Who is Jean Jaurès (1859–1914), and why study his political thought? Geoffrey Kurtz's new book, the first on Jaurès to appear in English in nearly a half-century, offers compelling answers to both questions. Kurtz wants “to project the lines of Jaurès's thought beyond his own situation” (6), but the core of his book is an illuminating study of Jaurès's political ideas in their historical context. Thus, while this text will appeal most straightforwardly to readers who share the author's assumption “that social democratic politics is worth … thinking about” (6), it will also reward the attention of anyone interested in the history of modern European politics, in the tensions between high ideals and the vicissitudes of democratic practice or in questions of political ethics.

Kurtz introduces his subject with a tantalizing sketch in the opening pages and adds depth and detail in the five chapters that follow. Born in southern France about a decade before the Third Republic, Jaurès studied and taught philosophy, joined the Chamber of Deputies at twenty-five as a “republican at large” (17), and eventually became an “international spokesman for the new reformism” in socialist politics (5), a movement that opposed revolutionary violence and pursued its egalitarian vision instead through parliamentary politics and social activism. Jaurès was an early supporter of the rights of unions, an impassioned Dreyfusard, a defender of socialist participation in coalition governments and an architect of France's separation of church and state. He was an internationalist who nevertheless viewed commitment to a just republican patrie—expressed through participation in civic institutions like his proposed citizens' militia—as the path by which “nations ascend to humanity without being dissolved” (149). Jaurès's life came to its violent end in 1914, when a nationalist assassin fatally shot him on the eve of a world war Jaurès had sought to avert.

The man was extraordinarily prolific. One early editor estimated that Jaurès's complete works would fill “80 or 90 octavo volumes of some 400 pages each.” While this makes omissions unavoidable in the volume under review, Kurtz is judicious in his selections, covering the central texts necessary to ground an interpretation of Jaurès's political thought. Kurtz agrees with Irving Howe that Jaurès presents “a clear vision of the indissoluble link between democracy and socialism” (5). He agrees that for Jaurès the challenge of collective political action is not to be bypassed but embraced as precisely that mode by which a just society might be realized—if only ever imperfectly. “At the root of Jaurès's politics,” Kurtz writes, “we find a commitment to the immediate work of political reform” (91), pursued through both labour activism and legislation—what Jaurès called “the masses in motion” and “the play of parliament,” respectively (87). This “ethos of democratic engagement” (155) offered an alternative to “the dream of a revolutionary moment,” that “shortcut” promised by the Communist Manifesto and recommended—ruinously, Jaurès thought—by doctrinaire Marxists like Jules Guesde and by other revolutionary socialists and syndicalists (112).

Kurtz goes further, and breaks new ground, when he argues that the “deepest concern” of Jaurès's thought was “to give an account of social democratic hope” (7). The need for such an account arises directly from Jaurès's reformism. What can motivate the ongoing project of democratic reform once the promise of decisive victory is dismissed as an illusion? Kurtz finds in Jaurès a twofold answer. Political hope springs from an ideal of social justice and from a new way of conceiving its relationship to the real. Socialism, in this view, is not some distant promised land that will be occupied at a future time. Nor is it a state of affairs that, though absent, is gradually approximated with each reform. Instead, as Kurtz writes, “the ideal is already present, here on the capitalist earth” (93). It is to be found, dimly but unmistakably, “in the movement's immediate tasks and small achievements” (108). To cleave to such an ideal while “rediscover[ing] in it” one's experiences of daily political struggle is, Jaurès says, to inhabit “a socialist state of grace” (92).

Here we get a glimpse of the “inner life” (143) at the heart of Kurtz's interpretation. For Jaurès a just society succors citizens' interior wellbeing. But that is not all. His political thought also traces the capacity for social democratic hope to a kind of moral psychological transformation. What citizens seeking social justice need is to become “attune[d]” to the ways in which their ideal “touch[es] earth” (162), precisely in “the prosaic spaces and ungainly bodies of real politics” (165).

While Kurtz is a sensitive and sympathetic reader, he is not uncritical. He draws out and interrogates the tensions and ambiguities in Jaurès's thought and eschews tidy resolutions. Not everyone will agree that the result is a promising model of democratic engagement. We might worry, for example, that Jaurès achieves “plausible hope” (161) only by assuming that reform is cumulative and ignoring the possibility of retrenchment and reversal. Nevertheless, political theorists can be grateful that in this elegant and enlightening book, Kurtz not only recalls Jaurès to our attention but demonstrates the depth and power of his “awkward politics” (165).