. Indeed, Jaurès claimed that parliamentarism in industry (responsible bargaining) was necessary to produce a more responsive and representative form of parliamentarism in the state—i.e., to bring an end to the rule of the self-interested parliamentary cliques which had come to define democracy in the French Third Republic. His theory of socialist trade unionism therefore highlighted the important social preconditions of democratic parliamentarism.

Author

• Peter Giraudo, Boston College