| [1] | The most important works of Lassalle are mentioned in the text. See Georg Brandes, Ferdinand Lassalle; Franz Mehring, Die Deutsche Social-demokratie, ihre Geschichte und ihre Lehre; W. H. Dawson, German Socialism and Ferdinand Lassalle. |
| [2] | Schulze-Delitzsch was born in 1808 at Delitzsch, in Prussian Saxony, whence the second part of his name, to distinguish him from the many other people in Germany who bear the familiar name of Schulze. It was his great merit that he founded the co-operative movement in Germany on principles of self-help. He was a leading member of the Progressist party. |
| [3] | In contrast to the unequal and indirect system existing in Prussia, according to which the voters are on a property basis divided into three classes. The voters thus arranged choose bodies of electors, by whom the members for the Chamber are chosen. |
| [4] | Bastiat was the populariser in France of the orthodox Political Economy. Lassalle accused Schulze of being a mere echo of Bastiat’s superficial views, and therefore called him Bastiat-Schulze. |
II. Theories of Lassalle
The socialistic position of Lassalle may generally be described as similar to that of Rodbertus and Karl Marx. He admits his indebtedness to both of those writers, but at the same time he cannot be regarded as a disciple of either of them. Lassalle himself was a thinker of great original power; he had his own way of conceiving and expressing the historic socialism.
Lassalle supplies the key to his general position in the preface to his Bastiat-Schulze, when, quoting from his System of Acquired Rights, he says: In social matters the world is confronted with the question, whether now when property in the direct utilisation of another man no longer exists, such property in his indirect exploitation should continue—that is, whether the free realisation and development of our labour-force should be the exclusive private property of the possessor of capital, and whether the employer as such, and apart from the remuneration of his intellectual labour, should be permitted to appropriate the result of other men’s labours.[[1]] This sentence, he says, contains the programme of a national-economic work, which he intended to write under the title, Outlines of a Scientific National Economy. In this sentence also, we need not say, the fundamental position of socialism is implied. He was about to carry out his project when the Leipsic Central Committee brought the question before him in a practical form. The agitation broke out and left him no leisure for such a work. But he had often lamented that the exposition of the theory had not preceded the practical agitation, and that a scientific basis had not been provided for it.
The Bastiat-Schulze was itself a controversial work, written to meet the needs of the hour. Lassalle has never given a full and systematic exposition of his socialistic theory. All his social-economic writings were published as the crises of his agitation seemed to demand. But, as he himself says, they compensate by the life and incisiveness of the polemical form of treatment for what they lose in systematic value. We may add that it is often a scientific gain, for in the career of Lassalle we see socialism confronted with fact, and thereby to a large extent saved from the absoluteness, abstractness, and deficient sense of reality which detract so much from the value of the works of Marx and Rodbertus. The excessive love of system so characteristic of German theorists may be as remote from historic reality and possibility as the utopian schemes of French socialists. It is, however, also a natural result of Lassalle’s mode of presentation that he is not always consistent with himself either on practical or theoretical questions, especially in his attitude towards the Prussian State.
On the whole, we can most clearly and comprehensively bring out the views of Lassalle if we follow the order in which they are presented in his three leading works, the Working Men’s Programme, the Open Letter, and the Bastiat-Schulze.