Ferdinand Lassalle

Ferdinand Lassalle (Breslau, 1825 – Carouge, Switzerland, 1864) was a German jurist, philosopher and socialist of Jewish origin. He is best remembered as an initiator of the social democratic movement in Germany and as the founder, in 1863 in Leipzig, of the General German Workers' Association (ADAV), the first independent workers' party in the country. He belongs to the socialist tradition of the nineteenth century, shaped by Hegel's legacy, and his importance lies in having organised the working class politically in a Prussian setting dominated by the monarchy and the bourgeois liberals.

Born in Breslau into a family of silk merchants, he was expected to follow a business career, but he preferred university. He studied philology and philosophy in Breslau and Berlin, where he became an ardent follower of Hegel. After a stay in Paris, where he met Heinrich Heine, he became involved in a long and sensational lawsuit defending Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt, which brought him public fame and financial security. During the revolutions of 1848 he took part in democratic agitation and was imprisoned. He later published his study of Heraclitus and a treatise on legal theory, The System of Acquired Rights. His relationship with Marx and Engels was complex, combining collaboration with mistrust.

His decisive entry into politics came in 1862, during the Prussian constitutional conflict. He broke with the liberal Progressives and proposed an independent party for workers. His central claim was that socialism should be reached through producers' cooperatives supported by the state, and through universal suffrage. This strategy, based on electoral action and a degree of cooperation with the state, led him to hold secret contacts with Otto von Bismarck, which fuelled criticism from his rivals. His vehement and polemical style made him very popular, but it also gave his leadership more of the tribune's character than of a democratic leader's.

He died in 1864, aged 39, after a duel arising from a dispute over a young woman. The ADAV then had only a few thousand members, but it grew into a significant force in the German Empire. In 1875 it merged with the Marxist party from Eisenach to form the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). His influence, especially in its statist and nationalist strand, lasted within German social democracy, often in tension with Marxism.