In an age of performative politics, where populists shout louder than statesmen and belief is often reduced to branding, there is an urgent need to recover the moral clarity that once anchored democratic ideals. From the Global North to the Global South, progressives struggle not just with right-wing antagonism, but with the erosion of their own ethical foundations. As Europe wrestles with the rise of illiberal democrats, and Asia with technocratic authoritarianism, we might look for inspiration not in the loud, but the principled. One name — largely forgotten beyond Indonesia — deserves revival: Sutan Sjahrir.
Sjahrir was Indonesia’s first Prime Minister and the intellectual architect of Partai Sosialis Indonesia (PSI), the country’s first and only avowedly social democratic party. Unlike other post-colonial revolutionaries, however, he did not build his movement on charisma or a cult of personality. He refused the intoxicating appeal of mass mobilisation without conscience. Instead, he stood for a politics grounded in personal responsibility, ethical self-discipline, and deep respect for human freedom. Today, in our fractured political climate, Sjahrir’s ethical socialism offers an essential and neglected moral vocabulary.
A Politics of Conscience, Not Coercion
Sjahrir’s early resistance against Japanese occupation and his later opposition to Sukarno’s authoritarian turn were not driven by ideology alone. They were acts of conscience. He believed that power without ethics would devour the very revolution it claimed to protect. PSI’s platform was defined less by slogans and more by a commitment to inner discipline: cadre education, pluralism, and moral integrity.
This internalist approach made PSI unique. It rejected Marxist determinism, warning that materialism alone — whether capitalist or communist — could not account for the dignity of the human person. Unlike many in the post-colonial Left, Sjahrir placed the individual conscience at the centre of democratic socialism. He once wrote, “The real revolution is the revolution of character.”
To European ears, this may sound familiar. It echoes the ethical socialism of Eduard Bernstein, the civic humanism of R.H. Tawney, and perhaps even the intellectual restraint of Michael Walzer. But what makes Sjahrir’s case distinct is its setting: the ideological furnace of post-colonial nationhood, where socialism often collapsed into either military dictatorship or ideological rigidity. PSI resisted both.
One of PSI’s core principles was an active commitment to pluralism — not merely as toleration, but as the test of democratic maturity. The party deliberately recruited from outside the dominant religious or ethnic identities, championed women’s political education, and refused to engage in sectarian populism even when it was politically costly.
Sjahrir’s conception of democracy was not majoritarian but ethical: it required the cultivation of citizens, not just voters. The party’s refusal to ride on religious sentiment, for example, eventually cost it parliamentary influence — but preserved its soul. There is an uncomfortable lesson here for progressives today: moral clarity may lose you elections, but preserve the terrain for a deeper politics.
Ethical Socialism in the Post-Truth Age
Why does this matter now? Because the global Left — especially in electoral democracies — has too often ceded the moral ground to its opponents. In the name of realism or strategy, progressive parties have mimicked the aesthetics of the populist right or the language of neoliberal metrics. But in doing so, they risk losing the ethical distinctiveness that once defined them.
What Sjahrir and PSI offer is not a policy blueprint, but a moral compass. It is a reminder that the strength of democratic socialism lies not just in its programmes — but in its posture: humble, pluralist, rigorous, and internally honest. And it is this posture that social democrats across Europe, Asia, and Africa must reclaim. Particularly as authoritarianism today no longer arrives in jackboots, but in soft-spoken technocracy and electoral manipulation.
The banning of PSI in 1960, and the decades of Suharto’s anti-left repression that followed, nearly erased Sjahrir’s political vision from Indonesia’s historical memory. But the ethical questions he posed remain pressing. What does it mean to wield power without cruelty? Can freedom survive without character? Can democracy endure without moral self-limitation?
Revisiting figures like Sjahrir is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is a demand for renewal. For progressives everywhere, especially those seeking to rebuild the moral centre of their movements, the answer may lie not in louder rhetoric — but in quieter strength. In the words of PSI’s later intellectual Soedjatmoko, an Indonesian diplomat, intellectual, and former Rector of the United Nations University: “It is not the noise of ideology, but the discipline of thought that sustains freedom.”
Let us begin there.
Deny Giovanno is a public affairs strategist and political thinker based in Jakarta. He writes on ethical leadership, Southeast Asia’s democratic traditions, and the legacy of Sutan Sjahrir and Indonesia’s early socialists. His work draws on experience in both corporate advocacy and civil society engagement.
