ARGUMENTS ABOUT the intellectual relationship between socialism and liberalism (understood in the European sense) are probably familiar to most left-wing Americans. To left-wing Europeans, and for the French in particular, it’s a difficult matter. The idea that there is a positive relation between socialist and liberal concepts is scandalous in some quarters. Liberals are viewed by them as class enemies and false friends who threaten socialist integrity.

It is true that economic liberalism in its brutal “laissez-faire” sense is opposed to any traditional socialist ethos. Socialist movements emerged in the nineteenth century in reaction against liberal capitalism. Socialists saw in it only a deceptive form of liberty and advocated instead the socialization of the means of production and economic equality. They argued that no real liberty could exist without equality, and no democracy was real without socialism. Social democrats still agree today on these points, more or less, even if they temper them with inevitable compromises needed to get elected and to govern.

The tensions between principles and practices were first highlighted by Eduard Bernstein at the end of the nineteenth century. They were raised anew by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) at its Bad Godesberg conference of 1959, when it jettisoned Marxism officially. The Austrian and Scandinavian social democrats resolved these matters, at least pragmatically, when they governed with a Keynesian regulatory model. They did not break entirely with what had made the workers’ movement original, but accepted constraints imposed by capitalism, while trying to retain their political morality. They accepted pluralism while still speaking in the name of the proletariat. Consequently, they remained socialists through their defense of a national redistribution of wealth, by their ties to workers’ movements, and by the value they placed on equality, but they did not have to face the same crises that beset communist parties after 1989.

Austrian, Swedish, and German social democrats were able to take their own paths in part because no strong communist parties competed with them and also partly because of local contingencies. These contingencies included the left’s long term in power in Sweden and the impact of totalitarianism and then the cold war on Germany and Austria. The British Labour Party had its own story.

French socialists, in contrast, continued to fight for a clean break with capitalism. Léon Blum, who became their leader after the First World War and led the “Popular Front” to victory in 1936, still appealed to this ideal after the liberation of France from the Nazis, but in a distinct way. He sought to preserve a good amount of Marxist economics while casting aside “dialectical materialism.” At the same time, he reasserted a commitment to “humanist socialism” and called on his party’s activists and voters to place themselves firmly within the rules of the democratic game. For nearly half a century this remained fundamental to the French socialist platform. French socialists adjusted to liberal capitalism, especially during the 1980s, only because they found their own way to reconcile the idea of the individual with that of a collective within socialism’s intellectual corpus.

Nonetheless, the Bad Godesberg break with Marxism was deemed so radical because German social democrats arrived at “the center” from a much greater distance than their French counterparts. French socialists never reformed their program in so frank a manner. However, a reconsideration of their political choices and the ideas of their leaders shows that they sought to clarify the place of socialists in a liberal society earlier than the Germans, albeit more cautiously and with greater embarrassment. Well before they confronted pro-Soviet communism, French socialists—especially under the early leadership of Jean Jaurès (who was assassinated by a nationalist fanatic in 1914)—worked out an intellectual model in which classical Marxism was tempered by a respect for pluralism and the rule of law. This modus operandi had practical political benefits and also allowed socialists later to distinguish themselves from their adversaries, especially after the split at Tours in 1920, when most of the Socialist Party became the French Communist Party. In order to say what socialism was, democratic socialists first had to say what they didn’t want it to be. For that, they needed to define themselves by their relationship to communism on the one hand and classical (free-market) liberalism on the other. The result has sometimes been characterized as a third way.

French socialists’ acceptance of tenets of economic liberalism during the presidency of François Mitterrand in the 1980s was possible because of the sort of reconciliation pioneered by Jaurès between individuality and the social collectivity. Individuality, socialists still argued, had to be defined socially. But they also insisted that individual rights took precedence when an individual’s fate was at stake. They rejected an absolute opposition between the individual and the social whole, between morals and politics, and between relative and absolute values. Even when they leaned far left and refused to admit it, their socialism was a compromise. The compromise worked itself out in their treatment of individual rights, the separation between public and private spheres, and the role of the market.

The “third way” of French socialism did not seek a “center” that was simply equidistant between extremes; it was not a politically opportunistic “median.” Its identity—and its intellectual and programmatic expressions—was always uneasy. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Dreyfus affair had pushed socialists to clarify themselves. What really mattered? Dreyfus the individual or perfect equality in a social “whole” that socialists hoped one day to create? Should socialists emphasize humanity writ large or only social class? Should socialists regard this controversy as little more than civil war within the bourgeoisie? Or should they take sides and proclaim that an individual and liberty mattered more than “group” interests? Jaurès hesitated at first but then championed Dreyfus. He drew on arguments made in his own thesis On the Origins of German Socialism. He proposed there that socialism was not only the product of class struggle. It certainly was that, but its cry of protest was no less “the supreme affirmation of individual rights.” According to Jaurès, “nothing is above the individual. There is no celestial authority that can bend him to its whims or terrorize him with threats. . . . The individual will no longer be an instrument; the entire universe will become the instrument of the individual.” Jaurès did not abandon his references to “the absolute” or total change. At the same time, he never accepted the idea that individuals ought to be no more than instruments of the whole. He allowed for both relativism and pluralism, and these are keys that opened the door, later on, to socialist intellectual reconsideration of liberalism.

During the interwar years, it took French socialists, now challenged by communists for the leadership of the left, some time before they reasserted the primacy of the individual. They stressed their own variant of Marxism in opposition to liberalism yet also sought to set themselves apart from communists. Blum did this by rearticulating a political philosophy of humanism in the Jaurèsian mold. The rise of Nazism made this all the more poignant. Blum insisted that socialism spoke on behalf of humanity and not just class. Socialism, for him as for Jaurès, was a moral code and not simply economics conditioning politics.

It’s not difficult to find ambiguities, paradoxes, and even contradictions in Jaurès, as in Blum. Both men worked simultaneously under pragmatic political constraints and on the plane of moral obligation. Jaurès attempted to reconcile Kant with Rousseau in The Origins of German Socialism. He followed Kant in linking individual free will to a society of equals. Like Rousseau, he thought that personal liberty could not exist outside the state and the social contract. In short, the rights of each only made sense within the rights of all.

Although this seems straightforward, there is always a moment when socialist thinking passes beyond a modest and pluralist understanding of social groups toward a notion of unified humanity. Events also impose choices. When the fate of an individual is at stake, a socialist of the Jaurès-Blum school is not different from a liberal. The idea of the good life is sustained, but the rights of individuals are raised above more general concerns. Nonetheless, socialism remains a comprehensive outlook and refuses a simple liberal separation between public and private domains. But socialists of this stripe also knew that there were times to be modest. Read Jaurès and you will often find him subordinating the rights of individuals to a particular idea of the good life; yet at moments of crisis, he asserted individual rights over an apparent common good. The individual—Dreyfus, for example—could not be sacrificed to a “total” doctrine of humanity.

There was, of course, another tendency in French socialism exemplified by the orthodox Marxist Jules Guesde. Guesde thought the Dreyfus affair was a quarrel within the bourgeoisie, a sort of historical mishap of little concern to socialists. Nothing should turn socialism from its path, he asserted. Justice does not exist in the here and now, but only when the liberated proletariat and the people writ large become one and the same. Universality was only to be achieved by a class.

Both socialists and communists rejected liberalism’s insistence on separations between public and private spheres and between political and civil society. A workers party, they thought, does not just represent a class, but incarnates it and a homogenous future. As a famous phrase put it, the administration of things would replace the governance of men. Liberals, in contrast, recognized that the people, their elected representatives, and their parties may have divergent interests.

At Tours in 1920 Blum warned against communist refusal to separate politics and society as well as communist insistence on concentrating all power in a party. Nowadays we would say that he was warning against totalitarian thinking. He responded to it by arguing that there had to be a sharp distinction between what socialists sought to do in the here-and-now and what principle was reserved “for tomorrow.” For communists, an ideal tomorrow was implicit in the present; for Blum it was a fiction, something for imagination, because social revolution, as Jaurès had claimed, is not the ineluctable consequence of economics, but depends on the human conscience.

Democracies could become socialist only by means of education; feelings alone were not enough. Revolutionary transformation required educating minds first. This meant that socialists had to move politically with the prudence of a teacher who advances only at the rhythm of the student. Consequently, democratic socialists were wary of intermediate stages between political democracy and social democracy (like the dictatorship of the proletariat) because they relied too much on elites. “The socialist party,” Blum said, “tries to elevate activists to an understanding of their role. Communism aims only to harness the audacious and aggressive part of men’s minds. Its propaganda neither instructs nor elevates; it rhapsodizes, overexcites, and overheats.” By pretending to express perfectly the will of the proletariat, regardless of its actual consciousness and education, communists opened the way to totalitarianism.

So, while the French socialist mainstream may have looked toward a perfect society throughout the last century, it always resisted totalitarian temptations and opted practically for democratic representation (whatever its flaws) and democratic debate. Whether in power or in opposition, socialists never acted against pluralism or respect for the rule of law. They preferred the imperfections of the present to utopia. This distinction between what is possible and what is desirable is quite coherent, and it also imposed on socialists moral standards for governing when they came to power. Ambitions had to become more modest in the context of representative democracy. Socialists had to work with tools that were not their own. This restraint disappointed some impatient activists and voters, but socialists of the Jaurès-Blum school understood that a social democratic context had first to be created before larger visions could be achieved, and that context was a long way off.

This way of doing things exposed real tensions within socialist thinking and shows how difficult it is to maintain a distinction between contemporary political democracy and a model of socialist democracy. Socialists had to navigate between the continent they were on—an existing pluralism of interests and opinions—and another world that would embody their own project of social unity (a classless society). They needed to explain what should be done when pluralism and unity conflicted. Blum tried to do so after the Second World War and he ended up affirming the secondary status of socialist hope, favoring a focus on the present instead of future utopia. He did not succeed fully in reorienting his comrades to reformism, and his failure had decisive consequences for the integration of the socialists in France’s postwar parliamentary system. After Blum was pushed aside, more orthodox socialists led the socialists throughout their unhappy history of the 1950s.

In the 1970s, after a new Socialist Party was founded under Mitterrand’s leadership, socialists still sought a radical break with capitalism. They stressed the need for a “class front,” the idea of workers’ self-management, and a “united left” (including both socialists and communists). In their quest for power, they spoke of “changing life” entirely and often lost sight of the moral problems posed to politicians who win elections but cannot fulfill the promises they made and disregard the maturity (or immaturity) of their own electorate. At the same time they thought that all reforms they enacted could be managed easily without accounting for the restraints imposed by representative democracy.

Although we must still see what happens in the 2007 elections, it is not clear that French socialists—no longer pressed by communists—have overcome all absolutist temptations. They still look over their shoulders at other leftist movements, often Trotskyist, and this forestalls a fuller embrace of political liberalism. Socialists cannot simply ignore constituents on the very far left and some of the Socialist Party elite is very (perhaps too) sensitive to them. Conflicts over the European Constitution two years ago illustrate this. Party activists and most leaders supported it, but some figures, such as former prime minister Laurent Fabius, opposed it, along with segments of the more radical left.

What would a full acceptance of political liberalism mean? First, there would be agreement on Ralf Dahrendorf’s distinction between “constitutional” and “normal” politics. There is no real choice in constitutional politics: either there is an open society or a closed society. But within constitutional politics there is normal politics, endless choices to be made. It is only by accepting this distinction that socialists become truly integrated into Western democratic politics. It means keeping the difference between ends and means clear—along with the difference between Socialist Party long-term vision and immediate political reality.

In the early 1980s, Mitterrand quickly reversed an initial experiment in more radical economic policy. Commentators often pointed to this as socialist acceptance of market logic and the development of a new realism on the left. This interpretation was bolstered by Mitterrand’s other policies. He opposed protectionism, did not support major renationalizations of corporations during his second term, allowed for more decentralized domestic policies, and recognized that markets were beneficial. Elected in 1981 on a program that placed political considerations and willpower ahead of economic considerations, French socialists began to reverse priorities and to accept that not everything was possible. Government alone could not determine the good life. This was an ideological reformulation—a new adherence to the liberal values of individualism, separation of public and private spheres, and the market—and as a result Socialist Party discourse began to correspond to more sound practices. Socialists may not have committed to each of these values with the same strength, but this adherence distinguished them again from the communists. The latter were soon to be shipwrecked. Of course socialists did not need their conflicts with communists to assert the importance of the individual for their own intellectual tradition. Socialists—George Orwell, for example—were among the first to discern the totalitarian character of communism.

Difficult as it is for them to admit it, acceptance of the market economy marked a socialist initiation rite into the tribes of liberalism. Already in 1979, Lionel Jospin (later a Socialist Party prime minister) declared a willingness to compromise “on the issues of reform versus revolution, state and civil society, centralized state versus local institutions, capital versus labor, regulation of the economy by the market versus planned economies, private capital versus the public sector.” In reality, there were never real compromises, only acceptance—if not unconditional—of liberal values. We don’t yet know what this implies if Ségolène Royal wins the presidency. But we should also point out that as socialists took liberal steps, French liberals took steps in the direction of socialism during this same period, accepting progressively some essential ideas of social democracy. Both camps changed in interaction with each other. Socialist politics gave liberalism a sense of social solidarity and pushed liberals to cede real decision-making power to citizens in many domains. Socialists and liberals come from different ideological traditions, and, when they met in twentieth-century France, the consequence was an uncertain but original democratic equilibrium. Its fate is now in the balance.

Translated from French by Marco Roth.

Marc Sadoun is professor of political science at the Sciences-Po in Paris and author of several books on socialism and democracy. His new book, Le politique (with J.M. Donegani), will be published by Gallimard this year.

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